A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
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Right now, the United States and Japan invest more in R&D as a percentage of GDP than the European Union. China is coming up fast from behind and is inching over into the passing lane. The question is, does the European Union want to engage in the race, or content itself with puttering along? British medical scientist Marc Feldmann recently reminded everyone of what is at stake.
Feldmann received the lifetime achievement award at the 2007 European Inventor of the Year ceremony in April for his groundbreaking work in the treatment of autoimmune disorders. He took advantage of his moment in the spotlight to gently scold member states and EU officials for not doing more to support R&D. “If we want Europe to become a technology-driven society,” Feldmann told several hundred guests gathered at the International Congress Centre in Munich, “then the [current] investment in research is insufficient.” The numbers back him up.
EU member states collectively spent just over €200 billion on R&D in 2005, according to Eurostat. That represents 1.8% of Europe’s GDP. By contrast, R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP reached 2.7% in the United States and 3.2% in Japan. Eurostat also reported that the business sector financed 55% of total R&D expenditures in the European Union compared with 64% in the United States and 75% in Japan. China trails the European Union—investing 1.3% of GDP in R&D in 2005—but for how long?
We will doom ourselves to failure, Feldmann warned, unless we increase investment. “Research is very expensive and it requires a lot of facilities and trained people. It is impossible to do research without significant resources,” he said. In addition, since the resources are scarce, they tend to flow to well-established scientists rather than “younger, potentially more creative people who are at the beginning of their careers,” said Feldmann. If they can’t pursue research at home, they will go abroad to test their theories, he added. Feldmann did not have to take the expatriate route, but that had more to do with the UK tradition of charitable donations than enlightened public financing.
The European Patent Office and the Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General of the European Commission, which jointly organized the event, chose to honour Feldmann for the work he led at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in London in the 1990s. He identified the role of cytokines in autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, and discovered that blocking one particular cytokine molecule could lead to a significant improvement in a patient’s condition. That research on tumor necrosis factor inhibitors led to numerous patents. While the research was done in Europe, the financial rewards went elsewhere. The reason is because “European companies were reluctant to get involved,” said Feldmann. “They had not understood the importance of taking risks, and [the benefits] they can lead to.” The UK is fortunate in that it has a large charity sector that supplements government funding, he told the audience. Government funds alone were not sufficient to sustain the project.
To be fair, Europe has made progress in recent years. Member states and the European Commission set some ambitious R&D investment goals in Lisbon in 2000. Under the terms of the so-called Lisbon agenda agreement, member states pledged to allocate at least 3% of GDP to research by 2010, while the Commission committed to pushing the business sector to invest more.
Member states, as noted above, have a ways to go to meet that target. In 2005, Finland and Sweden were the only countries spending more than 3% of GDP on research; Germany came in third, redirecting 2.5% of GDP to research. But the European Union took a promising step in February, when it launched the European Research Council (ERC) with a budget of €7.5 billion until 2013. Its mandate is to fund research into new technology, especially in the life sciences, that has the potential to keep Europe competitive.
That’s certainly a start, maybe more. But don’t be lulled into thinking that we have turned the corner, cautioned Feldmann. “There is an investment gap ...catching up will require more resources.”
