Munich

Benchmark of despair: innovative German researchers find it hard to get grants.

Researchers such as Mark Benecke should be the future of German science. With most of his contemporaries still only just finishing their PhDs, this 29-year-old entomologist at the University of Cologne is already applying for research grants under his own steam. Yet earlier this year, his application to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the country's main grant-giving agency for university research, was turned down after an eight-month wait. “The DFG had huge difficulties in assigning my proposal to appropriate referees,” he says.

Benecke's field is forensic entomology, which can, for example, reveal how long a corpse has lain undiscovered by studying the insects on it. And it is typical of the novel research areas that, according to many scientists, the DFG seems unable to assess. They charge that the agency's aversion to taking risks, lengthy review procedures — in some cases more than twelve months — and inability to deal with interdisciplinary proposals threaten career opportunities for young researchers.

Ultimately, some researchers warn, the agency's outmoded procedures could weaken Germany's position in cutting-edge areas of science. And feelings are running so high that the debate has spilled over into the science and correspondence pages of leading German newspapers. Germany risks the “migration of the best minds of its next generation of scientists”, says Ralf Müller, a German electrical engineer at the University of Princeton in New Jersey.

Many question the DFG's ability to handle interdisciplinary research applications. Its elected external referees are organized into narrow, discipline-orientated boards, and critics claim they fail to keep pace with fast-moving areas such as biomedicine, ecology, informatics or materials research. Time is lost because the DFG has trouble finding referees for innovative or cross-disciplinary applications, they say.

“The key problem is that funding decisions are made by a small group of overworked honorary referees, nominated by the traditional German scientific societies,” says Michael Cross, a young British molecular biologist at the University of Leipzig.

The DFG's review system “is not as flexible as it should be”, agrees Gerhard Neuweiler, a professor of zoology at the University of Munich and former president of Germany's science council, the Wissenschaftsrat. “Unfortunately, this tends particularly to disadvantage innovative researchers in the most competitive areas.”

Peter Uetz, for example, applied unsuccesfully to the DFG in 1997 for a project in functional genomics. Uetz then turned to the German Academic Exchange Service, and eventually received a grant allowing him to do research at the University of Washington in Seattle. His first results were published last month in Nature (403, 623; 2000).

“Ironically, the DFG turned down my proposal at a time when its president, Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, was strongly emphasizing the strategic importance of functional genomics in Germany,” says Uetz.

Many German scientists look enviously across the Atlantic, where they feel funding agencies are prepared to support risky projects, trusting that one of them will turn out to be a big breakthrough. They criticize the DFG's tendency to cover itself against possible failures at the expense of missing out on the new and unexpected. Faced with such conservatism, young researchers such as Müller and Uetz are voting with their feet.

DFG officials defend their record, pointing out that decisions on grant applications take on average between five and six months — comparable to organizations such as the US National Science Foundation and the British Medical Research Council. But critics say this respectable figure includes grants in the humanities and traditional scientific disciplines, where the DFG's performance is not under attack.

The DFG had promised organizational changes after similar criticisms were levied by an external evaluation last year (see Nature 399, 395; 1999). But many scientists are disappointed with the lack of progress, and some suggest that a more pluralistic system may be the answer. “Flexibility would increase very quickly if the DFG lost its monopoly,” says Oliver Kempski, a professor of medicine at the University of Mainz.

Unlike its counterparts in the United States and Britain — and private foundations such as the German Volkswagen Foundation — the DFG has no established mechanisms to ‘fast-track’ applications in hot research areas such as computer-based functional genomics or molecular medicine. “In highly competitive areas, one week can be a very decisive factor,” says Neuweiler.

Cross suggests that the DFG should allow interdisciplinary projects to be reviewed simultaneously by referee boards representing different disciplines. In particularly complicated or urgent cases, he adds, applicants should be given the chance to attend referees' meetings to explain their ideas face to face.

Eva-Maria Streier, the DFG's spokeswoman, says the agency is open-minded about this idea. She points out that the agency is already experimenting with such parallel reviewing, although merely in addition to its normal procedures.

Unless the DFG makes urgent reforms, say some researchers, Germany risks losing international competitiveness. “Eventually you will find yourself in the second division,” says Cross.