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"But today there is no way to do this without money. That’s the difficulty. In order to do science you have to have it supported. The supporters now, the bureau

• mjn 13y ago
  Although it has its own set of problems (some pretty large), this is one somewhat nice aspect of the EU scientific funding system. It has ulterior motives, but many of them are "meta" motives rather than specific ones like oil-sands, because it's not one national government setting the priority. Instead there are meta-motives like "improve European research/educational integration". That's implemented by requiring that EU-level funding only go to multi-country projects with partners from >= 3 countries represented (single-country or two-country projects are supposed to be funded at the national level). That adds coordination difficulties since every EU project is a big multinational management problem, but it's at least a political criterion that's mostly orthogonal to the actual research. And when they do pick actual topics, because of the need to compromise between so many governments they tend to be very vague, like "data & 21st-century society", which you can fit a lot of things under. I do recall seeing a study that suggested that just taking the total pot of money and dividing it by the number of researchers would be at least as good and maybe better, though. Even if the lack of competition leads to less hard work and more money being spent on questionable things, there is a huge overhead removed: the entire infrastructure of people writing 100-page documents, other people reviewing those documents, people flying to Brussels (or D.C. or Ottawa) to make funding decisions, support staff at universities reviewing documents, etc., etc.
  • dnautics 13y ago
    The odd thing about your comment is that in my experience science in Europe is a MORE feudal system than in the us, with hierarchies of professorships and less independence for most researchers. It's possible that this is a cultural thing writ large, but how exactly do you get a committee to do anything but reward the 'haves' at the expense of the 'have not's?
    • mjn 13y ago
      That's one area that really, really varies, and is completely unstandardized across Europe (while the funding mechanisms and degrees are becoming more standardized, which is a tricky divergence). Germany has more of a traditional model where a Professor has a capital P, is not a social peer of the lower-down people, and there is no clear route to becoming that person. But once you are, there is a large degree of research freedom and some guaranteed funding. Sweden has the diametric opposite, where a lecturer with a masters degree who's been teaching at the same place for a few years basically becomes permanent faculty with tenure, without having to either do a PhD or go through a tenure application (and anyone with a PhD is more or less equally at the top tier). Denmark isn't quite as flat on the teaching side, but is flatter on the faculty vs. PhD student side, with PhD students considered more or less faculty, paid much better salaries than most PhD students (€40-45k), and guaranteed funding (by law) for their entire PhD before they're admitted. Italy is more feudal, with "barons" controlling the positions in some departments (apparently Umberto Eco, mostly known to the general public for his novels, is somewhat notorious in Italian academic circles for being one of the big ones). Spanish universities can be super-regional, with complex language requirements, e.g. a colleague of mine who was born and raised in Galicia can't teach at a Galician university without doing additional certifications, because his degree was not done in a Galician university. Etc. But my point was mostly just that the EU as a funding body doesn't micromanage research areas that much, because it has too many governments to do so: Denmark might want all the money in wind power, but they won't get that through. Instead the EU picks general meta-goals like "promote European research integration", and a few broad focus areas, which allows quite a bit of flexibility on what the actual scientific project is. Some blue-skies stuff gets funded as a result, as long as it's multinational blue-skies work in a broad area of interest.
• rachellaw 13y ago
  that's the problem with a lot of places that deliberate try to be so-so 'science hub'. the thing with scientific research is that doesn't always turn into a positive result - much of it is messy, we don't know a lot, and ends in failure. most investments in science assume that results are always positive and profitable, which works with agencies and pharama companies but not for the pursuit of scientific research aka 'the higher ideal' of human knowledge.