Research at the heart of the country's biggest ever investment plan

At a conference in Warsaw last week, EU Science and Research Commissioner Janez Potocnik warned that EU member states needed to do much more to support science. Speaking on future EU research policy and opportunities, Potocnik said that European member states had worked hard to reach the goal of spending 3% of gross domestic product (GDP) on research, but he added that "action has not been sufficient yet for research investment to catch up more than marginally." Overall research and development (R&D) investment is now nearly 2% of GDP, up from 1.9% in 2002, he said—still a far cry from spending in the United States and Japan. In Poland, the level of overall R&D investment in 2003 was 0.56% of GDP, Potocnik said. But his message did not fall on deaf ears. On January 11, the Polish government adopted an ambitious national investment plan that made science and the development of a knowledge economy a key priority. Poland, which joined the European Union in May 2004, plans to invest €142 billion (USD $181 billion) between 2007 and 2013 to develop and modernize the country's economy and infrastructure—and much of this money will go to science, according to Polish Minister of Science Michal Kleiber, who attended the conference. Of the total, €73.6 billion (USD $93.8 billion) is to come from EU structural and cohesion funds, while €50 billion (USD $63.7 billion) will come from the Polish government, and €28 billion (USD $35.7 billion) from the private sector.