'The whole world should team up'

Prof Maria Leptin is a developmental biologist and immunologist currently serving as the President of the European Research Council (ERC), which funds research in the European Union. Set up in 2007, the ERC recently increased its funding for outstanding research proposals, promising additional grants to scientists willing to move to Europe from anywhere in the world. Leptin talks about the necessity for every country to invest in science and not depend on research done elsewhere for their development. Excerpts:

How has the nature of research changed in the last decade?
That will be very different for different fields. In the life sciences, instrumentation and technology have become much more important. New techniques always drive research, but in the life sciences, many of the new techniques and instrumentation have become large and expensive. That means that access to such instrumentation has created more unevenness. Some things can now be done only at large centres that can afford the necessary infrastructure. Interactions and collaborations make it easier to look at problems from many angles, allowing for fast progress. That has also meant you have larger groups working together at large centres. The lone researcher in their cubbyhole is rare now in our field.

Given such high costs, will only a few countries be able to do high-end research?
In some fields, yes. Physicists have been used to this for 100 years. We don't have high-power beamlines or synchrotrons in each lab. The same is true for large telescopes. Not every country sends up a Hubble. But that does not mean that only those astrophysicists who have access to these instruments do important work. It's just a division of labour.

Consider Europe. In the past, Russia and Poland had fantastic theoreticians, but not much instrumentation. India, of course, was similar. And Bulgaria wasn't exactly leading in scientific research, but recently, Martin Vechev, a Bulgarian scientist who works at the ETH in Zurich, came up with a plan to set up an AI institute in Sofia. He got the Bulgarian government behind it and secured funding. The government was open-minded in allowing liberal work conditions, contracts and salaries. It is now a hub for progressive research in that area. It has good faculty and is a magnet for talent. This has propelled it to a level that's competitive. They're not now also going to build the world's best imaging centre for life sciences or a space telescope. But they have this one thing they're really great at.

Collaboration, for me, is unbelievably inspiring. Most of us love discussing our ideas with others. When you have these discussions, somebody sees your problem from a different angle. Collaboration is a natural way of making progress. It's not something that needs to be forced. And with the many technologies now, it's even more powerful.

What major trends will drive research over the next 10 years?
We must hope that enlightened governments will continue to see the need for blue-sky, free research in all fields, and that you can't predict outcomes. Some people think research has to be 'useful'. To me, it has to be fun and creative. We don't always know whether and how it will be useful. Creating knowledge is important, and so is sharing that knowledge. Then, anyone who has ideas for application, innovation, translation can dip into that pool of knowledge.

Four years ago, nobody was talking about AI in research. ChatGPT hit the scene, and everybody now thinks AI is one of the most important things. Extrapolating from that, what's going to hit the scene tomorrow?

If the recent drop in funding in the U.S. continues over the long run, will it affect science worldwide?
Yes, absolutely. What's happening is just terrible. It will slow down science and discovery. It will completely block it in some important fields. Because the U.S. is such a big player in generating knowledge, if half the funding goes, the generation of knowledge will slow down. Worse, the funding appears also to be affecting the storage of data. If data that are shared across the world are deleted, obliterated, lost, that is terrible. These are irretrievable: longitudinal studies over two decades... you can't recreate that.

Can other countries raise money and work with the U.S. on this? The whole world should team up together. The European Research Council doesn't have an easy mechanism for doing that. Our mission is clearly defined. But there must be funders – rich individuals who could save those data.

Can the reduced funding be the beginning of a new trend?
I don't really see much reduction in Europe at the moment – touch wood! There will always be countries or societies that see the value of research, including fundamental research. So, it may shift to China, and if knowledge comes out of China for a while, so be it. Of course, the knowledge should be reliable and shared. If that's the case, humankind doesn't need to worry so much about where the knowledge comes from. Any country that thinks it can make do without its own basis for generating knowledge is killing itself. Doing fundamental research does more than just generate knowledge: it also creates the skills of those who know how to handle knowledge. You can't say, 'we'll let the others do the research, and we'll just benefit from it.' If you want to exploit knowledge, you have to have a workforce that's trained in knowing how that knowledge is generated and knows the methods.

See also:

Mind the gap in science funding
Science revision
'Future of science in India is bright'
'AI lacks a conceptual grasp'