Munich

Germany's top science manager is urging the federal and state governments to go ahead with two funding programmes that have been grounded by a political impasse.

“Science in Germany has become a hostage of a political power game,” Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, the president of the DFG, Germany's main funding agency for basic research, told Nature. “We've got to get out of this unprecedented deadlock.”

The programmes consist of a €2-billion (US$2.6-billion) scheme to create several élite universities and a separate ‘pact for research’ that would guarantee 3% annual budget increases until 2010 for the Max Planck Society and other large non-university research bodies.

The projects have been frozen since December, when the planned reform of the relationship between Germany's federal government in Berlin and its 16 Länder (states) fell apart. The plan failed largely because the Social Democrat-led government and the Christian Democrats, who control most of the Länder, disagreed about who should have power over science and education. Science experts from the federal government and the Länder are now discussing the possibility of going ahead with the programmes anyway.

“Science has without doubt climbed up the political agenda in Germany,” says Winnacker. “Unfortunately, this appears to have caused more harm than good.”

The impasse is hurting Germany's universities, which carry out four-fifths of the country's publicly funded research. In January last year, Edelgard Bulmahn, the science minister, promised to award a small group of élite universities an extra €390 million each year for five years from 2006 (see Nature 427, 477; 2004 10.1038/427477a).

Now candidate institutions are growing impatient as they await confirmation that the money will be released. Patrick Cramer, for example, a structural biologist and managing director of the University of Munich's Gene Centre, says he needs the money to attract top researchers. “We cannot yet compete with the best groups in the United States in terms of equipment,” he says.

Although an end to the impasse is currently not in sight, Winnacker remains optimistic that sooner or later the promised money will flow. Disagreement over who should distribute the extra money, and how, should not threaten the programmes as a whole, he says.