Munich

More than 1,600 German scientists have rallied to the defence of the country's main grant-giving agency for basic research, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Their action is a response to allegations that the agency is reluctant to fund research outside the scientific mainstream.

In today's Nature (see page 922), the scientists defend the DFG against criticism from parts of Germany's scientific community recently reported in German newspapers (see Nature 404, 217; 2000).

The complaints, they argue, are unrepresentative and largely unjustified, given the DFG's generally “unbiased support for creative, high-quality research and its programmes for young scientists”.

The letter was drafted by Reinhard Jahn and Herbert Jäckle, directors at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. It was mailed to a number of randomly chosen scientists, with a request to sign it and forward it to colleagues.

The initiative was well received — albeit mainly by senior scientists. Only about a quarter of the 1,600-odd signatories are young scientists such as PhD students or postdoctoral researchers. Most are institute heads or other well-established researchers.

But Jahn, 48, an experienced DFG referee and a winner of the agency's DM3 million (US$1.4 million) Leibniz prize for his research on biological membranes, says that “the time has come for the whole community to positively affirm the DFG and to protect it against damage”.

Jahn says he decided to initiate the chain letter after reading last month's Nature article. “Such negative reports about the DFG are grist to the mill of those who would like to increase political influence on our self-governing agency,” he says.

Jahn returned to Germany in 1997 after six years at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Yale. He challenges the claim that the DFG is less efficient than US or UK funding agencies. “Compared, for example, with the procedures of the European Commission, the DFG is certainly capable of funding the best research in a highly efficient manner,” he says.