Euro superpower is our launch pad for success

UK science needs more investment and close links with our near neighbours, says Martin Rees.

This country still punches above its weight in science - but the global competition is strengthening fast. The challenge comes not just from the US but from the Far East. In our efforts to compete, we'll benefit from being meshed into Europe, an intellectual and economic superpower.

In the so-called "big sciences" - which require international-scale facilities - there has long been well-managed European collaboration. Cern in Geneva is destined to be the world's leading laboratory in particle physics for the next 15 years, the European Southern Observatory has the world's best ground-based telescopes, and the European Space Agency is Nasa's equal in unmanned space science.

Of course, these specialised and capital-intensive sciences aren't typical of research. But they are good portents - they show that Europe can fully match the US if we optimally develop a European research community.

What about European research in general? The omens are good. As a young researcher 30 years ago, I met my counterparts from mainland Europe in the US - that's where we all went to gain postdoctoral experience.

Young scientists are now more likely to migrate within Europe. The European Union fellowships and collaborative network programmes have been an effective stimulus and catalyst. And we should welcome the proposed European Research Council, provided its funds are allocated by a peer-review process that inspires confidence.

UK universities have problems but are in far better shape than those on mainland Europe: we have more diversity of funding and mission, and our universities have more autonomy over admissions of students and governance.

But our advantage in research is narrower than would be suggested by university league tables. That is because in mainland Europe the best researchers aren't in universities. In Germany, they are in Max Planck Institutes, many of which are world-class. In France, they are in Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which has pockets of excellence.

This hiving off of the best researchers is a major drag on efforts to improve French and German universities.

Indeed, what we see in mainland Europe reinforces the virtues of the "research university" model that prevails in the US and the UK. Harvard and Berkeley universities are major assets to the US through the worldwide pull they exert on talent, the collective expertise of their faculty and the consequent quality of the graduates they feed into all walks of life.

To sustain our own research universities, we need to stem the drain of talent across the Atlantic. But there is another concern - the total pool of talent in academe. Some people will become academics come what may. But academe cannot survive just on these.

Universities must attract their share of people who are ambitious and have flexible talent. Unless academe can compete with other career paths that seem more alluring we risk a downward spiral that would jeopardise our competitiveness in science and technology.

Stronger universities in the rest of Europe - and greater mobility and opportunity - would be good for us too. Europe collectively could then offer a stronger counter-attraction to the US as a destination of choice for mobile talent than the UK alone ever could. But we risk falling further behind. Lord Patten, chancellor of Oxford and Newcastle universities, noted in a recent lecture that the total expenditure on higher education in the US was 2.6 per cent of gross national product; in contrast, the total of public and private funding in the UK, France and Germany was only 1.1 per cent of GNP.

We focus obsessively on optimising how funds are apportioned, via the research assessment exercise and so on. But not even an optimal system will allow UK universities to fulfil their potential for the nation unless the total funding is more commensurate with the level in the US.

To make a real difference would not require prohibitively larger investment: the Higher Education Funding Council for England's annual budget is comparable to the Christmas bonuses shared last year by 3,000 city traders. As Lord Patten said: "How can Europe be so condescending about US culture when that country spends twice as much on knowledge, its transmission to students and its acquisition, as Europe?"

Whether we, and the rest of Europe, close the gap is a matter of priorities, values and incentives.

Lord Rees is president of the Royal Society and master of Trinity College, Cambridge.