The pace of improvement, continuing investment and its position at the forefront of research are all good reasons for career-minded foreign researchers in industry or academia to look favourably on Germany, says Moroney. While he may have had reservations in 1992, when he chose “desert-like” Germany as the location for his biotech start-up MorphoSys, the fall of the Berlin wall three years earlier had given him confidence that the country was going to be a real growth area. His gamble paid off, and MorphoSys is now Germany’s second-largest biotech company. One benefit is that there is plenty of great science around, he says. “There are opportunities to work at the cutting edge with high quality, committed colleagues.”

Germany now has more biotech companies than any other European country, and although firms tend to be small – with almost half employing fewer than 10 people – industry analysts predict the sector’s turnover will exceed ¬1 billion this year. The country is also near the top of the international league when it comes to the number of compounds in the drug pipeline. It even has its own biotech “fairy godfather”, in the form of software billionaire Dietmar Hopp, who is investing millions in the industry.

Germany’s remarkable turnaround began in 1996. Concerned that the country was failing to keep pace in the global competition for biotechnology jobs and revenues, the federal government sponsored a nationwide contest called BioRegio, awarding grants and loans of $30 million to its three strongest biotech regions. The competition kick-started the industry. “It told everyone that the German government wanted to promote biotech,” says Moroney.

The industry thrived until 2001, when boom turned to bust. The industry “crashed into a nuclear winter” that extended into 2004, says Boris Mannhardt, CEO of BioCom Project Management, which advises biotech companies and runs the government-funded website biotechnologie.de. Shaken by this experience, Germans now tend to be cautious about starting new biotech companies, says Julia Schüler, a senior industry analyst from the European biotechnology centre of Ernst & Young. Foreign researchers looking for the thrill of joining a start-up company may want to look elsewhere, she suggests. “It’s a matter of culture. People don’t like to take the risk. They’ve seen how in earlier years some of those [biotech] start-up companies failed. In Germany, it is much easier to be a scientist at a research institute than to start a company.”

Since 2004, however, the industry has felt a promising revival, aided by investment from venture capitalists. Government spending on research and development is now running at a healthy 2.5 per cent of GDP, with a substantial slice of that directed towards biotech and pharmaceutical research. The number of biotech companies now hovers around 500, Mannhardt says. “It’s quite stable now – the sector has really recovered a lot.” What’s more, in July the government announced a four-year ¬800 million incentive to further strengthen the country’s pharma research, and this funding has been matched by equal commitment from biotech firms.

The biotech recovery is most apparent in Munich, Heidelberg and Berlin, home to the country’s largest clusters of biotech and pharma companies. Between them, these cities also offer a diverse choice of environments in which to live. “It’s clear to me that the German people now have a real pride in this industry,” Moroney says.

Munich

Munich is the capital of the state of Bavaria and is located just a few hours from the sun-drenched cafes of Italy and the glacier-encrusted peaks of the Alps. With more than 90 biotech companies, Munich hosts the largest cluster of such firms in Germany, according to biotechnologie.de. “Munich is definitely the most advanced in the biotech field,” says Mannhardt. Among its prestigious universities and research institutions are the Ludwig Maximilian University and the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry (MPIB).

Cell biologist Simon Goodman works in Darmstadt at Merck, which claims to be the world’s oldest pharmaceutical company. He came to Germany from the UK in the early 1980s to work at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society, for what he thought would be a two-year stay. “I really didn’t plan on being here very long, but I found it was a really beautiful place to live,” he says. Goodman was charmed by the people and by the beauty of southern Germany’s landscape. “I’ve spent lots of time cycling, walking and skiing here,” he says, “and over 25 per cent of the land area is still under forest. The forests are really fantastic.”

Goodman has found one of Germany’s most striking cultural characteristics to be its strong sense of regionalism, defined in part by local food preferences. “The variety and the deliciousness of the bread is only matched by the variety and deliciousness of the beer,” he says.

The strength of these regional food differences is reflected in the Weisswurstgrenze – literally the “white sausage border” – which divides southern Germany from the rest of the country. On the southern side, diners are served Weisswurst, made from veal, along with Weissenbier (wheat beer) and dumplings. Elsewhere in Germany the favoured traditional meal features the darker bratwurst, served with potatoes.

Munich’s beer gardens are another distinctive feature, with a twist that illustrates Germany’s attitude towards children and family life. Even the beer gardens have playgrounds, says Dennis Thomas, an American researcher in the molecular structural biology department at the MPIB. Perhaps more significantly, German firms are required to allow employees up to three years of unpaid parental leave, with a guarantee that a job of the same seniority will be made available to them on their return.

Heidelberg

Heidelberg is a city surrounded by the Odenwald (Odin’s Forest). It has just 150,000 inhabitants, but the German Cancer Research Centre, the European Molecular Biological Laboratory (EMBL) and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research make it a big hitter when it comes to academic biotech. Barely touched by the devastation of the second world war, Heidelberg’s old-world architecture, narrow cobbled streets and sprawling gothic castle give it a fairy-tale feel.

All fairy tales need a splash of good fortune, so it is fitting that Heidelberg is also where Hopp has invested most of his money – an estimated ¬320 million over six years – in companies such as Cytonet, which is working on liver cell products, and Heidelberg Pharma, which is developing treatments for HIV and cancer.

Heidelberg is also home to Canadian-born Rob Russell, group leader in structural bioinformatics at the EMBL. Before moving to Germany, Russell gained a PhD in molecular biophysics at the University of Oxford. One of the most telling differences Russell has found between German and Anglo-Saxon cultures is the attitude towards work. In the UK and North America “you work all the time and you don’t speak in terms of a job, but of a career”, he says. “You see much less of that here. Germans want their work and play to be divided. It leaves you admiring people for valuing things outside of the office.”

Time off from work tends to be generous too, averaging six weeks plus national holidays. “The concept that someone would work and not use the vacation they have is just out of the question,” agrees Thomas. “I’ve learned the most important word in the German language is Urlaub,” which means vacation.

Berlin

Berlin, the national capital, is a cosmopolitan, big-city melting pot, where the energy of post-Communist eastern Europe meets the west. As well as five universities, it has four specialist institutes of higher education and about 100 research establishments related to the life-sciences, including the German Human Genome Project and Charité University Hospital, Europe’s largest teaching hospital.

Berlin is also home to Germany’s largest pharma firm. Bayer Schering Pharma was created late last year when Bayer and Schering merged. The move shook the industry, not least because of the resulting loss of thousands of jobs. As Russell observes, a hire-and-fire policy is generally taboo in Germany, and this can come as a surprise to foreigners. “The expectation in Germany is that if you have a job, you will stay in it for a very long time. People expect a great deal from their employers.”

This doesn’t mean that researchers moving to Germany can expect an easy ride. Postdocs in particular may be in for a surprise in the shape of what some call the country’s “super PhD”. To become eligible for an academic post, newly qualified postdocs must go through “habilitation” – writing a second thesis and authoring a number of high-quality scientific publications. “It takes such a long time to get a permanent position,” says Eric Guenzi, who moved to Berlin from France in the early 1990s to do his PhD and postdoc. “It makes it very risky, because the older you are, the less opportunity you have to switch to other careers.” Guenzi elected to leave academia, and worked in Italy and Germany before taking up his current position at MediGene in Munich, as associate director for immunology research.

Johanna Höög, who has just completed her PhD at the EMBL, is not troubled by an extended student life and sees no problem with the prospect of continuing her career in Germany rather than her native Sweden. In January she will be moving to the University of Oxford to do a postdoc, but afterwards wants to live in southern Germany. “It’s fantastic,” she says. “Very similar to home but warmer and nicer.”

Integrating was easy for Höög – Swedes and Germans share many similarities – and she found the differences in culture more welcome than jarring. “Germans are much more direct than Swedes, but I like that. You always know where you stand.” Her one difficulty was with Germany’s meat-based cuisine. “I miss seafood,” she says. “The shrimps on Friday night. That was a tough one.”

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The numbers reflect that maturity. In a recent OECD survey of patent statistics, Denmark led the world in the number of biotech patents filed as a percentage of the national total, while Sweden and Denmark have both increased biotech patent applications to the European Patent Office by 7 per cent.

Neighbours Finland and Norway are relative newcomers to the field but, hard on the heels of their international success in information technology, both governments have earmarked money for biotech as the next economic frontier. For example, Norway recently announced a €105 million, four-year fund for biotech and genomics research and development, while Finland’s 2007 funding for Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, has jumped to €504 million. In 2006, Tekes allocated €54 million to life sciences and biotech projects.

Add to that a comprehensive social services network, a safe society where everyone speaks English and carefully planned cities with easy commuting, and the Scandinavian biotech industry appears to offer an unbeatable combination. “We can’t offer better science than San Francisco or southern France, but we can offer research that’s as good, and an outstanding quality of life,” says Stig Jørgensen, managing director of Medicon Valley Academy (MVA), a regional biotech association that links Copenhagen with its neighbours in Skåne, southern Sweden. “And you can get to work by bike!”

Power of clusters

The Nordic countries have followed international trends and invested heavily in biotech clusters. Traditionally, much of the activity has centred in the Stockholm-Uppsala region, where international companies such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca and GE Healthcare have a substantial presence. But the biggest buzz is around Medicon Valley, the 10-year-old international association that brings together more than 300 biotech and life sciences companies.

“The biggest buzz is around Medicon Valley, which brings together 300 companies”

To the west of Medicon Valley, MedCoast Scandinavia links the Norwegian businesses and six universities in the greater Oslo region with their Swedish neighbours in Gothenburg, where the linchpin is the international pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. Farther east in Finland, BioTurku is fed by spin-offs from the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University, with research and development groups from Finland’s major drug companies.

The clusters are convenient for companies looking for research partners or headhunting up-and-coming whizz-kids at the region’s universities. But they also afford researchers the safety net of many work options: companies are always watching what their competitors are doing and sometimes they poach talent. “There’s a huge concentration of job possibilities here,” explains Peter Høngaard Andersen, vice-president for research at Lundbeck, a pharmaceutical company located in Copenhagen that focuses on treatments for central nervous system disorders. “A company might hire people away from us, but we also hire people away from other companies.”

Superb links

It’s just 16 kilometres across Öresund Sound from Copenhagen to Malmö in Sweden – an easy ferry crossing. But somehow, the construction of the spectacular Öresund Bridge in 2000 helped change the dynamic of the region, and gave extra energy to the Medicon Valley cluster, says Marianne Kock, vice-managing director of Ferring Pharmaceuticals in Copenhagen.

The link opens up access to a labour force fuelled by the region’s 12 universities and their 150,000 students. “We’re very pleased with the bridge,” Kock says. “It gives us a much bigger base for recruiting people.”

Even so, Kock and others are always on the lookout for potential employees from farther afield, particularly for specialised positions. The bridge itself is a selling point: new members of the company in the greater Öresund region can choose to live in downtown Copenhagen, with its narrow streets, 18th and 19th-century buildings and feel of “Old Europe”, or across the water in more suburban Sweden, where the taxes are also lower. Commuting takes just 45 minutes by car or train. Copenhagen itself is so compact that it can easily be covered by bike, helped by raised, marked lanes set aside for cycles.

The region’s strengths were sufficient to attract €710 million in investments in 2006, centred around 10 to 15 companies. A hefty portion of that cash influx came from the Danish company Genmab, which signed a worldwide agreement in late 2006 with GlaxoSmithKline to co-develop and commercialise a human monoclonal antibody in the last stages of development. MVA’s Jørgensen doesn’t expect any blockbusters in 2007 from Genmab or the others just yet, but does expect two or three initial public stock offerings from the biotech community.

Because the region’s biotech and pharma companies are used to working with international researchers, they are keenly aware of cultural differences. The biggest is probably the lack of hierarchy, in universities and industry. “It’s about cooperation instead of competition. That’s what makes us different from the US,” says Børge Diderichsen, vice-president of R&D at Novo Nordisk, in Copenhagen.

New Zealander Mark Brader came to work at Novo Nordisk in 2005 after 12 years in Indiana in the US, and was immediately struck by how managers and their teams eat lunch together every day. “There’s a real team spirit and cohesiveness. People focus on the company and the department, and not on making themselves look good as individuals.”

But the office isn’t the centre of people’s social life the way it can be in the US or the UK. Even though you’ll make friends at work, people are more likely to find friends through sports or other leisure activity clubs. It’s a distinction that Lundbeck takes time to explain to its foreign employees in its introduction to Danish culture, Andersen says.

And there’s much more entertaining at home, instead of in town. “I have become a much better cook,” laughs Mary Catherine DiNunzio, an American patent attorney, who moved from New York City in early 2006 to take a job in Lundbeck’s Copenhagen office. “In New York everyone went out. Here I’ve had 12 people over for dinner and cooked a six-course meal.”

Coastal life

While it is geographically bigger, MedCoast Scandinavia has a smaller number of employees and investments than Medicon Valley, with three main venture capital groups investing about €150 million yearly, according to Jens Gran, project manager with MedCoast Scandinavia. Another €150 million is available in venture capital through five or six other diversified funds. Six universities from Chambers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, to the University of Oslo and the Nordic School of Public Health in Gothenburg, are involved in biotech and life sciences R&D.

Big companies in the region such as AstraZeneca offer attractive packages to lure researchers, but Nordic taxes still sting, says Christopher Southan, who joined AstraZeneca’s Mölndal offices, just south of Gothenburg, three years ago to work in bioinformatics. Newcomers to Scandinavia typically benefit from a reduced tax burden during their first three or four years, depending upon which country they work in, but when the honeymoon is over, the shock can be substantial.

The tax break “is a virtue and a vicissitude at the same time”, says Southan. “I would thrash out the exact details of your package, and be very careful about your net income. It’s complicated, because there are quite a few benefits as well.”

Southan cites generous childcare and a society that’s nearly unbeatable in the way it supports families and children as benefits that don’t fit neatly into a cash calculation. He has first-hand experience with childcare perks – his wife gave birth to twins not long after they moved to Sweden. “My wife is wholly convinced this is a much better place for kids (than the UK),” he says. Corporate culture in Scandinavia also encourages people to work sane hours. “You’d be seen as dangerously odd if you worked really long hours,” says Southan.

Academic researchers considering the MedCoast Scandinavia region benefit from this work ethic and the premium placed on children and families. They may also find attractive funding possibilities. The University of Oslo has a dedicated biotech centre, while in Trondheim, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Department of Biotechnology presides over a number of projects, including some which have promising pharmaceutical applications.

“Researchers considering MedCoast Scandinavia can find attractive funding possibilities”

Money for basic biology has also been good in Norway since 2002, when the government set up FUGE, Norway’s foray into functional genomics, which has established centres of expertise in different aspects of genomics at the country’s main academic institutions in Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Tromsø and Ås. A parallel Swedish effort, Swegene, is hosted by Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg University and Lund University.

However, it’s not always easy for foreign researchers to tap into research gold, according to Vincent Eijsink, a Dutch researcher who has been at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Ås for 13 years, and who directs the school’s protein engineering and proteomics group.

Eijsink says it can be difficult for a foreigner to get money from the research council, partly because the Norwegian government puts a premium on funding collaborative efforts. By definition, newcomers simply don’t have those connections. There is also an emphasis on backing Norway’s regions by spreading funds throughout the country, which can work against researchers who prefer the more cosmopolitan areas. When it comes to university jobs, biomedical researchers can find it difficult to locate full-time jobs because there are relatively few. And Norway has only 100 or so biotech and pharmaceutical companies, none of which is very large, which also limits industry job opportunities for postdocs.

As for the weather… Björn Cochlovius is research and development director for Affitech, a privately owned biotech company in Oslo. He switched from academia to industry when he moved to Norway from a research post at a German cancer centre four years ago. He still loves his work, but loathes the dark, cold winters.

“I come from south-west Germany, where there’s wine and sun, so the weather for me is a big issue,” he says. “We always fly to the sun, to the beach, in the winter. We fly from the weather.” In contrast, Eijsink has found he has come to love the Norwegian winter – especially since he took up cross-country skiing. “I have become so Norwegian that I look forward to the snow,” he says.

AstraZeneca is the world’s eighth largest pharmaceutical firm, with 66,000 employees worldwide. The company’s Scandinavian research and development efforts are based mainly in Sweden, with 2700 researchers at the company’s Mölndal offices, making them among the biggest players in MedCoast Scandinavia.

Turku tiger

Finland’s biotech industry is relatively new and relatively small. According to a 2006 OECD report into the country’s pharmaceutical industry, 60 per cent of its companies are only 10 years old, while 60 per cent of its 120 companies employ fewer than 10 people. But because Finland is consistently among the top three countries on the European Innovation Scoreboard, no one is prepared to discount the country’s efforts to enter the biotech race, especially since half of its 20 universities are already doing biotech research.

American Mark Johnson came to Finland in 1994 via a postdoc position in London, and hasn’t looked back. Now he’s professor and head of the department of biochemistry and pharmacy at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, a part of the BioTurku cluster. Johnson says that as he hails from Seattle, a city big on coffee houses, Finland’s strong coffee culture made him feel immediately at home.

Support for the sciences in Finland is also strong. The country spends an impressive 3.5 per cent of its GDP on R&D, putting it in second place after Sweden.

And the drawbacks of being far from western Europe and North America are more than compensated for by the world-class university laboratory facilities. “I don’t think there is any difficulty being at the edge of the world,” says Johnson. “We have extraordinarily good facilities. Generally, we have the newest and the best.”

But what of the infamous Finnish language, unlike any other in the world except for Hungarian? And how about the Finns’ international reputation for being reserved?

Not a problem, according to Reijo Salonen, senior vice-president of R&D at Orion, one of Finland’s main pharmaceutical companies. “Finnish people are fluently silent in five languages,” he jokes.

IN 1984, long before the Finnish cellphone company Nokia was a household name, the company’s then chief executive Jorma Nieminen observed: “When an inventor in Silicon Valley opens his garage door to show off his latest idea, he has 50 per cent of the world market in front of him. When an inventor in Finland opens his garage door, he faces three feet of snow.”

Finland may still have its deep snow, and the Baltic Sea may freeze at Helsinki’s doorstep, but the country’s current ranking by the World Economic Forum as the world’s most competitive country economically suggests that investors are unlikely to care. The country’s rags-to-riches success over the past two decades, the result of targeted public funding for R&D, has taught the Finnish government the value of planning ahead. The result is that investors and career seekers don’t need a crystal ball to see what the government plans to support: in the summer of 2006 the Finnish government released not one but two foresight studies, one detailing shorter-term R&D investments and the other longer-term goals a decade away.

“Any government coalition has understood that R&D investments are key to our future development,” says Martti af Heurlin, deputy director general of Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. Even Nokia does its part: one-third of the country’s R&D investment comes from the company.

At the top of Finland’s near-term list is boosting national spending on R&D from 3.5 per cent to 4 per cent of GDP by 2011 (see Chart). The increase in government funding will be used to support five new alliances between research groups, called strategic centres of excellence. They will focus on energy and environment, metal products and mechanical engineering, forestry, health, and information and communication.

These centres will capitalise on Finland’s resources and cater for its needs, says Heurlin. For one, alternative energy sources that make use of the country’s extensive forests and peatlands are a priority. The hope is that the centres will help advance technology to the point at which it is in demand overseas, and duplicate Nokia’s global success.

Some of the Finnish government’s funding priorities could seem either counterintuitive or far-sighted, depending on your point of view. For example, Finland will continue to put money into the biotech sector in spite of weak international interest in investing in Finnish biotech. A recent Tekes review of the country’s pharmaceutical industry noted only one significant investment in the first part of 2005, when a company called Ipsat Therapies in Helsinki, working on bacterial resistance, closed a ¬7 million deal.

Looking east

The country is also looking east for foreign investment, to Russia, China and Japan as expanding markets; in fact, many of the Tekes web pages have been translated into Chinese and Japanese in addition to English. The Finns are also interested in importing expertise: a joint programme between Tekes and the Academy of Finland, which funds university research, is designed to lure foreign researchers to Finnish universities for as long as five years, by offering to pay for costs such as moving family members in addition to funding the researcher’s project.

Finland’s focus on applied rather than basic research means that competition is intense among university researchers to find support for their work. The Academy of Finland, which is responsible for funding basic research, commands an annual budget of just ¬200 million, or half of Tekes’s annual ¬429 million for applied research.

Dennis Bamford, an Academy professor and head of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Virus Research at the University of Helsinki, says one major problem for Finland’s basic research is the university system, which has too few research spots for young PhDs and postdocs. Young researchers can be awarded an Academy Research Fellowship for five years, but this fellowship is non-renewable. Although this is also a common problem in other countries, it is exacerbated in Finland by the fact that there are few permanent university positions at all between postdocs and professors, and the latter tend to hold their appointments until they retire. “When the fellowship runs out, you are in deep trouble,” says Bamford. “We lose talent.”

Concerns about the Finnish brain drain have not fallen on deaf ears. In June, the prime minister’s science and technology policy council proposed providing more research-specific posts for young scientists at the country’s research institutes and universities.

SWEDEN

STOCKHOLM’S charming medieval centre and boat-bedecked waterfront exude old-world charm, but make no mistake – there’s big science going on here and throughout the rest of the country. By one measure at least, Sweden leads the world in investing in science and technology. It has an enviable 4.27 per cent of its GDP committed to research and development, which is well above the European Union average.

“Make no mistake – there’s big science going on here”

To see this in action, you need look no further than the Swedish Human Proteome Resource Programme. One of the country’s most visible success stories, it is the nation’s largest research project, with a budget of 540 million Swedish krona ($75 million). Based at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm and Uppsala University, the project is gearing up to publish the second instalment of its Human Protein Atlas this October. This will provide images of where and how proteins are expressed in healthy and cancerous tissue, to help biochemists understand how newly discovered proteins work. “It’s my dream project,” says the programme director, biochemist Mathias Uhlén of the KTH.

The Human Proteome Resource Programme illustrates a common characteristic of Sweden’s R&D. Only 25 per cent of its funding comes from the Swedish government; the EU gives another 5 per cent, but the rest comes from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, a charitable trust. In fact the majority of the nation’s R&D is paid for by businesses and private foundations.

Uhlén, who has served as an adviser to the Swedish government, says he has tried to send a consistent message to politicians. Government spending, at less than 1 per cent of GDP, is simply not enough. “This makes us just average in Europe.” The magic number? “1.5 per cent,” he says. “Sweden has a very good tradition and a history with science, but I think that we excel in the industry side rather than on the university side.”

While this may mean that academic scientists have to work harder to win funding, there are plenty of opportunities for researchers in Swedish industry, particularly in the life-sciences sector. In 2005, biotechnology and medical technology accounted for nearly one-third of all venture-capital investment in Sweden, according to the Stockholm-based Swedish Private Equity and Venture Capital Association. That investment has helped Sweden’s biotech industry to become the fourth largest in Europe in terms of number of companies.

Thanks to Swedish law, one area in particular is benefiting from the life-sciences boom. Biotech companies working with human embryonic stem cells have greater freedom compared with many other countries, and have tapped markets in countries with stricter legislation. The Gothenburg-based company Cellartis, the world’s largest supplier of human embryonic cell lines, signed an agreement this summer with US company Invitrogen to develop novel engineered embryonic stem-cell lines.

Sweden’s welcoming business environment and bioscience know-how also means that it is attractive to international companies. GE Healthcare has its Life Sciences business global headquarters in Uppsala, 45 minutes from Stockholm, where the company has a Centre of Excellence in Protein Science, along with a world-class research programme on molecular imaging using PET scanners.

The science is strong enough to draw researchers from China, India and North America, but another attraction is Sweden itself, says Peter Ehrenheim, CEO of GE Healthcare’s Life Science business. Sweden’s research hotspots may be located in cities such as Uppsala or Stockholm, but researchers can still choose whether to live in the city or the country. Choose the right community and you can go skating from right outside your door, or boating in the summer among the 24,000 islands that make up the archipelago outside Stockholm, says Ehrenheim. “For people who want to be in the outdoors in their spare time, it’s a great place to live.”

DENMARK

DENMARK is a natural incubator. In one area the size of Silicon Valley, the country boasts a cluster of eight universities, six university hospitals and more than 140 biotech companies.

Public funding for R&D in Denmark has remained relatively flat over the past few years, but researchers say the current government is making good on its pledge to pump up public funding from just under 0.8 per cent of GDP to 1 per cent. Among the government’s first steps towards this has been the creation of a body to finance university-industry collaborations. In its first year, the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation has awarded 200 million Danish kroner ($34 million) to 12 projects.

There were some surprises in the foundation’s decisions. One group won 3.8 million kroner ($640,000) for its efforts to grow the perfect Christmas tree using a technique that brings together robotics and genetics. “[The project] is a combination between biotech, where they try to modify the structure of the trees at the cellular level, and robot technology to plant the trees,” says Thomas Sinkjær, who is on the foundation’s board. “It’s a combination of two worlds.” The decision is slightly less surprising once you realise that Danish trees are big business. The country’s landscape – rolling fertile fields on the mainland of Jutland with a scattering of 400 islands to the east – is peppered with tidy forests that supply nearly a fifth of the 70 million Christmas trees sold in Europe each year.

Most of the other projects are less esoteric, and build on the country’s traditional strength in biomedical research. Danish biotech researchers lead the world in the number of biotech patents per capita. One thing that has fuelled this is the willingness of the Danish population to participate in clinical trials. “There is a tradition in Denmark, where the need for research with human trials is acknowledged,” says Sinkjær. “People know this has to be done to move forward.”

Small, but welcoming

Sinkjær’s own research group at the Centre for Sensory-Motor Interaction (SMI) at Aalborg University shows this in action. “We have really been able to progress quite quickly to clinical investigations,” he says. At his centre, engineers and neurologists are working side by side (interdisciplinary collaboration is common as a result of Denmark’s compact research scene) to restore impaired sensory-motor functions in the brain, be it in people who have been paralysed by strokes or in the development of advanced prostheses for amputees.

Denmark’s relatively small research community is not exclusive however – researchers from overseas are in demand. Lars Arendt-Nielsen, co-director with Sinkjær of SMI and a professor at Aalborg University says that when the centre was first established, researchers recognised that they would have to attract international students to fill at least half of the research positions. “We knew we would run short of qualified researchers,” he says. It’s an effort being mirrored across the country as universities recruit more aggressively on the international market for researchers and graduate students. “We often invite [researchers] for a visit,” says Sinkjær. “When they realise how many other foreign PhD students there are here, it’s a strong motivator for them to come.”

NORWAY

DEEP fjords and a 22,000-kilometre crenulated coastline mean that Norwegians are master mariners. The North Sea has played a major part in the country’s economy for many years – in particular providing its oil and gas industry, which has had a strong influence on the R&D the country has chosen to support.

Some day the oil will run out, though, and Norwegians are making a conscious effort to look beyond petroleum. Norway has traditionally remained cautious about channelling its oil wealth back into the economy, and at present the country spends just 1.73 per cent of its total GDP on R&D, the lowest of the Scandinavian nations and below the European Union average (Norway is not a member of the EU).

In June this year, the Norwegian minister of trade and industry, Odd Eriksen, signalled a commitment to change. “We have more legs to stand on than just oil and gas,” he said. He was speaking at the announcement of an eight-year, 1.12-billion kroner ($170 million) programme to help nurture Norway’s science. This money will be used to build 14 new centres for research-based innovation, where businesses and scientists will collaborate at the country’s universities or research institutes. Some will nod towards the country’s nautical experience, with research on aquaculture technology for farming marine plants and seafood, and a new ocean-life prospecting centre hosted by the University of Tromsø will screen marine organisms for compounds that could lead to new drugs. Others will explore research such as stem-cell tumour therapy, while at a telemedicine centre in northern Norway scientists will team up with partners such as IBM’s Zurich laboratories to develop equipment such as smart sensors for elderly or chronically ill people who wish to live at home.

“We have more legs to stand on than just oil and gas”

Meanwhile, Norway’s foray into functional genomics, FUGE, is four years old and thriving, with funding recently extended to 2011. The programme will develop national proficiency in genomics in relation to basic biology, medical and marine research. FUGE’s backbone facilities cover 11 areas of expertise, from a transgenic-animal development lab to a bioinformatics centre. The centres have been spread across the country’s academic institutions, in Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Tromsø and Ås, as part of government’s policy to build collaboration between universities and keeping all parts of the country economically vibrant. This year, government spending on FUGE topped 170 million kroner ($27 million), says Ole Petter Ottersen, chair of FUGE’s programme board and director of the Centre for Molecular Biology and Neuroscience at the University of Oslo.

Despite all this investment across wide areas of science, for now petroleum remains the critical driver for the Norwegian economy. With oil prices topping $70 a barrel, it is no surprise that Norway continues to pour money into R&D in the oil and gas industry.

In 2007 Norway’s state-owned oil company, Statoil, is due to open an enormous gas field in the Barents Sea called Snøhvit. Norwegian companies are keen to get the edge on bidding for contracts in nearby Russia using the new technology developed for Snøhvit, as the Russians gear up to develop the Shtokman gas field, one of the largest unexploited gas fields in the world.

Scandinavia’s largest independent research firm, SINTEF, is based in Norway and is benefiting from oil fever. This is well illustrated by the 80-metre-long water test tank at the firm’s Marintek research headquarters in Trondheim, 500 kilometres north of Oslo. This year, the tank has been in continual demand, says Tor Einar Berg, principal research engineer with Marintek. Engineers are testing scale-model designs for everything from oil platform supply ships to the special barges designed to carry materials to the Barents Sea for the Snøhvit development.