Helga Nowotny is Chair of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB). She is also Professor of Social Studies of Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich and a member of Scientific or Advisory Boards of many scientific and policy-oriented institutions in Europe as well as a Member of the Academia Europaea.

So what?

On the invitation of the Editor of  Science, Donald Kennedy, she provided the August 6 editorial "European Research Momentum". -- Some excerpts:

[T]he European Constitution, agreed on in June 2004, makes explicit reference to research and a convergent European Research Area "in which researchers, scientific knowledge and technology circulate freely." This gives EU research policy a more solid base and broadens its scope, making research a "shared competence."

 

One of the six objectives of FP7[Framework Programme 7], to begin in 2007, supports basic research and an ERC [European Research Council] that would encompass all disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences. The ERC mission would be to generously support the very best researchers, making them truly competitive on a global scale.

 

The challenge is to create a European knowledge base for research and innovation in which human resources, adequate infrastructures, and mechanisms to encourage excellence receive the necessary sustained boost. Political support for a better balance between basic and applied research stems from recognition of the impact of basic research on economic performance.

 

A key to the overall challenges is the transformation of European universities, which in the end will determine whether support for basic research through EU mechanisms will have the desired effects.

Nowotny concludes that "brakes of a political, financial, and administrative nature on universities have to be removed," and Europeans as a whole must begin to see themselves increasingly as Europeans with common cause if they are to be competitive with the United States and Japan.

And we would add with the China, and possibly the India, of 10 -15 years from now.

The points raised by Professor Nowotny ought to give Australia's leaders pause;  as a competitor, an increasingly consolidated Europe from the viewpoint of research and development, will be a force to be reckoned with.

Just a year earlier Pierre Papon, professor at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles, and previous director general of the CNRS Paris, had written the Editorial for Science "A challenge for the EU" in which he sets out the challenge. "In March 2000, European heads of governments and of states agreed in Lisbon that by 2010, the European Union (EU) should become "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world... To implement this objective, they agreed in Barcelona in 2002 to devote 3% of their gross domestic product (GDP) [by] 2010 to R&D and to foster common science policies in a 'European Research Area,' as proposed by EU research commissioner Philippe Busquin."

Papon went on to point out that "Several reports released in 2003 by the European Commission (the political and administrative arm of the EU) indicate that the EU countries invest much less in research than the United States or Japan (1.9% of GDP, compared with 2.8% for the United States and 3.0% for Japan in 2000)." [By comparison Australia was 1.53%]. However, Papon was under no illusions as to the extent of the task while emphasising the rewards. "According to the plan, a research investment of 3% of GDP would result in ~0.5% of additional growth and 400,000 additional jobs every year after 2010. To reach this level of investment, the European research effort will have to grow by 8% per year; business funding for R&D will have to increase more (9%) than public funding (6%), because it lags far behind in most countries. Given the present trend in public budgets in Europe, these targets are very ambitious."

He also emphasised the need for a pan European approach if the individual nations were to be internationally competitive and he concludes, "We also have to move beyond rhetoric to implement the European Research Area..., but all these ambitious objectives require a strong political will, which has yet to be demonstrated by governments all over Europe."

Clearly Papon was imploring Europe's leaders to look to the medium and longer term for the sake of European prosperity.

According to Nowotny's assessment significant progress has been achieved in the past 12 months though much remains to be done. But to digress for a moment, Papon's editorial brought a quick and cogent response from Robert May, immediate past Chief Science Advisor to the British government and current president of the Royal Society:

[S]cience base spending¹ is slightly higher in the EU than in the United States, although lower than in Japan: 0.65%, 0.63%, and 0.85% of GDP, respectively. The differences in the R&D figures arise almost entirely from differences in spending by the private sector (business and industry), mainly on Development rather than Research. And within the EU countries, there is considerable variation, with several spending significantly more on their science base than the United States: Germany, 0.73%; France, 0.80; Netherlands, 0.88%; and Sweden, 0.95%, compared with, for example, UK, 0.59%, and Spain, 0.42%.

---

^1. The term "science base" describes all research and postgraduate training undertaken in universities, government-funded laboratories, and private non-profit organizations (charities or foundations) funded both from public and non-public sources. For more information on the science base and difficulties in its estimation [it is not a conventional OECD statistic, and the usual R&D spending by institutions of Higher Education (HERD) is not always a good measure of it], see reference (9) in R. M. May, Science 281, 48 (1998).

And that in turn allowed Papon to make the following points:

...I wanted, indeed, to emphasize the growing gap in R&D funding between the EU and the United States. Indicators reveal that Europe is investing globally less in research than the United States, and the recent trend is not favorable to Europe: U.S. industry has continuously increased its R&D funding (but not in basic science), while the NIH, for example, has doubled its budget during the last 5 years. As far as the figures regarding spending for basic science that May cites, I think they must be considered carefully. For example, May points out that France's science base funding corresponds to 0.80% of the GDP, with lower figures for Germany and the UK and higher figures for Sweden and the Netherlands. Actually, those figures for public expenses correspond to different types of spending in different countries: For France, the figure includes budgets for academic science (CNRS, universities, etc.) and also for space, nuclear energy, and defense activities (roughly half of the 0.80%) that are not, for the most part, science-related. I suspect that the situation is the same for Germany, which has an important space budget, and probably for the UK, which has kept an important military R&D effort, although the military/space spending is probably a lower proportion of the total than in France. The United States, which has by far the biggest military R&D in the world, spends a rather fair proportion of this effort on basic science; this is not the case in a country such as France. Furthermore, funds provided by foundations to academic science are certainly higher in the United States than in Europe (the UK being a positive exception in Europe).

In short the devil is in the detail and the figures quoted for Australia's commitment to research require equally judicious scrutiny.

The communication of the of the Commission of the European Communities released by European research commissioner Philippe Busquin in mid-June, Science and technology, the key to Europe's future - Guidelines for future European Union policy to support research, is introduced by The European Research Area and the "3% objective". And to place in context the Coalition's complacent pride in that Australia's public spending on R&D is above that of the UK, and the OECD mean (click on thumbnail, note penultimate column), the communication notes:

At the Barcelona European Council of March 2002, the European Union set itself the objective of increasing the European research effort to 3% of the European Union's GDP by 2010, two-thirds coming from private investment and one-third from the public sector [our emphasis, Australia (2003) = 0.71%] ...

[and later on]

The discussion on basic research and the“European Research Council” which has been ongoing for two years in the scientific community, and which was raised to the political level by the Commission Communication of January 2004,14 has highlighted the need for - an increased effort on basic research in Europe given the increasingly recognised impact of this type of research on economic performance, as stressed by industry [and] increased support for this type of research at European level through the setting up of a support mechanism for research projects conducted by individual teams which are in competition with each other at European level.

The short but densely written document lists six major objectives to augment the initiatives of the individual states:

1. Creating European centres of excellence through collaboration between laboratories,

2. Launching European technological initiatives,

3. Stimulating the creativity of basic research through competition between teams at European level,

4. Making Europe more attractive to the best researchers,

5. Developing research infrastructures of European interest,

6. Improving the coordination of national research programmes.

 The two critical messages for Australians are that this is no time to be smug about Australia supposedly punching above its weight - it isn't, and we are not going to be able to go it alone and remain competitive. It's past time for the emu to get its head out of the sand and look around to see what the rest of the world is up to.

Alex Reisner

The Funneled Web