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Ministers from the world’s leading industrialised nations agreed last
week to step up efforts to save science in Eastern Europe. But they stopped
short of creating a fund to pay for it.

The meeting of the OECD in Paris agreed to set up a new ‘forum’ to help
countries to make ‘intelligent choices’ on big science projects, such as
particle accelerators and research into the human genome. The ministers
asked the OECD to carry out a full inventory of all ‘big science’ facilities
in Eastern and Central Europe.

They pinpointed four ‘vital areas’ for cooperation with Eastern Europe:
training, strengthening the science infrastructure, technology transfer
and the conversion of military industry to civilian needs.

Russian science minister Boris Saltykov, who attended the meeting as
an observer, said that there had been ‘broad agreement’ on the idea of a
special fund or agency to support basic research in Eastern Europe. But
the form of the fund remains unclear.

The French research minister, Hubert Curien, hinted that France will
soon take the initiative on the idea of an international agency to fund
science in the East. ‘The governments of interested countries must get together
now and it is not impossible that France may play a major role in coordinating
this business,’ he said.

Britain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands backed the French idea.
But the US was less keen. Allan Bromley, science adviser to President Bush,
argued for joint initiatives and said that the US was looking for ways to
ensure that money ‘goes to science, not bureaucracy’ and only to ‘outstanding
scientists’.

Curien, who chaired the OECD meeting, warned that the new forum would
not be an excuse to wheel out ‘all the ideas which have been put on ice,
probably for good reasons’.

Bromley stressed that ‘science now needs such expensive instruments
that no country can go it alone’. This, together with the ending of the
Cold War, meant that ‘for the first time, we are dealing with the true internationalisation
of science’.