[MGSA-L] Science endures as conditions in Greece worsen

June Samaras june.samaras at gmail.com
Sun Apr 8 20:44:11 PDT 2012


Physics Today / Volume 65 / Issue 4 / Issues and Events

Science endures as conditions in Greece worsen
Toni Feder

April 2012, page 24
Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.1512
Worry, resignation, and optimism mix among Greek scientists as they
deal with salary cuts, ever-changing laws, and pervasive uncertainty.

    Science and government (funding, politics, etc.)

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“You need fresh blood. This is a long-term catastrophe,” says Leonidas
Resvanis, a high-energy physicist at the University of Athens. For
scientists in Greece, the country’s financial meltdown has exacerbated
preexisting problems and created new ones. Money for research was
already both tight and irregular, but now it’s not clear when or if it
will be disbursed at all. The community is worried that the best
scientists will leave and that recruiting people is becoming
impossible.
Greece is, of course, striving to reduce its spending and debt
according to guidelines from the troika of the International Monetary
Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. But the
country’s scientists fear that applying the prescribed measures across
the board, without regard to quality or productivity, damages science.
As Giorgos Tsironis, a physicist at the University of Crete and at the
Foundation for Research and Technology–Hellas (FORTH), puts it, “If
the remedy is successful, but the patient dies, it’s not a very good
remedy.”
“The ambience really worries me,” says Resvanis. “To produce, you have
to be in a creative atmosphere. People in Greece don’t know what will
come above the horizon tomorrow. They are scared. When you have to
make a choice, you take the conservative approach, and this is not how
science moves forward.”
Relying on Europe
Figure
Participants at the first Greek–Turkish conference on statistical
mechanics and dynamical systems in 2008 stand in front of the library
ruins in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus. Greece is not cohosting
the conference this year because of the country’s financial crisis.

Greece gets about €3 billion ($4 billion) per year in European
structural funds—money collected from value-added tax throughout the
European Union for use in poorer regions. Roughly €150 million of
that, earmarked for research, is administered by the Greek government.
Since structural funding began more than 20 years ago, the country has
assigned its national research budget to go mainly toward projects
funded by the European money. In 2011 the European Commission lowered
from 25% to 5% the percentage that Greece is required to match, making
it easier in some cases for researchers to get funding.
The other main source of research funding in Greece is competitive
grants through the European Union. Greek scientists manage to win a
lot of European Union grants, says Achilleas Mitsos, an economics
professor who served as director general of the European Commission’s
research directorate and until last year was secretary general for
research in Greece’s education ministry. “Since that money and the
structural funds have not been reduced, you would imagine that in
terms of funding, research is not suffering a lot. But things are not
like that, unfortunately.”
The European money is to some extent shielding research from the
financial crisis. But soft money is not a dependable source of
funding, it does not allow for long-term planning, and it rarely
covers fixed costs, such as equipment maintenance, salaries, water,
and electricity. Such fixed costs are covered by the Greek government,
and money for them has been repeatedly slashed. Greece invests only
about 0.5% of its gross national product in research. Membership fees
for international scientific organizations such as CERN, the European
Space Agency, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, which
total about €30 million a year, take up a sizable portion of the Greek
research budget and are being paid.
Ubiquitous cuts
Not surprisingly, anything that requires money from the Greek
government is feeling the squeeze. Salaries for faculty at Greece’s
research centers and two dozen or so universities have been cut by up
to 30% in the past two years, and another 10%–15% cut is expected this
summer. New hires are officially allowed at a rate of 1 per 5–10
vacancies. For months libraries have been unable to pay for journal
access. Facilities are doing without technicians.
Resvanis, who heads plans to build an underwater neutrino detector in
the Mediterranean Sea, says that about $1 million he had “accumulated”
for running the project “evaporated a year and half ago. [The
government] took it away to supplement salaries. You cannot say no to
that.” Still, the project remains an “oasis,” he says. Plans for the
detector have increased from 1 km3 to 10 km3, with a €240 million
price tag. The Greek government is so far standing by its commitment
of €50 million, of which it must provide only 5%; the rest will come
from structural funds. The partner countries are Italy—which will also
pay out of structural funds—France, Germany, the Netherlands, and
Romania.
Scientists have sometimes had luck getting small grants from sources
such as the Onassis and Latsis Foundations. Last year, Stavros
Baloyannis, a neurologist, managed to launch a new institute to study
Alzheimer’s, aging, and degenerative disorders. “I have an electron
microscope, light microscopes, a PCR [polymerase chain reaction
instrument] for genetics, and I have organized equipment for
neuropathology and neurochemistry,” he says. Most of the institute’s
funding is from the Greek Orthodox Church. Even so, Baloyannis spends
money from his own pockets on research. And charitable organizations
are saying they no longer have money for science because of more
pressing demands, says Astero Provata, a researcher at one of the
National Center for Scientific Research (“Demokritos”) institutes in
Athens. She and colleagues have been denied their requests for a few
thousand euros to cover expenses for a conference on genomic
complexity in Brussels later this year.
Even projects that have been approved to get structural funds sit
waiting for the money. Tassos Bountis, a physicist at the University
of Patras, leads one such project, on mathematical modeling of complex
systems in biomedicine, physics, and the technology of materials. The
project is supposed to get €500 000, and is one of 200 projects
waiting for promised funding. Bountis is optimistic that the money
will come through soon because, he says, “we know the money is there.
And politicians are being scrutinized now. They realize they can’t get
away with channeling the money to something else.”
“Unexpected discontinuities”
Figure
A laser technique for cleaning statues is applied here to a caryatid
from the Acropolis. The technique, developed by scientists at the
FORTH Institute of Electronic Structure and Lasers in Crete, involves
the simultaneous emission of two wavelengths and preserves the
surface.
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM

Superimposed on the tight funding are constantly changing rules. A set
of university reforms enacted last year has yet to be implemented
because of opposition within the university hierarchy and by students.
In February scientists were surprised by an announcement that the
country’s 56 public research institutes would be merged to 31. The
idea is to share resources, but researchers are skeptical. The mergers
are “an exercise in linguistics and window dressing with no
substantial effect on budgets or anything else,” says Ion Siotis, a
high-energy physicist and former director of Demokritos and of the
National Hellenic Research Foundation. “This exercise will allow our
ministry to tell the troika that Greece is reducing the number of
public bodies and thus saving on public expenditure. It is all a big
joke.”
For example, the eight Demokritos institutes have been recast as five,
including the merging of three Athens institutes to form the Institute
of Advanced Materials, Physicochemical Processes, Nanotechnology, and
Microsystems. The government is creating a few mega-institutes, and
next to them there will be nano-institutes, says Georgios
Papavasiliou, director of the now subsumed Institute for Advanced
Materials. Merging research centers is necessary, he says, “but not in
a hurry. There is no plan behind this merging.” The mergers, he adds,
were done independently of an imminent law intended to restructure and
streamline the research system.
In Greece, says Costas Fotakis, president of the seven research
institutes that make up FORTH, “we are witnessing a violent financial
restructuring which deeply affects the society and the scientific
landscape. It is causing some unexpected discontinuities.” Fotakis and
others are particularly upset about the cuts applied across all
scientific activities “without preserving existing islands of
excellence.” Treating everyone the same, he says, “works against those
who do exceptionally good work.”
Such horizontal cuts are in keeping with Greece’s tradition of not
linking performance with funding for education and research, says
Lefteris Economou, retired president of FORTH. The best scientists
survive by getting money from the European Union, he says, “but this
does not promote competition within the Greek system. If everyone
thinks their salary is guaranteed, more and more start not producing.”
What’s more, he notes, most Greek researchers get their PhDs in other
countries and then come back. He says many of them end their careers
after a postdoc. “They have high enthusiasm in the beginning, but they
receive almost no funding from the Greek government, and they see
others who are deadwood treated the same way they are. In the long run
this does not promote high performance.”
Michael Kokkoris says that he, “like all young scientists in Greece,
got no startup package” when he returned from the US to become an
assistant professor in experimental nuclear physics at the National
Technical University of Athens. “The whole core of research is in
constant jeopardy. The fact that we have learned to produce with
little should not hide the need for structural reforms”—and for more
money.
On top of such long-term problems with Greece’s research system, the
crisis creates “a general paralysis of machinery. This paralysis is
choking everything,” says Siotis. Another problem, he says, is that
“our politicians believe research should have a short-term financial
return. Our effort is to change this unrealistic attitude that leads
to enormous waste of resources through the funding of ‘monkey
projects’ that ultimately do not deliver.”
Human capital
More than the salary cuts, more than the changing laws and merging
centers, more than the uncertainty and having to make do with little
money, scientists in Greece are worried about keeping their community
vibrant. “Greek scientists have always gone outside to study and
work,” says Provata. “The difference now is that students who are
finishing their bachelor’s degrees in physics don’t even consider the
possibility of staying in Greece. They are all asking for help to get
out. And the ones who are outside the country and have gained
experience do not consider the possibility of returning.” Says
Kokkoris, “I love my country, I do not want to leave. The level of our
students is high. It is decadent to be forced to send all these young
minds abroad. But what can I tell them about the future?”
The University of Crete and FORTH were created about 30 years ago by
Greek scientists who returned from years abroad. Says Fotakis, “We
have managed to act as a pole of attraction for prominent scientists
and talented young researchers. Now we are in danger of losing them,
or some of them. It’s not only a financial problem, it’s a political
problem.” One of the main dangers of the crisis, he says, “is that we
have a repetition of brain drain. Human capital—not just researchers,
but technicians and administrators, too—[is] more important than the
actual infrastructure.”
Until last fall, the Demokritos institutes were collectively able to
offer scholarships for 100 PhD students, thanks to Greek national
money. “If the blood is students, then the flesh is postdocs,” says
Papavasiliou. “Funding for postdocs hasn’t stopped yet, but I am
afraid we will not have them for long. Things are getting worse.”
Many scientists say they are counting on the structural funds to tide
them over. But Economou says he is “hoping for a miracle. It has to
come soon if a culture of scientific excellence in Greece is to
survive.”


-- 
June Samaras
2020 Old Station Rd
Streetsville,Ontario
Canada L5M 2V1
Tel : 905-542-1877
E-mail : june.samaras at gmail.com



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