"Swiss research in the European showcase," beams Swiss daily Le Temps. The Human Brain Project an initiative of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) was selected on January 28 as one of two projects by the European Union's FET Flagship programme which promotes initiatives in innovative and sustainable technologies within the Europe 2020 programme.

The European Commissioner responsible for New Technologies, Nelly Krooes, announced the two winners of the "Flagship" competition [...] who will each be awarded €1bn: Graphene, an initiative based in Sweden which hopes to develop a revolutionary electronic material, and the Human Brain Project (HBP), headquartered at the EPFL, which plans to simulate the human brain using super-computers.

"Developing social and health applications seems to be at the core of what Europe expects of the flagships," explains French daily Le Monde. But the paper adds, "a number of philosophers such as Patrick Juignet, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, denounce this approach as 'part of a vast reductionist, materialistic, ideological current seeking to mechanise humans. [...] The human-machine turns human beings into objects, depriving them of the specifics that make them human'."

From Madrid, daily El Periódico considers this "the greatest investment in the history of European research". The paper notes that –

The most sceptical consider that this is a huge investment with no guarantee of success, but the European Commission responds that Europe needs to take a brave step and get involved in two fast-growing sectors.

Regarding the Graphene project, Italian business daily Il Sole-24 Ore notes that in Brussels the one atom-thick, nanotech material is considered "the miracle material of the 21st Century, like plastic was to the 20th." Its extraordinary properties will open the path in a large number of fields from electronics where it will replace silicon, to renewable energies, to desalination projects, to biological research and so on. "The European initiative comes a little late, but better late than never," comments Il Sole-24 Ore, noting that

These past five years, Chinese universities and business have registered 2,204 patents linked to graphene [...], the United States 1,754, South Korea 1,160 and Europe less than 500. In this context, Europe is right to attribute €1bn to the promised land of science.

"Europe will finally acquire a competitive patent system," French financial daily Les Echos is pleased to announce following the adoption by the European Parliament of a single EU patent scheme.

"Thirty years of effort has finally materialised and, for once, the European Union is responding to a concrete business demand," Les Echos says. The paper adds that the single patent will be implemented as of 2014 and explains how it will operate –

In effect, rather than paying the translation costs and the fees in each of the countries in which they wish to be protected, all inventors can request a single patent from the European Patent Office (EPO). This will ensure protection in 25 member states, excluding Italy and Spain which are reluctant to join. The patents will be available in one of the three principal EU languages (French, English and German) and, in case of dispute, the legal procedure will be unified and simplified. This vote by the MEPs will finally allow European small- and medium-sized businesses to compete on a level playing field with the United States and China. Simplifying the burden of translation will reduce the cost by a factor of at least six.

Despite impatient calls from business, linguistics is to blame for this European delay concerning patents, explains French daily Libération –

Although translation costs are covered by the EPO – each company can deposit a request in its mother tongue – Rome was demanding an English-only process while Madrid pleaded for Spanish to be allowed. Their hardline stance can also be explained by the fact that both countries host many counterfeiters (fake Vuitton bags claiming to come from Rome are infamous).

Fatigued, the Commission proposed a "reinforced cooperation," accepted by 25 countries, to get around the Spanish and Italian vetoes." But this set off a new battle for jurisdiction, settled this summer, the paper explains –

A compromise was found in June: the Unified Patent Court, headed by a French expert, will be located in Paris, as is the patent office responsible for electricity, telecommunications and construction. But the office responsible for general mechanical engineering patents will be in Munich (30 per cent of expected disputes) and that responsible for medicine and biotechnologies will be in London (30 per cent of disputes). And with Luxemburg obtaining the headquarters of the Patent Court of Appeal, here is another maze-like system, this one to begin operating in 2014, at the earliest.

In Spain, it is the isolation of Madrid and Rome on this question that is highlighted. Spanish daily ABC calls the single patent "discriminatory" towards Spanish and Italian –

In the end, Spain and Italy lost their support and found themselves isolated, with the other 25 countries approving the patent. Spain maintained its position in defence of Spanish as an official patent language arguing that this would influence Latin American markets which are interacting more and more directly in Europe's economy. Yet, the number of patents registered in Spanish, to date, is insignificant compared with those registered in German or English.

“Europe, save science!,” yells Gazeta Wyborcza, following the publication of an unprecedented open letter to European leaders signed by 42 Nobel Prize winners and five Fields Medal laureates (a mathematics prize comparable to the Nobel). The signatories urge heads of state and government to protect research and innovation spending in the 2014-2020 EU budget. The European Commission’s official budget proposal for R&D is nearly €80 billion, but there have been fears that the sum could be slashed by as much as €10-15 billion at the upcoming EU summit on 22-23 November. According to the scientists, this would cause irretrievable damage –

Knowledge knows no boundaries. The global market for outstanding talent is highly competitive. Europe can ill afford to lose its best researchers and teachers, and would gain greatly by attracting foreign talent.

The scientists argue that science is the only means of ensuring long-term prosperity in Europe, and warn that funding cuts would put Europe in a position of weakness with regard to competition from North America and Asia. Europe is already spending much less per head on research than the US, Japan or South Korea, laments Professor Tomasz Dietl at the European Research Council.

"The EU wants to control drug tests," headlines German daily Berliner Zeitung. The proposed regulation presented by EU Health Commissioner John Dalli on July 17, aims to simplify procedures for clinical trials on humans.

Currently, the pharmaceutical industry, which finances international clinical trials, faces a number of legal discrepancies within the EU, a complementary article in the Frankfurter Rundschau. The industry has thus left Europe to proceed with trials elsewhere, preferably in emerging nations. The number of clinical tests made in Europe fell from 5,000 in 2007 to 2,800 in 2011.

In emerging Asian and South American nations as well as in Russia, where the requirements are less costly, 20,000 medical drugs are tested on human guinea pigs each year, according to Wemos, a Dutch patients' rights organisation. The 40% difference in cost is a weighty argument for the laboratories because clinical tests can represent half of a medical drug's development budget – about 1 billion euros on average per product.

To adapt to the hard facts, the European Commission is seeking to kill two birds with one stone: to make Europe more attractive by simplifying authorisation procedures through the creation of a central authority competent in all European countries; to ensure that European clinical trial standards are respected by all European firms operating outside of Europe.

This second measure concerns India, in particular, since it eased clinical trials on human guinea pigs in 2005. Many of the test subjects, who must confirm by signature that they are informed of all the possible side-effects, are illiterate or minors lacking parental consent.

The Council of Ministers and the European Parliament must now discuss the proposed regulation, which would be more binding than the current directive on clinical trials. It is expected to come into effect in 2016.

“Five reasons to believe (once more) in Europe” – An optimistic Le Monde wants to prove that “Europe is not a continent in distress, a tragic commentator on its own decline.” In its Economy supplement the French daily notes that –

The euro crisis and the wave of austerity plans that accompany it dull and mask the reality of the power of a continent with unique advantages [...] It’s not just in Silicon Valley or Asia where innovation is to be found. Of the 30 most innovative countries in the world, 20 are European.

European brains, Le Monde reports, are “a sought-after species,” and that continental workforce is a workforce of “quality” because it “benefits from a very specific cultural broth” –

To innovate – or almost – it is sufficient to contrast these differences. That is the purpose of the Erasmus mobility program (...), which gets subsidies from Brussels for research (...). Of course, there is no equivalent to Harvard between the Atlantic and the Urals. But, in the absence of loads of cash, the network of higher education institutions is very dense. And young people can study here for very little money compared to Asia and the United States.

[...] The European Union combines unique strengths, but today those strengths are under threat. Will it know how to use them to overcome the crisis?

In a ruling applauded by the Catholic Church, criticised by researchers, and feared by the pharmaceuticals industry:  "The European Court of Justice has banned patents based on human stem cell research,” headlines Die Presse. On 18 October, the judges in Luxembourg that researchers who had recourse to methods involving the destruction of human embryos would not be able to patent their discoveries, invoking the principle of "respect for human dignity." European states are divided on the issue of the use of stem cells in research, with national legislation  that varies from an outright ban in Italy to very liberal laws in the United Kingdom and Sweden.

In Germany, the country where the case heard by the European Court of Justice began with a complaint filed by Greenpeace against a Bonn University researcher, the press is divided on the issue. The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung enthusiastically remarks that the ruling shows that “economic interests do not take precedence over everything,” while Süddeutsche Zeitung struggles to understand the decision. "Excessive moralising," headlines the Bavarian daily, which points out that the judges were less motivated by moral considerations when considering the patenting of "components for tanks, abortion pills and the results of animal testing.”

“The Netherlands is increasingly falling behind in terms of innovation,” reports NRC Handelsblad. According to two studies on the strength of the economy, current investment in research and development will not be enough to fulfill the government’s ambition to become one of the world’s top five most innovative countries. The Amsterdam daily is surprised that the government, which created a Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture & Innovation and makes liberal use of the term “innovation” in its coalition agreement, has no plans to fund additional spending. The newspaper also regrets what it perceives as a short-sighted policy on investment in education, and points out that Germany, France, Denmark and Finland have not used the economic crisis as a pretext for penny-pinching on innovation. The European Commission wants member states to devote 3% of GDP to research, but as it stands the five billion euros per year spent by the Netherlands only amounts to 0.88% of the country’s GDP.

“European satellite agency to be based in Prague,” reports a delighted Hospodářské noviny. Galileo, the system that is destined to put an end to Europe’s dependence on American and Russian satellite navigation systems, will be operating by 2013 from the Czech capital. For the daily, the 8 December decision taken by the European Space Agency will bring “prestige to the country, which will be welcoming its first European institution.” Hospodářské noviny notes that to date, the launch of the system “has been been beset by financial difficulties.” Now that it has been abandoned by its initial consortium of private investors, the project which has a minimum estimated cost of 3.4 billion euros will be almost entirely financed by European funding.

Brussels has shelved its space policy, reports Les Echos. "What was to be a major priority for the European Commission, now that the Lisbon Treaty has granted it new prerogatives in the field of space policy, has discreetly been sidelined." In the current context of budgetary restrictions, the Commission wants "to avoid exposing the European Union to risks inherent in high-profile financing of major space projects" like Galileo. As the daily explains, the space industry has responded with disbelief to the news that the Commission has set aside the implementation of a programme for which it had assumed political responsibility. However, at least Germany “will be pleased that the European Space Policy has been shelved," continues Les Echos. "Many will remember the staunch opposition in Berlin to a policy that would enable the European Union to sideline the European Space Agency (ESA)."

"Why is aspirin so expensive in our country?" wonders Die Zeit. The weekly blames the lobbying and economic clout of the pharmaceuticals industry for the high prices charged for medicines on the German market, which are significantly more expensive than they are elsewhere in Europe.

An aspirin, which costs 2 cents in the UK and 14 cents in the Czech Republic, costs 20 cents in Germany. Oral contraceptives like the Yasmin birth control pill, which is produced by the German drug company Bayer and exported to more than 100 countries worldwide, are so expensive that black marketeers who re-import them from Portugal are making a killing.

According to the OECD, on average Germans spend 20% more than the citizens of other developed countries on medicines. A lobbyist interviewed by the weekly explains that there are two reasons for this. One is the size of the country: Germany functions as a reference market for other countries where prices are often lower. It follows that the cost of drugs in Germany is a critical issue for the pharmaceutical companies.

The second is deregulation: the laboratories are "free to set prices and charge what they want to insurance companies," explains Die Zeit. Procedures for the autorisation and distribution of new pharmaceuticals are also much faster and easier to implement in Germany. Elsewhere in Europe, "only Malta and Denmark offer such preferential conditions to producers."

After a slight delay in the programme, the first Romanian space flight was launched on 1 October from a warship in the Black Sea. Gândul, whose front-page report looks at the team behind the project, explains that the "Helen 2" rocket was carried to an altitude of 14,000 metres by an aerostatic balloon and then propelled to an altitude of 40 kilometres by its non-polluting hydrogen peroxide engine. Designed by the Romanian Cosmonautics and Aeronautics Association (ARCA), "Helen 2" is one of the entrants in the Google Lunar X Prize, an international competition to land a robot on the moon able to send back images and data and to travel across at least 500 metres of the lunar surface.

After Chile announced last week its intention to provide a site for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), Público reports that the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation has rushed to submit a competing bid “to obtain world’s biggest telescope.” One of the innovations of the device designed by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) “will be its ability to see light reflected by planets outside the solar system – a feature which could help find life or water on them.” The project also represents a major investment, which “will bring hundreds of jobs and millions of euros to the area around the chosen site.” The two competing locations for the telescope are Armazores in Chile and Roque de los Muchachos in Palma (Canary Islands). However, according to sources in the ESO, the Spanish location may present some technical problems. Spain is expected to finalize its bid before the end of February in the run-up to the 2nd and 3rd of March meeting of “the 14-member ESO, which includes Spain, to select the final location of the telescope.”

One year after PM Jose Sócrates announced the creation of Lusocord, a public stem cell bank, Portuguese daily Público hails its success, topping 1400 donations of umbilical cord blood since the beginning of 2009. Cord blood is collected because it contains stem cells, which can be used in the treatment of blood diseases and genetic disorders. By the 2010, end the Centro de Histocompatibilidade do Norte (Northern Histocompatibility Center) – the bank’s Oporto-based administrator- hopes to reach three thousand donations. By the end of this semester, Lusocord storage will be used throughout the world for research, transplants and to treat children suffering from leukemia. The continued success of this bank relies only one thing only – the generosity of the nation’s pregnant women, the Lisbon daily notes.

On 14 December Nicolas Sarkozy announced plans to set up 10 “centres of excellence” in French higher education, involving investment to the tune of €10bn, as part of a €35bn “big loan” from the state. "University of Sarkozy", headlines Libération, explaining that the president is bent on spawning French campuses capable of holding their own with the likes of Harvard and Berkeley. The Parisian daily applauds the ambitious plan to fund these public/private partnership-based “centres of excellence”, touted as future wellsprings of “innovation and jobs”, but doubts that copying Silicon Valley-type models based on geographic concentration will work in France. “None of those hubs was built up from scratch by state decree,” Libération points out. The paper also objects to the “highly scientific, highly economic – in a word, highly utilitarian – cast” of the scheme, wishing the same zeal might be lavished on higher education in the social sciences, psychology, literature and history.

Fossilized remains discovered at the Atapuerca site in Spain, have revealed that the earliest known Europeans were cannibals "who enjoyed eating children and teenagers," reports Le Figaro. According to one of the co-directors of the archaeological dig, "It is the first well-documented case of cannibalism in human history, but that does not mean it is the oldest." The 800,000 year-old remains are those of Homo Antecessor who preceded both Neanderthal man and Homo Sapiens. Traces of stone knife cuts and the manner in which the fossilized bodies were dismembered indicate that "cannibalism was not a ritual activity but a source of nourishment," points out the daily.