Networking in Barcelona

Euroscience Open Forum closed its 2008 Barcelona conclave Tuesday with a ceremonial, Olympics-like handoff to the 2010 host city, Turin, Italy. If the doubling in size of this year’s conference is any indication, the Turin officials will need to plan for a big venue. Success has bred success. As one of the few Americans in attendance, I can attest to the European journalists’ continuing appetite for perspective on the some of the biggest issues facing humanity – from energy solutions for an overtaxed environment to the ethical use of nanotechnology. Neuroscience topics, one of my perpetual favorites, also were well represented, a big change from 2006. Social networking applications, however, are another story. There is both curiosity and hesitation about these applications, the full-blown, American-style sharing of information online conflicting with a cultural preference for face-to-face contact and greater privacy. I think, too, there is still a small entrepreneurial gap. The notion that a single person, represented in a Euroscience session on podcasting by John Bohannon, Science magazine’s gonzo journalist based in Vienna, could create a whole web presence around podcasts was exciting but a little scary, and perhaps a little unseemly. Still, experiencing the technology firsthand can be liberating, and you could almost feel attitudes shifting as Bohannon’s presentation continued. I’m sure that whatever emerges on Europe’s web 2.0 science communications side in the next few years will clearly reflect the continent’s different sensibility, but we will recognize it as a cyber-blood relative all the same. In my next blog posting, I will offer some final observations on the Barcelona meeting and some points of reference that could be useful to those who seek greater public engagement with science on this side of the Atlantic. In the meantime, this news item from Nature captures what I clearly saw and felt in Barcelona, a European science community that is starting to flex its financial and research muscles.

Nature News / July 23, 2008
German public-private partnership breaks ground

For the first time in its 60-year history, Germany’s Max Planck Society (MPS) is setting up a new institute using private money – €200 million (US$317 million) of it. On 15 July, the twin brothers who founded the generic drugs company Hexal signed an agreement with the MPS to establish an institute for cognitive neuroscience in Frankfurt. The institute is set to start work by the end of this year.

The Ernst Strüngmann Institute is named after the father of Hexal founders Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann. It will have the same scientific independence as the 80 other MPS institutes, but unlike them its finances will be overseen by a separate board, on which Andreas Strüngmann will sit.

“Public-private research is a well established concept in the United States, but not yet in Germany,” says Wolf Singer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and provisional head of the new institute. “I hope this model will become common practice.”