Time Reported on January 19 "Europe's Best and Brightest Scientific Minds are Leaving in Droves for the U.S." What's Europe doing about it? (August 31, 2004)

    "The U.S. is a place where you can do very good science, and if you're a scientist, you try to go to the best place," Valerio Pagano, who likens researcher migration to football transfers, told Time on January 19^th this year when doing the feature "How to stop Europe's Brain Drain" for its European edition. "In soccer," Pagano continued, "if you're great, another team can buy you." Science is the same, and the big buyer is the U.S. In 2000, the U.S. spent €287 billion on research and development, €121 billion more than the E.U.

And Andrew Wyckoff, an OECD analyist told Time, "Growth in the future will come from industries that are science-based [and Europe] needs scientists to irrigate them." And the message while far from the ken of Australia's parliamentarians is starting to get through to some of their European counterparts; funding is significantly on the increase both nationally and through the EU and research infrastructure is improving.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in presenting his government's priorities for 2004 said, "Only if we manage to keep our innovation at the top will we be able to reach a level of prosperity that will allow us to keep our welfare system in today's changing conditions." But Peter Sloot of the University of Amsterdam in commenting on Brussels and the EC told Time, "There is a strong administrative and management culture, rather than a scientific culture, in the higher regions of the E.U." And Time reports the competitive spirit found in the US "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.'"

Aside from the hand wringing what constructive steps are being undertaken?

In Sweden (one of the few countries that already allocates greater that 3% of GDP for R&D) the Wallenberg Foundation according to Time "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."

And on the publicly funded EU side progress toward the formation of the European Research Council (ERC) appears to be progressing significantly beyond the coffee clutch stage, but whether or not the bureaucrats will be able to throw off the traces of decades of narrow interpretations about the direction of research remains to be seen. Bengt Samuelsson, Chairman of the Nobel Foundation Board says simply, "The E.U. needs a common research policy if it is going to play an important role in future global development." And immediate suggestions centre around creating the ERC and endowing it with the €2 billion-plus per year that it would need to make a difference, so that member states would better equip the E.U. to match the U.S., which enjoys the strength of well-funded bodies such as the National Science Foundation. But the admonishment has already been voiced that such funding must not be a the expense of national funding commitments.

In the meantime we can watch the sport of our politicians matching honestly/dishonestly credentials.