Basic science tests hypotheses, and applied science solves problems. A curious irony of the European Commission's multi-year Framework programmes for research is that they support applied research, but conduct themselves as a series of independent, hypothesis-driven social experiments.

The latest, fifth, Framework programme (FP5) tests whether scientists across Europe can emerge from their narrow scientific worlds and successfully focus their work on helping to solve some of Europe's major socio-economic problems.

From the outset, the prospects for the success of this approach did not look encouraging (see Nature 398, 1; 1999). Now, after little more than a year, they seem even less so; indeed, there is evidence that attempts to meet these new goals have merely increased the already daunting criteria that grant applications must meet (see page 695). The commission is not entirely to blame: it is, after all, but a servant of many political masters, each with their own interests to safeguard.

The various parties negotiated for years over FP5, and finally came up with a grand political vision intended to engage research in tackling many of the chronic European ‘ills’, from high unemployment to the inflexibility of the workforce. The experiment that is FP5 has only three more years to run. But any lessons learnt may be only partially relevant to its successor, FP6, whose radically different governing hypotheses are already being formulated. Research commissioner Philippe Busquin, who took office last year, is preparing a discussion paper on FP6 to bring to the Council of Research Ministers in June.

Busquin's vision has an entirely different emphasis: it seeks to improve the integration of national and European Commission research efforts. The tools by which this could be achieved are not yet defined. But the sort of thing that may emerge is a move away from the funding of large numbers of relatively small, complex projects to a more coherent investment in critical mass, for example by supporting or networking centres of excellence.

Busquin's aim is for the commission to interweave its own research money with that of member states. This will be another experiment, and one whose conditions will inevitably be muddied by political negotiations. But at first glance the vision, as outlined by Busquin in January, has a reasonableness that was absent from FP5 from the start.