Leiden University fires evolutionary biologists
(February 5th 2009) Darwin wouldn't be amused. Evolutionary biologists across the world are celebrating the double anniversary of their great mastermind and are enjoying the raised attention in their field. At the same time, however, nine evolutionary biologists at Leiden University are facing a completely different kind of attention - the kind you only experience in a bad dream: they have been fired!
Without doubt, this was not what Dutch science minister Ronald Plasterk, a molecular biologist himself, had in mind last year when he shifted 100 million Euros in research funding from the annual budgets of the universities to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the main grant-giving institution in the country. In fact, he had hoped to raise the Netherlands' overall research quality by the move, by forcing scientists to compete for grants. But, of course, he must have been aware that at the same time these changes in funding would inevitably affect the operational expenses of universities.
In Leiden, the budget cuts have led to the dismissal of the following nine evolutionary biologists, most of them working in the Section of Theoretical Biology of Leiden's Institute for Biology: Jacques van Alphen (Marie Curie professor of Excellence), Tom Van Dooren, Frietson Galis (president of the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology), Sacha Gultyaev, Patsy Haccou (Executive vice-president of the European Society of Evolutionary Biology), Ken Kraaijeveld, Femmie Kraaijeveld, Hans Metz (retired, but still very active), Rino Zandee. Although they have been told that their labs and offices will not be shut down until March 1st, the Theoretical Biology homepage has already been removed from the Institute of Biology's list of sections.
The nine victims claim that they still haven't been given a satisfactory explanation as to why exactly they were chosen and all other fields like, for example, molecular biology remained untouched. Frietson Galis told
The Scientist that by concentrating on this one group only, the dismissals will wipe out Leiden's expertise and research in theoretical biology and advanced population modelling. “It's not possible anymore to have masters and PhD students who work at the population level, but that's necessary to study natural selection.”
Menno Schilthuizen, a research scientist at Naturalis, the National Museum of Natural History, commented in
Science on the topic, suggesting that the restructuring at Leiden will negatively affect the creation of the Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity, which was counting on the scientific expertise of the staff now laid off. On the whole, interest in evolutionary biology is rising because of biodiversity and conservation issues, Schilthuizen says, but “it seems that the universities are falling a bit behind.”
The numerous Darwin Year events throughout this year is even likely to give the interest in evolutionary biology an additional boost. Celebrating Darwin in Leiden, however, might now seem like a bad joke.
Of course, the nine are not willing to quietly accept the move and have already hired a lawyer to file lawsuits against the university. In addition, the research community has also come to their help: last week, Isabelle Olivieri of the University of Montpellier 2, president of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, initiated an online petition to protest against the layoff which has already collected 3,000 signatures (
http://evodevo.eu/petition/).
In the meantime, another victim has emerged from the Dutch budget cuts. Utrecht University is determined to close down its Endocrinology & Metabolism and Toxicology & Neurobiology sections. University officials justified the decision with the considerably lower research performance of these sections when compared to their colleagues at Amsterdam and Nijmegen universities.
Is this really the kind of competition that science minister Plasterk envisaged?
Ralf Neumann
