munich

Swiss science is still of high quality, but it is living off its past successes, says a report from the Swiss Science Council that analyses the state of research and universities.

The report warns that recent years of falling investment in research mean current high standards “cannot be guaranteed in the future”.

Science council reports are prepared every four years and are used by the federal government to help develop its short-term science and higher education policies. The current report has been prepared for the 2000-2003 financial planning period.

Since 1992, Swiss spending on research has stagnated at around SFr9 billion ($6 billion), and the proportion of this provided by industry has fallen from 75 per cent to less than 70 per cent. The report does not criticize the relative reduction in industrial research and development investment, since the proportion of spending on research by industry in Switzerland has always been much higher than in other European countries. But it says that the state should make up for the reduction in future.

The report says new money should be used to support Switzerland's strengths such as biomedical and clinical research, computational physics and material sciences.

A second report on universities says that support for the so-called Mittelbau in Switzerland — the 20,000 or so doctoral students, research fellows, assistant and associate professors — is a “central problem of the science system”. The Mittelbau are usually on short-term contracts and have little responsibility within their institutes, whose hierarchical systems deny them freedom in their research and freedom to teach.

The report says working conditions and career prospects of the Mittelbaushould be improved by the universities and the federal and canton governments. Training and support programmes should be available and grants should be provided to encourage the notoriously non-mobile Swiss PhD students to study abroad.