A new global strategy for the life sciences in Europe.

Since the mid-1990s, the life sciences have undergone a major revolution. The systematic sequencing of the human and other genomes has triggered major changes in biological research, which was previously based on the traditional bottom-up philosophy of individual investigators contributing knowledge piecemeal. But technological advances and large-scale approaches to knowledge production require new ways to plan, fund and conduct research. These developments have also raised enormous interest not only from industry but also from politicians who count on the life sciences to create new jobs and economic developments. “Life sciences and biotechnology are widely recognized to be [...] the next wave of knowledge-based economy, creating new opportunities for our societies and economies,” the European Commission (EC) stated in a strategy document (EC, 2002). This is testament to the political and economic importance of the ‘omics’ revolution—the use of high-throughput technologies to generate huge amounts of sequence, expression, protein and metabolic data. It is against this background that the EC held a conference in Brussels entitled “Funding basic research in the life sciences: exploring opportunities for European synergies,” a few days before Christmas 2004. The aim of the conference was to define a common European research strategy that would achieve one of the EC’s raisons d’être: encouraging the member states of the European Union (EU) to pull together the financial means and expertise that are required to be competitive in the global economy. To this end, the EC proposes establishing a forum of high-level representatives from funding organizations to develop synergies and address the new challenges for biological research in a coordinated and cost-effective manner.