Not ageism – realism

09 May 2006 | Viewpoint | Update from University of Warwick
These updates are republished press releases and communications from members of the Science|Business Network
The European Research Council’s plan to give grants to young researchers could help in the reform of Europe’s sclerotic research structures.

Image courtesy EMBL

European science can only be as good as the people carrying it out – that was the take-home message from the European Research Council (ERC) when it outlined its proposed new grants system for young researchers last month.

Grants of up to €400,000 per year will be awarded to researchers with less than ten years on the clock since they completed their PhD, allowing them to set up their own research teams.

Despite saying it will subsequently create a grant scheme for older researchers, the ERC can expect to hear cries of ageism. But while there is much talk these days of how other sectors of the economy ignore the skills, and deride the experience, of older members of the workforce, in science the opposite is true.

Outside the UK it is practically impossible for any European scientist who is not an éminence grise to get funding in his or her (but usually his) own right. The ERC’s Starting Independent Research Grant (SIRG) aims to tackle this widely accepted deficiency, creating an opportunity for young scientists to develop independent careers, and make the transition from working under an (older, inevitably) supervisor.

After all, the evidence is that scientists are most productive in the early years of their careers.

Brain drain

Late last year an number of eminent German-born scientists who have brain drained to the US wrote an open letter to the German government, demanding changes in the way German science is run, and in effect, asking to be allowed to come home.

In the fallout from the rows over the French government’s plans to alter the contractual terms on which young French workers are employed, it emerged that some of the country’s top young science graduates are now employed in the City of London working in financial services, a loss not only to French science, but to European science as a whole.

The SIRG is an opening attempt to solve the various structural problems that lead to such a dramatic waste of Europe’s scientific talent.

Although its final budget is yet to be announced, the ERC is proposing to spend a third of its money, expected to be around €300 million to €350 million per annum, on SIRGs. A rough estimate is that around 200 SIRGs would be awarded annually. “Over the seven year period of Framework Programme 7, SIRG will have a substantial and durable effect on Europe’s research culture and the vitality of its research institutions,” claims the ERC.

Ruffled feathers

Which brings us to another condition of the SIRG grants which is likely to be ruffling feathers among the bureaucrats of academe: institutions where researchers are based may only ask for the grant to pay 20 per cent of their indirect costs. This is going against the current tide, where institutions are demanding a larger share of these costs be met.

Anticipating that the 20 per cent rule will be unpopular, the ERC has been careful to state that the grant “belongs” to the researcher, not the institution, and as such is portable.

While this will undoubtedly annoy some universities, it seems likely that the prestige of ERC grants will be such that institutions will want to SIRG researchers to come and work in their labs.

If that is the case, there will be further criticism that money disbursed by the ERC is going to gild the already elite institutions, rather than pushing up the lowest common denominator of the less-well endowed.

But in this context it should be remembered that the overall aim of the ERC, and the concept of the European Research Area from which it springs, is to create a single market for European research that can compete with the best that Asia and US can offer.

Excellence

The movers and shakers of Brussels are much taken with the idea of granting research money based on excellence. As the science and research commissioner Janez Potocnik put it in a recent speech at the London School of Economics, “Europe as a whole seems to have problems in selecting and supporting new and influential fields of research, managing rapid quantitative growth in these fields, and combining this with high quality. These problems suggest a mismatch between the institutional set-up for research in most European countries and the requirements of new leading sciences.”

Putting aside the fact that this implies that all the money the EU has pumped into its research programmes to date has not been spent as well as it might, will the ERC’s SIRG grant scheme help solve the problem?

Well, if it gets the best researchers from across Europe to join in an open competition for grants and pushes funding towards new fields at a faster pace than national funding schemes, it could make a significant start in reforming Europe’s sclerotic research structures.

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