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 Brain Drain
Europe's best and brightest scientific minds are leaving in droves for the U.S. |
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Gender Gap
Giving Girl Power a Boost |
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Why They Go
What can be done to reverse the trend |
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High Anxiety
Science can spot potential dangers — but consumers must decide [July 28, 2003] |
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Beyond 2000 How technology will change our lives [July 3, 2000] |
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BRUNO VINCENT/GETTY IMAGES
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ONE-TRACK MIND: Staying in Europe wasn't an option for Dorrello, who says he "was always thinking of the U.S." for his postdoc work |
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How To Plug Europe's Brain Drain |
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Europe's best and brightest scientific minds are leaving in droves for the U.S. — and billions of euros and thousands of jobs are at stake. Here's how Europe is trying to lure them back |
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By JEFF CHU |
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Posted Sunday, January 11, 2004; 15.48GMT
When Valerio Dorrello looks around his lab, he sees a miniature European Union. As the afternoon sun streams in, the Italian postdoctoral fellow stands at his sink, changing solutions for one of his experiments. A Spanish colleague, Virginia Amador, pours a gel between glass plates, while a German researcher named Tarig Bashir works on a computer nearby. Their primary investigator, Michele Pagano, is Italian. Two other postdocs are Italian, too, while two more are French. There's such a jumble of languages in the group, which is doing cancer research, that its members have talked about putting up a keyword chart by the telephone with basic phrases in all their languages, "so anyone can say, 'He's not here' in Italian if my mom calls," says Dorrello, punctuating his Neapolitan-accented staccato with laughs. "We're going to make it with flags and everything."
What's not so funny for European policymakers is that this lab isn't in Brussels or Paris or any other E.U. capital. It's at the New York University (N.Y.U.) School of Medicine. All over the U.S., such research facilities are teeming with bright, young Europeans, lured by America's generous funding, better facilities and meritocratic culture. "In Italy," says Dorrello, "I'd be earning maybe €900 a month." At N.Y.U., he gets nearly three times that. "The U.S. is a place where you can do very good science, and if you're a scientist, you try to go to the best place," says Pagano, who likens researcher migration to football transfers. "In soccer, if you're great, another team can buy you." Science is the same, and the big buyer is the U.S.: in 2000, the U.S. spent €287 billion
on research and development, €121 billion more than the E.U. No wonder the U.S. has 78% more high-tech patents per capita than Europe, which is especially weak in the IT and biotech sectors.
Three years ago, E.U. leaders vowed to make the union "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world" by 2010. But one of the most worrying signs of their failure is the continued drain of Europe's best and brightest scientific brains, who finish their degrees and pursue careers in the U.S. Some 400,000 European science and technology graduates now live in the U.S. and thousands more leave each year. A survey released in November by the European Commission found that only 13% of European science professionals working abroad currently intend to return home.
The flight of European scientists to the U.S. is nothing new, of course. Political and religious persecution drove luminaries like Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi across the Atlantic. The exodus continued in the 1950s and 1960s, as the U.S. poured billions into defense-related research and created magnetic clusters of scientific excellence, staffing them with the world's best minds and prompting Britain's Royal Society to coin the term brain drain. America's investments laid the foundation for the tech booms of the 1980s and 1990s, which drew yet more entrepreneurial Europeans westward. Europe's bureaucracies, rigid hierarchies and frustrating scientific fragmentation also pushed people away as they still do to this day. "Europe is a mess," thunders Christopher Evans, a biotechnology professor at four British universities and chairman of the venture-capital firm Merlin Biosciences, "a haze of overregulated and overcomplicated bureaucracies smothering the rare flames of true entrepreneurial brilliance."
Is it really so bad? Europe does have world-class research centers, such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, where the World Wide Web was invented, and the Heidelberg-based European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), where 1995 Nobel laureates Eric Wieschaus and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard did their fruit-fly genome research. But complaints like those of Claude Allègre, the former French Education Minister who heads the Paris VII geochemical lab, are all too common. He decries France's anachronistic "Soviet" system, in which control is centralized and researchers must run a bureaucratic obstacle course, whether to buy expensive equipment or order basic office supplies. "I'm planning on moving to the U.S. indefinitely because I want to continue my research," says Allègre. "I can't do so in the current conditions."
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Little Worries [May 12, 2003]
Invasion of the nanobots? Critics warn of a "gray goo" future as nanotechnology enters the marketplace
Risky Business [July 28, 2003
]
Science can pinpoint potential dangers from GM foods, mobile phones and household chemicals — but can't tell us if those risks are real.
Land of Laptops and Lederhosen [Sep. 23, 2002]
Edmund Stoiber turned Bavaria into a high-tech success story. Can he do the same for Germany?
Moscow Meets Man [Mar. 28, 2001]
A tech incubator on the island tax haven helps Russian scientists sell their ideas to the world
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