Spanish scientists like to quote the fact that the Brazilian footballer Ronaldo was this year sold by the club FC Barcelona to Inter Milan for a fee higher than the entire budget of their research council, CSIC. The national passion for football, it seems, is more enduring than that for science. Scientists are therefore right to be more concerned about the failure to capitalize on their country's recent investment in research than relieved to learn that a significant increase in research budget is foreseen for next year (see page 773). For the lack of research tradition makes Spain particularly vulnerable to the long-term effects of a period of famine.

In the 1980s, Spain, then one of Europe's lowest science spenders, injected a major funding boost. The research budget grew by around ten per cent a year, the number of research institutes expanded, and thousands of young scientists were sent abroad for postdoctoral training. The benefits of this push should now be being felt. But the economic doldrums of the 1990s threw the dream of matching the research efforts of countries such as Germany and France — rather than those of Greece and Portugal — off balance, and implicit promises that returning postdocs would be stably integrated into an expanding research scene were broken.

Corrective action must be taken before the present army of young scientists on which Spain's future depends leave for other careers. That haemorrhage is already under way, despite stopgap solutions offered by successive governments. A sustainable solution requires a fundamental change to the outmoded and inflexible employment practices that Spain shares with some other European countries — particularly Italy. These continue to provide permanent researchers with all the privileges of tenure, even though these are no longer affordable, while outlawing the renewable temporary contracts that could allow the establishment of a tenure track system. The government has begun to debate changes in the law to increase employment flexibility in general, but changes are years away.

In the short term, the government must remember its promise to create 150 new tenured positions for CSIC out of the 1998 pool of new civil servant posts when these are distributed next spring, even at the price of taking jobs from other sectors; that would certainly raise morale among the ranks of mutinying foreign-trained postdocs. Research institutions must take advantage of the new rules of the National Plan which allow them to hire temporary staff on its grant money. And the academic community must help itself by accepting the need for greater mobility.

The latter means that universities must be prepared to abandon their tradition of hiring locally, and from within their own ranks, while young researchers must be prepared to leave their home town to compete for jobs, even temporary, that arise elsewhere. All this will inevitably involve some social dislocation; but it is part of the price that Spain must pay if it wishes to become a modern, science-based state.