European Commission funding ends for life-science research centres

A number of major European life-science research centres are facing financial crisis in the wake of the European Commission's decision not to fund operational costs out of the fifth five-year Framework programme (FP5).

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge is one facility that is threatened. Under instruction from member states, the Commission published a new rule this March stating that core funding and operational costs would not qualify for support from FP5 - which runs until 2002. This is because member states wanted to control investment decisions on large science centres themselves. However, facilities such as EBI had not read the small print specifying that FP5 funds could only be used for research projects.

Joint head of the EBI, Graham Cameron, said that if the cash-flow problem was not resolved, 'we will have to abandon major projects like the DNA database, the draft human genome, the macro-molecular structure database and the microarray expression database,' The crisis, which looks resolvable in the short-term, has come at a particularly bad time for the EBI. Demand for its services is increasing at 15 per cent each month, the Drosophila genome will probably be available in February and a draft of the human genome is likely to be ready sometime in the spring.