Over the years: the European Molecular Biology Laboratory has become one of the most cited biomolecular institutions. Credit: EMBL

The club of life scientists launched by nuclear physicist-turned-biologist Leo Szilard this week celebrates the fortieth anniversary of its transformation into EMBO, the European Molecular Biology Organization.

At the same time it celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of EMBO's most visible manifestation — the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).

The celebrations are not ostentatious — a glass of champagne, a symposium. EMBO and EMBL, both based in Heidelberg, Germany, have gained status in the past ten years, but the financial temperature has always been chilly. At a time when the needs of molecular biology have grown, particularly for computational support to make sense of genomic data, funding has followed only grudgingly.

Despite such reluctance, EMBO, which runs a prestigious club of EMBO fellows as well as select meetings, has increased its modest budget by half in the past decade, allowing it to broaden its scope. This week it announced plans to extend its activities in central eastern Europe in the form of ‘installation grants’ to help young scientists set up their first lab. To begin with, this initiative is being financed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

EMBL, with its extensive infrastructure and 1,300 staff based at Heidelberg and four outstations in different countries, has always been a more expensive proposition. Over the years, it has fought, and mostly won, hard battles with the governments of the 17 member states that finance it. Its budget has more than quadrupled since 1981. The fights have often been bitter — in the early 1990s, Italy, a major funder, threatened to pull out if EMBL did not create special labs in Italy; the lab complied. But EMBL is now the most cited molecular biology research institution outside the United States.

Fleeing the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Szilard found refuge at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory in Geneva, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this year (see Nature 430, 824–827; 2004). CERN had been created to counteract the drain of nuclear scientists to the United States, and to promote international cohesion in postwar Europe.

Szilard envisioned that EMBO would do the same for biologists. But many critics argued that funding of a bricks-and-mortar European institute would only take money away from national projects. They complained that while CERN's huge particle accelerators could not be afforded by one country alone, molecular biology was cheap and could be done at home. It is no longer cheap — and its basic economic value is no longer in doubt. Critics are quieter these days.