Do you want Europe’s citizens to benefit directly from world-leading science?

1. Do you want Europe’s citizens to benefit directly from world-leading science? Philip Campbell Editor-in-Chief, Nature With contributions from senior editors at Nature and Nature journals European Parliament 22-9-05

2. Emphasis of presentation • While science-and-society activities at a European level are important, these are currently more critical at national level. • But greater collaboration needed by natural and social sciences in studies of citizens’ responses/participation. • Society benefits from local world-leading science (see later) • Europe as a whole has the potential to be a world-leading region, but not on the current levels and structures of funding. • I want to highlight this potential leadership in areas of basic science with clear benefits for Europe’s citizens

3. Comparative strengths by citations(David King, Nature 15 July 2004, v430 p311-316)

4. Comparative strengths by citations(David King, Nature 15 July 2004, v430 p311-316) • Total citations ’97-’01: • US 10,850,549 (49.4%) • EU 15 8,628, 152 (39.3%) • Top 1% highly cited publications ’97-’01 • US 23,723 (62.8%) • EU15 14,099 (37.3%)

5. Inputs for science opportunities • Nature and Nature journals have >100 editorial staff, all with strong research backgrounds, who assess papers, travel internationally, visit laboratories and conferences • Alongside Nature, there are Nature research and review journals in genetics, cell biology, immunology, molecular biology, biomedical research, biotechnology, neuroscience, microbiology, cancer, chemical biology, materials research, physics. All are at or (a minority) near the top of their impact categories. • I asked colleagues to identify strands of research where there are several good labs in Europe which, with freedom to compete internationally individually or in collaboration, could strengthen their international competitiveness.

6. Opportunities: environment • environmental microbiology and bioremediation, an area that suffered greatly under the FP6 round of funding despite considerable progress being made under FP4 and FP5 • Basic chemistry and physics of aerosol formation, key to pollution and climate studies

7. Opportunities: materials • Synthesis of controlled nanostructure morphology, chemistry (e.g. heterogeneous, branched, core-shell, doped). Controlling structure is vitally important for device development in nanotechnology (groups notably in Scandinavia, France and Germany) • Materials processes needed for mass production. A strong base in this area should be encouraged to ensure that we are competitive with the States.

8. Opportunities: materials • Fundamental research into biomaterials, biomimetics, tisse engineering (material-cell/tissue interactions), lab-on-a-chip devices - particularly strong groups in UK, Switzerland, Netherlands but need resources to attract good scientists away from the pull of the big US research groups. • We need to build a strong research base in materials for energy given various groups which are very strong in fields of fuel cells, lithium batteries, photovoltaics.

9. Opportunities: optics • Optical microcavities - with fundamental and technological implications ranging from nonlinear optics, quantum information to biological sensing and telecommunications - currently very hot and European labs in Germany, UK and France are doing quite well but because of funding seem to be lagging behind the US and Japan.

10. Opportunities: basic biology • Human origins and evolution • Evolutionary theory • Computational neuroscience • Molecular and cell biology (e.g. trafficking, cell cycle, DNA repair) • Developmental biology

11. Opportunities: basic - biomedical • Aids vaccines. • Cancer genetics • Immunology. See later, as an example of wider concerns.

12. Opportunities: biomedical • Prion diseases and axon regeneration, two important areas of clinical neuroscience • Stem cell research - political difficulties for this area in the US, but strong support in Asia • Approaches for predicting the safety of new drugs - for example, exploiting toxicological data currently distributed among pharma companies and academic laboratories that if brought together could be used to considerably improve in silico approaches for prediction of drug toxicity

13. Weakness in basic biology • Biology moves more and more into the highly quantitative, high throughput arena - this is an essential approach to understanding biology. This is technology-driven and this can ONLY be funded at the European level. Needs Europe wide human resourcing.

14. Example: weakness in immunological biomedical research • The price of failing to strengthen European science will be seen in the essential area of multigenic disease modeling. Major immunological diseases (diabetes; RA; MS; psoriasis, etc.) are underpinned by multiple genetic and environmental factors, and to model them will require the high throughput development of knock-in and transgenic mice that can then be interbred and subjected to specific infections, etc. • Moreover, such analyses need to be able to count on the availability of new technologies as they develop. Fluency on this scale is hard to find here in Europe. • The failure to compete in this area will be very serious, since clinical success will stem from the rapid translation of new ideas arising in such models into clinical research facilities.

15. Competitive weaknesses • In immunology, European groups tend to comprise no more than 10 people, by comparison to the 20-30 people in very high-achieving US labs. • there is a lack of programmatic studentship programmes, akin to the NIH training programmes. Those that exist are very small, and the EU Marie Curie Programme places individuals in labs on an ad hoc basis. US labs depend on the regular availability of students through NIH training programmes that are in operation at essentially every decent place. • The EU needs the courage to recognize good institutions based on meritocratic metrics, and to award them programmes of say half a dozen students. This will begin to build critical mass from the bottom up.

16. Principles • Scientific research groups who have to compete internationally for funds are more likely to achieve world-class competitiveness.

17. Principles • This is most likely if the competition is free of conditions aimed at ‘social engineering’, eg forced collaborations, and is judged solely on the proposal submitted on a research lab or consortium’s own terms. • Decision-making on funding must be independent of sources of funds, and based only on scientific merit

18. Principles • Such a system would provide a level playing field of opportunity to stimulate everybody, including highly talented researchers from less developed countries.

19. Principles • Wherever world-class talent is fostered, citizens will benefit; the impacts of leading scientists on a society are felt on a national and European scale. Benefits include: • Stimulus to the economy through direct spin-off • Stimulus to society through engagement on ethical and social issues • Inspiration to young scientists and others • Better quality of life through local translation: eg health

20. Evidence • In large-scale science, world-quality competitiveness has been achieved through groupings of funds across national boundaries: CERN, ESO, ESA • For smaller-scale science, the same has been achieved at European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Project for Ice-Coring in Antarctica....

21. Raising Europe to world-leading level Funds are required: • to recruit more PhD students into good basic science labs by making sizeable block grants to good institutions/departments. • to expand the public and private sector science communities to offer requisite employment options • to reduce constraining regulations • to reduce the cost of animal research • to make block grants available to invest in new technologies on multiple sites. • to support new clinical research facilities.

22. What’s at stake? • The benefit will be the substantially accelerated progress in eg understanding multigenic, multifactorial diseases, and the expeditious translation of ideas into pilot clinical trials. • The cost will be fatal loss of competitiveness, and the resultant reduction in “good people” going into science. • More generally, this will shift the culture of the EU away from technology and the realization of its benefits.