Greece should abandon a short-sighted policy.

545 F ollowing the example set by the United States, nearly all nations of the European Union (EU) now accept that a sensible investment in basic research is required for the national economic good. Greek politicians, on the other hand, remain unshakeably convinced of the opposite. If they have their way, as from this year there will be no single source of money for research that does not require an industrial partner. Greece is poor, they argue, and cannot afford the luxury of funding research for pleasure rather than business. A battle is raging between the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT), a department of the Greek Ministry of Development , and the 500 or so tenured researchers who work in its 44 institutes. The researchers argue that the government's approach is shortsighted , and warn that forcing academics to forge artificial partnerships with the still-embryonic Greek industry, which generally has no interest in research, will result in money simply being misspent. They are right to be incensed. Last year the GSRT research institutes were evaluated by international panels of experts which concluded that some scattered research excellence can be identified. But this is despite, not because of, government policies, which keep salaries uncompetitively low, provide insufficient money to keep institutes in good repair and stocked with basic instrumentation, and, most importantly , provide no source of competitive national research funds. The best researchers have survived on EU Framework programme grants and other external sources of money, and on EU structural funds which Greece, as one of the poorer EU countries, receives to build up its economic base. But there will almost certainly be no grants available in the next Framework programme, which starts in 2005, at a time when structural funds will also end. The next programme will probably concentrate its research money in large centres of excellence. A handful of GSRT institutes could compete for such funding, but the lifeblood for the strong research groups in others will be cut off. And the government is making no contingency plans. On the contrary, it has proposed adding a requirement for an industrial partner to qualify for the only source of basic research project money, which exists courtesy of structural funds. And it is in the process of amending its law on research institutes to bring them closer to government policy. In no other EU country are research and …