Munich

As many as 2,000 young German scientists are set to get a nasty shock in the mail as laboratories cancel planned positions in response to a budget freeze.

After last week's announcement that research budgets will be frozen at this year's level (see previous story), the DFG, Germany's main university research funding agency, will have €43 million (US$43 million) less to spend than it had anticipated.

The agency supports about 27,000 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in all disciplines. It says that this number is set to fall by about 10%.

“The success rate of applicants will decrease,” says Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, the DFG's president. Most disappointed will be those young researchers whose planned thesis or postdoctoral work in a collaborative project has been approved and must now be cancelled, he adds.

The Max Planck Society is not doing any better. The planned extension of International Max Planck Research Schools — an initiative aimed at improving training opportunities for PhD students — is likely to be delayed, and plans to set up a Max Planck group for stem-cell research at the University of Ulm may also be suspended.

Additionally, the continuation of the European Neuroscience Institute in Göttingen — four independent junior neurobiology groups jointly funded by the Georg August University of Göttingen and the MPS — may be at risk.

Stopping the project now would be disastrous, says Erwin Neher, who runs the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. “What's the use of complaining that Germany's brightest talent leaves the country if you cut, of all the institutes, the most attractive and competitive ones?”