EU hits back at former top scientist during coronavirus row
The European Union’s top scientific body has hit back at its former chief after he quit last night, saying that he was in fact asked to leave his position.
Mauro Ferrari said he resigned from his position as president of the European Research Council (ERC) last night because he had “lost faith in the system” over the EU’s coronavirus response.
The ERC had rejected a proposal of his on how to deal with the the EU’s coronavirus response.
However, a statement from the ERC Scientific Council said Ferrari was being “economical with the truth” and that he was in fact asked to leave his post on 27 March by all 19 members of the council in a no confidence vote.
The statement said that Ferrari “displayed a complete lack of appreciation” for the ERC’s mission to support “excellent frontier science”.
It added that Ferrari “displayed a lack of engagement with the ERC”, missed many important meetings to instead spend time in the US and too often went over the head of the council to directly engage with the European Commission.
The ERC Scientific Council added: “We regret Professor Ferrari’s statement, which at best is economical with the truth.
“This Scientific Council remains dedicated to pursuing the mission for which the ERC was established: the support of bottom-up ground-breaking research.”
Ferrari, on the other hand, said this morning that he had left the role because of Brussels’ unwillingness to launch a stronger response to combat Covid-19.
Ferrari suggested he initiate a dedicated ERC programme to combat Covid-19 to provide scientists with “resources and opportunities to fight the pandemic”.
The scientific council rejected his proposal on the grounds that the agency’s remit allows it only to fund so-called bottom-up research, rather than top-down ideas where aims are set out by politicians.
“I argued that this was not the time for scientific governance to worry excessively about the subtleties of the distinctions between bottom-up versus top-down research,” Ferrari told the FT.
The ERC addressed this allegation in its statement, saying that it was not in the remit of the body to issue the type of response Ferrari was calling for.
It said: “We did not support a special initiative because that is not our remit and the Commission’s Research and Innovation Directorate General, with which we are connected, was already very active in developing new programmes to support this research through the appropriate channels.”