Posted Sunday, January 11, 2004; 15.48GMT
Scientists say the competitive spirit found in Ruoslahti's largely European-staffed lab and across America is absent from much of the Continent. In the U.S., "young people who prove they're good get many more opportunities, including perhaps the freedom to run their own labs," says physicist Guido Langouche, vice rector of the Catholic University of Leuven (K.U.L.), who did his postdoc work at Stanford and returned to Belgium for family reasons. "In Europe, you usually have to work for an older professor for 10 years before you get that chance."
Even those lucky enough to get their own labs feel restricted. "In Germany, the principle of reward for performance doesn't exist," says physicist Michael Alexander Rübhausen, 32, who leads a biophysics research group at Hamburg University. He cites a law requiring a doctoral-degree recipient to leave the institution at which the qualification was earned. The idea behind the law is to prevent favoritism in the hiring of new professors, but the practical result is to close off a logical growth path to young scientists at a career crossroads. Rübhausen is lucky — he got a
Europe is a mess, a haze of overregulated and overcomplicated bureaucracies smothering the rare flames of true entrepreneurial brilliance
— CHRISTOPHER EVANS, chairman, Merlin Biosciences
grant guaranteeing his salary and funding for his group through the spring of 2004. But after that? "I don't know whether I'll be able to stay in Germany," he muses, because he won't be allowed to continue at Hamburg, and positions in his speciality are rare. So he's looking back to the U.S., where he did postdoc work.
Happily, the meritocratic ethos Rübhausen craves isn't totally absent from Europe. You'll find it at institutions such as Belgium's K.U.L., No. 5 on Scientist magazine's rankings of best non-U.S. institutions for postdoctoral research. Its history of fostering competitiveness and openness to new ideas has had lucrative upsides. To progress, "we have to take ideas from the Americans," says Langouche. So, in 1973, long before most European universities linked academe to commerce, K.U.L. set up Leuven Research & Development, a department designed to turn top projects into moneymaking spin-offs — which it does at a rate of as many as 10 companies a year. Its star: tPA, a heart drug developed by biology professor Désiré Collen. Millions of euros in drug royalties fund a 160-person lab headed by Collen, who says he has benefited from K.U.L.'s "awareness of entrepreneurship and inventiveness." Another beneficiary: the region around K.U.L., where high-tech firms have clustered, generating jobs and tax revenue.
Homeward Bound?
"the u.s. is a sponge that's happy to soak up talent from across the globe. It values scientists," says Paul Tangney, an Irish physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Who wouldn't want to work in that environment?" Now several organizations are working to create that environment in Europe. The people at Sweden's Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation acknowledge that you cannot — and should not — keep young researchers from going abroad, because the experience is invaluable. But you can give them better reasons to return. The foundation funds stints for Swedish scientists at prestigious U.S. institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). It also pays for lab construction and donates millions of krona in equipment to Swedish institutions so researchers have the world-class infrastructure they need. "We're living in a global world," says Erna Möller, the foundation's director. "We can't keep the scientists at home if we can't give them the same environment to work in."
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