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Education and outreach

Education and outreach

European dreams

02 Aug 2006

Plans for a European Research Council deserve to succeed

The idea of “European” science is a slightly abstract, worthy and probably rather dull notion to most physicists. People do physics because it is interesting and not because they want to help political leaders fulfil ambitious plans for improving the overall quality of research in Europe. If we want to collaborate with researchers from other countries, we will naturally try to look for the best people, who are often in the US, not Europe.

However, a major meeting in Munich last month, which brought together over 1700 scientists, science journalists and policy-makers from across Europe, sought to bring the idea of European science to life. Europe already has much to be proud of when it comes to research – the CERN particle-physics laboratory being the outstanding example. The European Union (EU) also has its massive Framework programme, which has traditionally funded huge multinational, collaborative but albeit massively bureaucratic applied-research projects.

The Munich meeting was organized by a group called Euroscience – a grass-roots organization that wants to build European science from the “bottom up”, rather than through grand projects decreed by European leaders. Held at the prestigious Deutsches Museum, the meeting highlighted the quality of European research, with scientific seminars on everything from quarks to nanoscience, coupled with discussion groups on broader issues like science journalism and peer review, as well as a string of outreach activities and careers events.

But the meeting, known as the Euroscience Open Forum, served to show that European science cannot succeed without plenty of cash: the conference cost €2.2m to organize, with a large chunk of the money actually provided by the EU itself. For a grass-roots outfit with just 2000 members, the Munich meeting would have been impossible without that central funding.

It seems that improving European science can only be done with serious money, which is why the EU’s plans for a European Research Council (ERC) are so significant. As reported in Physics World last month, the ERC – part of the €54bn Seventh Framework programme for R&D – will for the first time allow individual scientists to apply to the EU for grants to carry out basic research.

The budget is substantial – worth about €1bn a year – with grants initially being targeted at young scientists at postdoc level and beyond who want make a start as independent researchers. The first grants are set to be distributed some time next year. The ERC, which was a hot topic at one of the sessions in Munich, is a welcome sign that the EU is finally taking blue-sky research seriously. One big advantage of the council is that grants will be open to people of all nationalities, which means that Japanese or US scientists, for example, can apply, provided that they plan to move to a European institution.

However, the ERC will only succeed if it is easy and simple to apply for grants and if they are given, as intended, to support the best people and projects. The ERC must also become an independent outfit – it will initially start life next year as an offshoot of the European Commission, never the most transparent of bodies. The ERC is a genuinely exciting prospect that will help European science to thrive. It deserves to succeed.

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