Director of HHS National Institutes of Health Meets with Representatives of the European Medical Research Council

(Left to right) Liselotte Hjøgaard, M.D., Chair, Standing Committee European Medical Research Councils (EMRC); the Honorable Elias Zerhouni, M.D., Director, HHS National Institutes of Health; and Carole Moquin-Pattey, Pharm.D, Ph.D., Head of the EMRC, European Science Foundation (ESF), Strasbourg, France.

September 4, 2007 - The Honorable Elias Zerhouni, M.D., Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), met today with Liselotte Hjøgaard, M.D., Chair of the Standing Committee of the European Medical Research Council (EMRC), part of the European Science Foundation in Strasbourg, France, and Dr. Carole Moquin-Pattey, Pharm.D., Ph.D., Head of the Medical Sciences Unit from EMRC, on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The group discussed a publication the EMRC is currently working on entitled, "White Paper on the Future of Medical Research in Europe."

Researchers from Europe can apply for grants from the HHS/NIH, but European research-funding pools are not always open to American scientists, and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic are interested in increasing collaboration. According to the European Science Foundation, the relative share of public research money devoted to medicine and the life sciences is 55 percent in the United States, but only about 30 percent in Europe. The United States spends 2.6 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product for research, but the European Union (EU) only spends 1.93 percent; publications per 100,000 inhabitants, another measure of scientific output, are 809 per year in the United States, and only 639 per year in the EU.

Dr. Højgaard is Head of the Department of Clinical Physiology, Nuclear Medicine and Positron Emission Tomography Center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, and Professor of Medical Technology at the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Moquin-Pattey was previously the Director of Scientific Strategies and Partnership at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in France.

Last revised: September 06, 2007