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EU Brain Drain
Europeâs best and brightest scientific minds are leaving in droves for the U.S. â and billions of euros and thousands of jobs are at stake. Hereâs how Europe is trying to lure them back Long article, go read the rest 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. Thereâs 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, âHeâs not hereâ in Italian if my mom calls," says Dorrello, punctuating his Neapolitan-accented staccato with laughs. "Weâre going to make it with flags and everything." Whatâs not so funny for European policymakers is that this lab isnât in Brussels or Paris or any other E.U. capital. Itâs 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 Americaâs generous funding, better facilities and meritocratic culture. "In Italy," says Dorrello, "Iâd be earning maybe â¬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 youâre a scientist, you try to go to the best place," says Pagano, who likens researcher migration to football transfers. "In soccer, if youâre great, another team can buy you." Science is the same, and the big buyer is the U.S.: in 2000, the U.S. spent â¬287 billion on research and development, â¬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 Europeâs 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 worldâs best minds and prompting Britainâs Royal Society to coin the term brain drain. Americaâs investments laid the foundation for the tech booms of the 1980s and 1990s, which drew yet more entrepreneurial Europeans westward. Europeâs 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." Posted by: rkb 2004-01-16 |
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