Speaking of press releases about popular sites for scientists, the newly formed European Research Council (ERC) reports that its very first call for proposals has received a record number of applications. The call for the ERC Starting Independent Research Grant has received a massive 9167 proposals. This is to be contrasted with only about 250 proposals for which the current budget will suffice. This means that the percentage of research proposals funded will come in at about 2.7%. Compare this with the whopping 21% of NIH funding projected for the USA this year. Even after 5 years of NIH budget cuts, the funding situation for scientists in the US is still 10 times better than in Europe.
Obviously, the ERC grants are a good thing and a start in the right direction. But if Europe seriously wants to provide scientists with a better research perspective, politicians need to up the funding by easily a factor of ten. Even compared to the US agency NSF, the ERC budget appears meager: while the NSF can spend the equivalent of four billion € per year, the ERC gets only to spend one billion.
Thus, while the advent of the ERC is a boon and can only be commended and welcomed, the scale of it still barely passes as pitiful.
See also article in The Scientist.