Munich

Alison Abbott is senior European correspondent for Nature, and has been based in Munich since 1992.

I seem to have spent much of my seven years as Nature's Munich correspondent reporting depressing news of recession, budget cuts, broken political promises and disappointed scientific hopes.

Certainly all the European science organizations, including the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the European Space Agency (ESA) have seen their budgets fall in real terms during these years. And the erosion of research budgets in Germany, Italy and neighbouring countries have confirmed the fickleness of political promises.

But I have also reported on astonishing achievements in times of hardship. For example, CERN is building the Large Hadron Collider, which will be the world's most powerful particle accelerator when it begins the search for the Higgs boson in 2005.

ESO's Very Large Telescope, now being built atop a remote mountain in northern Chile, will be the world's largest and most advanced optical telescope when it becomes fully operational in 2003. ESA, despite its clipped wings, has launched several important scientific missions, including the X-ray satellite XMM launched just before the end of the millennium. Unfortunately, no such grand visions are pushing the frontiers in the life sciences, where investment is sadly lacking both in Germany and Italy.

Walls came tumbling down: the reunification of Germany led to a short, sharp shock for east German scientists, but the whole country's science has emerged the better for it. Credit: AP

But the greatest achievement that I have witnessed has been the rebuilding of research in east Germany after reunification (see Nature 401, 635; 1999). This has been more than just watching buildings sprout up among the Plattenbau (concrete apartment and office blocks). It has also been about watching the complex social readjustments within the east German scientific community, which had lost so much during the last ideologically and financially bankrupt years of communism.

Many scientists lost even more following reunification. More than half lost their jobs, and most of those who did not found themselves working for west German research directors. Few could seek refuge in a sense of injustice, as personal restrictions and material shortages were immediately replaced by freedom and plenty, courtesy of the west. Even those most deeply humiliated by the west German take-over admit to its historical inevitability, even necessity.

Interviewing in east Germany has always been a poignant experience, leaving feelings of both optimism and sadness, and a vague guilt for my luck at having been born in peacetime and on the right side of the Iron Curtain. The saddest story I covered concerned the suicide of an east German professor who was cleared of abusing communist party connections to the detriment of his colleagues — but only after his job had been given to someone else.

The most frustrating stories to unravel have been those on the restructuring of a reunited Berlin, for which the western side of the city paid a high price. It was hard to feel too sorry for west Berlin scientists, who had been kept in relative luxury — sometimes indolence — by subsidies that vanished when the city lost its island status, and who were forced to share their bounty with their new colleagues in the east.

Interviewing in Berlin was exhausting, as both sides of the divide expressed their deep frustration, or even anger, with gusto, wearing their mutual antipathy and lack of understanding with pride.

In the relative calm that now prevails, it is clear that east Germany has gained much more than it has lost from post-communist restructuring. So has west Germany, in that cash shortages have forced it to become more competitive.

Further east, the balance is less clear-cut. Central and eastern European countries, waiting hopefully in line for membership of the European Union, have been through much the same as east Germany. The structures of the old academies have been replaced, for example, and new university laws have been approved.

But without the cash injection that east Germany enjoyed, progress has been slow. Moreover, the passive mentality bequeathed by decades of communism seems to be harder to shift without the short, sharp shock experienced in east Germany.

Most depressing has been the failure of Italy, with its long and admirable scientific tradition, to reform its scientific structures to curb the power of the baroni, as powerful professors are known, and let a competitive and meritocratic system flourish.

Opportunities that opened up with the demise of the corrupt Christian Democrat governments in the mid-1990s were grabbed only half-heartedly, and the mystery of Italy's introspective stagnation continues, along with the mystery of its occasional successes.