A microscopic chemical robot that could send medicines around the body, a car that can travel thousands of miles without a driver and unravelling the secrets of ancient insect DNA locked in the Greenland ice-sheet. These are just a handful of the research subjects that have been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) in the three years since it was launched to boost ‘blue-sky’ research in Europe.  Today (24 June), a host of scientific and political grandees are meeting in Munich as the council celebrates handing out its 1,000th grant.

Although the ERC has no permanent status, it is difficult to imagine it being abolished, even in these straitened times. Helga Nowotny, the ERC’s new president, an Austrian professor in social science, is looking for a substantial increase in funds.

Nowotny, who took up the presidency on 1 March, says that “at the very least” the council needs to double its budget, currently €7.5 billion over 2007-13. She acknowledges that the financial constraints are hard, but says that frontier research is a very good investment for the future. “In basic research, Europe has made an enormous advance in catching up with – and even surpassing in some areas – the United States.” Although, China and India are catching up with Europe in applied research, their growth in basic research has been slower, she argues.

Curiosity-driven research is just as important to economic growth as applied research, typically done in industrial laboratories.

“Without basic research you won’t have innovation,” says Nowotny, reinterating the line that the ERC has taken in a paper on the EU’s Europe 2020 strategy for growth and job submitted to European leaders. (The Commission will make a proposal on the ERC’s budget for 2014-20, but it is member states and MEPs that will ultimately decide.) In its Europe 2020 submission, the ERC notes that the “emininently practical” industrial revolution came out of the “intellectual cauldron of the scientific revolution”, just as the fabled US biotechnology start-ups grew out of universities.

Frontier research

Risky research at the frontiers of scientific knowledge applies not only to ‘hard’ sciences. The ERC is founded on the German concept of Wissenschaft, which is broader than just the natural sciences. Around 14% of its budget goes on social sciences and the humanities. Nowotny, a sociologist by training, has written that “new methods in asking new questions” mean that the principle of “frontier research” holds true for social sciences. “Technology innovations have to be understood in their social context,” she says. “We have to forget the old 19th-century idea that humanities are only there for beauty and distraction.” She talks of a new generation of researchers who are breaking strict interdisciplinary barriers, for instance in neuroeconomics.

Whatever the discipline, the ERC insists that its goal is excellence, meaning that the allocation of research grants is not governed by juste retour, dividing the spoils according to what each country puts in. Instead the EU’s three biggest countries and non-member state Switzerland take a disproportionately large share of the grants. Nowotny says that she has never felt any political pressure to share out the grants more equally: “A number of governments – even those who receive few grants – have told us to continue to focus on excellence. There is trust in our evaluation methods.”

Fact File

Scientists in charge

A panel chaired by the former Latvian president, Vaire Vike-Freiberga, concluded in 2009 that the administrative rules of the European Research Council were in conflict with its science-first philosophy. The decision to put non-scientists in charge of European research programmes was flawed, said the panel. It recommended that the posts of ERC secretary-general and the director of the ERC’s executive agency be merged into one job and filled by a recognised scientist. The process of selecting this person is under way and Nowotny said that the new director could be named before the summer. As the Vike-Freiberga panel wanted, this person will be a top scientist, but will also become a Commission official.

The Vike-Freiberga commission called for the ERC to be more independent. Although it found no evidence of political interference, its report argued in favour of giving the ERC a similar status to the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, Europe’s would-be rival to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. For the moment, the ERC thinks it is too early to reach a verdict on structural change. “We really have to see whether the present adjustments will be sufficient or not,” says Nowotny.

Several countries – France, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden and the Flanders region – give grants to ERC runners-up, those researchers deemed to have good projects that nevertheless fail to get an ERC grant.

Nowotny says that each country should strive to have at least one ‘European–standard’ university, although policymakers should also accept that some universities will remain at “regional-standard” level. “We have inherited the fiction that every university can be good at everything and clearly this is not possible to achieve,” she says. Differentiating between the excellent and the good could be one way for European universities to do better in international league tables.

Bureaucracy

When her predecessor, Fotis Kafatos, stood down – one year early, to return to his research – he complained of the energy, time and effort expended on “busting bureaucracy road-blocks”. Nowotny says that “some of the roadblocks have been removed”, but adds that the ERC is still waiting to find out what the European Commission’s drive to cut red tape will mean. Giving researchers lump sums based on outputs would not be appropriate for frontier research, she warns. “By its very nature, frontier research begins without knowing what the outcome will be.”

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