William Harris has devoted his career to science. But when discussing how to reverse Europe’s scientific brain drain, he sounds more like a habitué of the boardroom than of the laboratory.
“There’s a global market for scientists,” he says, leaning into the conference table in his spacious office and jabbing a finger in the air for emphasis. “We’re competing for minds, and we have to be able to attract and retain the best.”
As director of Science Foundation Ireland, an agency created by the Irish government in 2000 to promote research in fields related to biotechnology and to information and communications technology, Mr. Harris brings an entrepreneurial zeal to the task of recruiting the best scientific minds to the shores that his ancestors left for the United States.
He and his foundation are one of the reasons that Ireland, once near the bottom of Europe’s economic ladder, is considered a success in terms of reversing the scientific brain drain. The combination of recent economic prosperity and government efforts to develop research has lured several scientists from across the Atlantic.
A chemist by training, Mr. Harris spent two decades at the National Science Foundation, in Washington. It has provided a template -- with crucial modifications -- for how Science Foundation Ireland has gone about distributing the $782-million that it received from the Irish government in initial financing.
Ireland’s science agency has emulated the NSF’s “open and transparent review process,” says Mr. Harris, but “we offer more freedom and flexibility.”
The Irish foundation may be diminutive compared with its American counterpart, whose 2004 budget is $5.58-billion, but “SFI gives some of the largest grants available, a factor of two or three times higher than NSF grants, and they last longer,” he says.
In 2002 the foundation’s largess lured John Boland back from the United States, where he had lived since enrolling in the California Institute of Technology in 1979 and earning a Ph.D. in chemistry there. He held an endowed chair in chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when a Science Foundation Ireland grant worth $1.5-million a year for five years convinced him that it was time to return home.
“In the U.S. you can get plenty of research funding, but the typical grant runs for three years and is worth about $50,000 a year,” he says. “It’s hard to get large grants, so you have to get several grants going at a time and spend a lot of time writing proposals.”
Freed from that cycle, Mr. Boland says, he has been able to broaden his research on the chemistry of silicon surfaces at Trinity College Dublin.
More Needed
Mr. Boland is one of the more than 50,000 Irish expatriates who have returned during the past five years, drawn by the thriving “Celtic Tiger,” as Ireland’s booming 1990s economy was dubbed. With grants ranging from $123,000 to $1.2-million a year, SFI is helping to ensure that scientists are well represented in that influx.
High-profile hires like Mr. Harris and Mr. Boland are evidence of Ireland’s progress in establishing a scientific-research infrastructure and drawing top talent. But a recent report by the Irish Higher Education Authority warned that spending on research was not high enough or consistent enough, and that there was “still much to be done to optimize the development of a knowledge-based Irish society.”
The authority has allocated more than $745-million to its program for university-level research, making it, along with SFI and the European Union, the main source for research money in Ireland.
For a country that, as Mr. Harris points out, had not much of a scientific-research culture just a generation ago, Ireland has made enormous gains. Yet it turns out that this is not the first time Ireland has lured some big scientific names.
Mr. Harris cites Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel-winning Austrian physicist, who moved to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1940. During his 15 years in Ireland he gave a series of lectures that became the influential book What Is Life?, which applies quantum physics to genetic structure.
Schrödinger’s relocation was, until recently, an isolated phenomenon. Now scores of the world’s top scientific minds are following his example. Of the 180 individual research programs financed by Science Foundation Ireland so far, a third are led by researchers who were recruited from abroad. Twenty-two of them are from the United States and 3 from Canada; other countries represented include Australia and Britain.
That Ireland now lures leading researchers in such numbers indicates that, in one part of Europe at least, the brain drain is being reversed to a gain.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 51, Issue 2, Page A47