The appointment of Europe’s first chief scientist will hopefully happen this year, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, the research commissioner told reporters in London today.
She blamed the financial crisis for the delay in making the appointment, which José Manuel Barroso, the Commission president, promised nearly 18 months ago. (See Nature’s story on the promised appointment)
She said she had written a personal letter to Barroso supporting the planned appointment but declined to make the letter public.
The research commissioner’s comments came after she gave a speech to the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, on the future of European research funding. She said the commission has listened and acted on researchers calls to simplify the European Union research funding programme, and it had now “done all it could on its own”.
The European Parliament and member states now have to play their part she says.
In her speech, Geoghegan-Quinn said Europe “needs a clean break” from the framework programme for research funding. The commission will propose a “new instrument” for funding research in its green paper on the future of EU research funding due to be published on 9 February. Nature reported last week that a leaked draft version of the green paper has received a lukewarm response.
She described the meeting of EU leaders on 4 February, where they dedicated discussions to research and innovation as a “major achievement” and a sign that R&D is at the heart of EU policy.
At that meeting, EU heads of state agreed the ambitious goal of to completing the European Research Area by 2014.
The fact that it is the member states themselves setting this goal is good news – pretty much all the work left to do on the ERA is up to them. An EU-wide patent, portable research grants and transferrable pensions are still the main sticking points. The patent debate has been particularly slow-moving, (see EU still deadlocked on patent reform) though there has been some movement lately, with a breakaway group of countries deciding to move forward on their own.
The council also hailed the launch of the first “Innovation Partnership”, on healthy ageing, as an important step in mobilizing Europe’s expertise to tackle important societal challenges. The partnerships were introduced in the Innovation Union document last October, but we are still unsure exactly what they will do, or how they are different from joint programming, Joint Technology Initiatives, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s Knowledge and Innovation Communities, or any of the other myriad public-private partnerships introduced in recent years (see The innovation game).
Image: Maire Geoghegan-Quinn
Reporting by Natasha Gilbert and Brian Owens.