Research community looks for ERA answers at ESF conference
'I believe there is a space in the political agenda over the next year or so for Europe to have an interesting debate about the future,' declared Ian Halliday, President of the European Science Foundation (ESF), at the opening session of the ESF sponsored conference on the Global Research Area (Glorea). 'These chances don't come that often and I believe this is one of the times where a coherent push and with well defined aims, we could get the political classes to help us and to move. I think potentially there are big gains to be had for Europe,' the ESF president added. Since the European Commission launched a debate on the future of the European Research Area (ERA) earlier this year, discussions have centred on combating Europe's fragmented scientific landscape and coming up with a version of the ERA that reflects all the interests of all stakeholders around Europe. In addition to responding to the European Commission's call for comments on the ERA, the European Science Foundation also organised its first ever science policy conference on 28 November to provide stakeholders with an opportunity to voice their opinions on the plan, which is intended to have far-reaching effects on European science. If participants expected answers, they were disappointed, as the conference tackled questions that could only be countered with many more questions. First up, Professor Halliday asked what the scientific agenda for Europe should be. Blue Skies research or Blue Skies research plus innovation? Should governments take a more active role in forcing innovation? Or should researchers be encouraged to explore possibilities that no one has ever imagined? 'More importantly, more difficult, how do you apply science to the possibilities that might be there but you don't really know about?' asked Professor Halliday, president of the ESF, and a theoretical particle physicist. 'My favourite example is the Americans, taking to, and grabbing, everybody's technology to make the Internet work. Think of the impact on society. That wasn't a solution to societal need. That was: there's something interesting over here that's more than just mature science. How do we make it work, how do we turn it into something?' On what used to be considered 'healthy competition', Professor Halliday sought to highlight the duplication of effort and fragmentation of research and research funds across Member States. The European Research Council should avoid these pitfalls, he said. 'What do I mean by duplication? I mean the worry in the UK or Sweden or wherever that you are funding something that is really identical to something funded in Italy or whatever. Again let me use my background. The UK had the best dark matter experiment in Europe. So did France and so did Italy. Those cannot all be true. There is real suspicion that the money could have been spent better. And that is repeated many times across Europe. So how do we get that kind of visibility and transparency?' According to Colin Blakemore, an Oxford neuroscientist and until October head of the UK's medical research council, cooperation should not be seen as an end in itself. 'One shouldn't lose sight of the broader goal: that integration and cooperation are not ends in themselves. They are a means to the greater benefit of science. Or are they always? Is it absolutely essential that to be successful in science Europe must have enforced trans-national co-operation? It is worth reflecting on that,' he said. He pointed to successful European scientific ventures and infrastructures where cooperation was necessary, such as the huge atom-smashing collider at CERN in Geneva, or the human genome project and the European bioinformatics institute. 'The examples are there but notice that in each case one can trace the need for cooperation to a scientific objective and goal rather than enforced cooperation for its own sake,' Professor Blakemore said. 'We have to be very cautious, in recognising that the driver for cooperation is not cooperation itself, but it is the goal of supporting science better where co-operation is essential.' The professor went on to explain his view that if US science has become dominant in the world, it was not through enforced cooperation, but through the encouragement of individual excellence and encouragement of that excellence through the right resources. He conceded that through the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), the European Commission had recognised the fundamental importance of that strategy for developing high quality fundamental research and had integrated that thinking when establishing the European Research Council (ERC). The problem now, as he sees it, is the paradoxical challenge that national funding agencies face in the emergence of an ERC, which most stakeholders agreed is set to be a European success story. 'There has been huge support from the National Funding Agencies for the ERC. It's been seen as a way for the research framework programme to recognise excellence better, to escape from the dead hand of top-down political control in science and strategy and putting power back into the hands of scientists, simply funding the best in Europe wherever it is and using that as a way of driving excellence through competition in science,' he said. 'And yet paradoxically, the more successful the ERC is in doing just that, the more legitimate it will be to ask why is that different from what other, national, agencies do, and so national funders will be under increased pressure to have our budgets top sliced and moved into the ERC,' he added. His solution: national agencies should demonstrate that they are capable of doing novel, innovative things together at European level to drive the formation of the ERA together. Presenting views of ERA from the perspective of the private sector, Andrew Dearing of the European Industrial Research Management Association (EIRMA), said: 'In business language we would say that we need to establish and project a stronger business case for the European Research Area so that everyone, from the man and woman in the street, understand that it is all about creating the basis for a successful knowledge share-based society from which everyone will benefit,' he said. 'If we don't do that, we will run out of political momentum. And I think that the way that we do that, using my favourite metaphor, is not about the logic of the symphony orchestra, it is about the symphony of the jazz band, and getting players working at the right level,' he added. The conference also heard from Mary Minch, from the European Commission, who announced a plan to skip the White Paper phase on the European Research Area and follow through directly with key objectives under the Slovenian Presidency in 2008.
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