Sir

The impact of genetics on our lives is now obvious to any reader of a daily newspaper. The prospect that Europe may refuse to fund the infrastructure that underpins all biological research is simply extraordinary (see pages 3–4 in this issue). Such research is essential for the exploitation of genetic and genomic research for the benefit of humankind. Aside from far-reaching benefits in medicine and health care, this science will bring advances to fields as diverse as agriculture, manufacturing and the environment.

Human health and welfare have the potential of great benefit from genetics research, largely because developments in large-scale DNA sequencing now make it possible to determine the complete genome sequence of any living organism. The complete genome sequences of more than 20 prokaryotes and several ‘model’ organisms are now public, or will be so within a year — two yeasts, a nematode worm, the fruitfly Drosophila and the plant Arabidopsis. The sequencing of the mouse genome has begun and, most dramatically, a draft of the human sequence will be finished within six months — a singular event in human history.

This information is revolutionizing biological research. Its analysis, both computational and experimental, will give an extraordinarily deep understanding of living organisms. The use of this knowledge will have an impact on all our lives.

Much of this work has been done in European laboratories — traditionally strong in biology and genetics research. European researchers are poised to make major contributions in the future, many through collaborations between researchers in different European countries. A decade or so ago, biological research was small in scale and required relatively little in the way of infrastructure. Today, particularly in genomics, it is quite different, requiring large-scale, often collaborative, research underpinned by robust infrastructure.

Infrastructure is defined by the European Commission (EC) as “facilities and resources that provide essential services to the research community in the life sciences”1. The paradox is that, although the essential nature of such infrastructure is recognized by the EC, particularly for bioinformatics and stock centres for model organisms, it is ineligible for funding under the commission's fifth Framework programme of research: “[it] will not provide for support for tasks that involve the construction and routine operation of research infrastructures, nor for the collection of data…”1. This decision does not reflect the needs of the scientific community.

Although recognizing the importance of this infrastructure, the EC appears to be of the view that it should be funded by some other agency, or by individual countries. There is no other pan-European agency that currently has the ability to fund these “essential services”. It is clearly inappropriate for infrastructure needed by all European scientists, in academic institutions and in industry, to be funded at national level.

A failure of funding now is particularly ironic given that we are on the verge of elucidating the entire human genome sequence. This prospect is a stark contrast with the commitment and vision shown by biology funding agencies in the United States and Japan. Because the decision not to make EC funding available for sustained infrastructure appears to be a political one, a political resolution must be found, and found soon. If not, then European research in the biological sciences, and all that flows from it, will suffer.