science 2008-2009: 15: Europe

Many news stories concerning the sciences in European countries reveal continuities in theme that stretch back far into the twentieth century.

The Russian Academy of Sciences has continued to have a close but difficult relationship with the supreme political powers of the nation. The appointment of Vladimir Putin’s favourite for president of the Academy, Mikhail Kovalchuk, controller of the purse-strings of a $7 billion nanotechnology initiative, was being held up by Academicians in 2008. They nevertheless chose to retain Yuri Osipov, a 71-year-old mathematician, a probable placeholder for Kovalchuk, as president of the Academy, rather than elect Vladimir Fortov, a modernising physicist who did not have Putin’s support. Fortov promised the introduction of international peer review and open competition for funding. Putin, on the other hand, doubled Academicians’ salaries.

In France, too, the tensions were between the centralised institutions of science and the movements for political reform. President Nicolas Sarkozy pushed to make universities more autonomous, able to set their own budgets and pursue their own research programmes. In a closely related move, Sarkozy also wanted to complete reform the CNRS, the body in France that both funds and performs, in its constituent laboratories, most French research. The idea was that CNRS would become more like a research council, a funder rather than a performer of science. In effect, these reforms would make the French system much more like the British system. This direction was, for Sarkozy’s critics on the left, enough evidence that an Anglo-American liberalisation, perhaps privatisation, agenda was being followed. University staff went on strike in 2009, while CNRS scientists, in a campaign co-ordinated by Claire Lemercier, invaded CNRS’s Paris headquarters in June 2008 in protest against the plan to break up CNRS into six parts.

Meanwhile, the European Research Council was set up in February 2007. The European Research Council is rather like a National Science Foundation for the European Union (plus Israel). It distributes about a billion euros a year. Not new money, but rather old science funding money now allocated at a European rather than at a national level. The Council is an agency, separate from, but not entirely legally independent of, the European Commission. (Nature in July 2009 backed arguments calling for the European Research Council to be fully autonomous).

The difference, at least from the perspective of scientists in some European Union nations, was the commitment to award grants on the basis of international peer review rather than according to political choices. The selection process was designed to be blind to national origin of the research proposals. Nevertheless, in the first round of 300 grants, in 2008, the allocations followed traditional geographies of scientific strengths, with the United Kingdom doing particularly well (58) followed by France (39), Germany (33), Italy (26), the Netherlands (26), Spain (24) and Israel (24). In comparison Bulgaria and the Czech Republic only received one grant each.