A new broom in Brussels

Richard L. Hudson

In Berlin, the great and good of European academia are gathering for the official launch 27 and 28 February of the European Research Council, the world’s newest scientific grant agency. Mostly, they are congratulating themselves on getting a new pot of money for science – but they might stop a moment and think about how it will change their own worlds, in academia.

For that change will be profound, if the ERC succeeds. For the first time, there will be a transparent, European-wide contest that picks winners and losers in science. That kind of uncompromising, binary choice is rare in European academia, which in most countries lives by a series of ambiguous compromises over tenure, lab resources, and grants. It’s almost unheard of in Brussels, where most funding decisions are openly political deals to spread the wealth around.

So what is this all about? First, the history. The ERC was authorised last year by the European Parliament, and endowed with a €7.5 billion bankroll to spend on science over the next seven years. In contrast to the rest of EU research funding – which tends towards big, industrial-research consortia – the ERC is focusing on basic research (“frontier research” in its own terminology.) These include the fundamentals of genomics, solid-state physics, organic chemistry, astronomy, archaeology – even art history. This isn’t about developing wind farms, software architectures or other development projects of the sort already familiar to Brussels technology-policy watchers. This is about science.

Also new (for Brussels) is the ERC’s method of awarding grants: by peer review of other scientists. The fledgling agency has already organised 20 panels, one for each scientific discipline, of about 12 scientists each – from across Europe (and beyond.) These panels will judge the grant applications on merit alone.

Political correctness gets the push

The sole criterion, the agency has pledged, will be scientific excellence. No need, as in many other Commission programmes, for a scientist to spend months organising a politically correct consortium of research partners from Latvia, Portugal and Malta, with a mix of university and industry collaboration.

In fact, there’s no need to organize a consortium of any kind: the grants will all be focused on individuals, not groups. The emphasis is on principal investigators – scientists who have enough credibility and independence in their universities or institutes to operate on their own, with or without a support team. The first round of ERC grants this year – about €300 million – is aimed at young scientists. A second round of grants, to begin next year, will be for senior scientists – but then, only for high-risk projects.

So the ERC  intends to be about nurturing bright people, rather than dull institutions. That’s profoundly destabilising, if it succeeds. And profoundly good.

First, academia in most European countries is about places, not people. For most of the post-war years, for instance, Germany has parceled out its education funding – and much of its research grants – across the country, in a deliberate policy of academic egalitarianism. The result: Whereas a century ago German universities were among the mostly highly regarded in the world, today hardly any of them figure in international rankings. A dull mediocrity prevails.

A lesson in excellence

The first crack in that system came last year – and in part, through the very man who has been selected to run the new ERC. As head of the German national research council, Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker and colleagues ran a competition among German universities to receive special “excellence” grants. To the amazement of most in German academia, in the end only three universities won the awards: two in Munich, and one in Karlsruhe. And the decisions had been based on international panels of scientific reviewers, rather than on horse-trading in a Bundestag committee. The clear message: what matters in science is excellence, not political fairness.

Now Winnacker takes that act to Brussels, with the legal mandate to apply scientific peer-review to grants across Europe. And the focus on individuals, rather than institutions, will mean that some universities have lots of happy grant recipients, while some have none. There will be, for the first time in EU research, clear winners and losers. And that will make for better science.