Economic (un)natural selection

Abstract

The credit crunch could turn out to be ‘kill or cure’ for scientific research, weeding out the weak while favouring the strong. While many governments and research institutes are tightening their belts fiscally, some scientific sectors—and even countries—could well emerge fitter from this brutal (un)natural selection. At the same time, the economic crisis could intensify the inequality that is already present in the European research community. Increasing unemployment and the resulting extra burden on social security will force the poorer countries of Eastern Europe—including some of the newer European Union member states—to cut their already meagre research budgets, while wealthier nations, such as Germany and the UK, will be able to afford to stimulate key research areas. Indeed, some research fields, particularly within biomedical research, will benefit directly from stimulus packages. This is already happening in the USA, where President Barack Obama has proposed a stimulus package that would inject an extra US$10 billion into the biomedical research budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH; Bethesda, MA, USA) for 2009, which certainly poses a major challenge for the whole of Europe, according to Beata Konze‐Thomas, Head of Coordinated Programmes and Infrastructure at the German central science funding agency, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; Bonn, Germany). “I think it is a problem because if [the Americans] suddenly spend an extra US$10 billion [they will] need the personnel to do the research, and for the last 6 or 7 years not that many people have gone to the US from Europe,” she said. “Now the opportunities are increasing [and] people will again start going to the US. [The Americans] probably need 15,000 people from Europe alone to do all the extra research this money will support.” The research‐stimulus package will certainly give a huge boost to the projects that are funded directly …