 Well, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us, taking time out of your schedule here to join us for the second press conference of the 44th annual meeting. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you to our audience who are watching us over our web channel as well. The theme of this press conference is actually very important. It's very consistent with a lot of the dialogue and a lot of the talk and hopefully outcomes that will be had from this annual meeting. It's about European research. This is a press conference organised by the European Research Council under the Banner Research for Growth. I will keep my own comments to a minimum to allow my esteemed colleagues here to do the talking. I will just first introduce them. So, to my immediate left, I have Helga Novotny, who was the President of the European Research Council from 2010 to 2013, still very much involved in the organisation. I'm very honoured to be joined by Mr Elio de Rupo, the Prime Minister of Belgium, and on the far left, Sir Tim Hunt, Professor of Cancer Research UK based in the United Kingdom, and again involved in the ERC and is continuing to striving for excellence in innovation. I'd first like to invite Prime Minister de Rupo to say a few words and talk about the efforts that Belgium is making in the field of European innovation to raise competitiveness, create jobs and fulfil the positive outcomes we hope to achieve going forwards. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I would like to thank the European Research Council for inviting me here to this press conference. And it's also a great pleasure to have a Nobel Prize winner with us today. Being a PhD in chemistry myself, I'm truly honoured to have the opportunity to speak to you today. Ladies and gentlemen, it's clear that fundamental research is of the highest importance. It's the only way to guarantee that Europe's research will be competitive and of great quality. The European Research Council plays a major role in that respect. The Council and other research infrastructures also offer unique research services to people from various countries permitting the application of theory. Let's take the example of François Anglaire, the Belgium physicist who was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize together with Peter Higgs. The bold intuition of Anglaire 50 years ago postulating the existence of the scalar boson responsible for the mass of elementary particles is one thing, the most important thing. But he had to be associated with the CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where the experimental confirmation of the theoretical prediction was obtained. Without this research infrastructure, co-founded by Belgium, no discovery of the famous boson, and probably no Nobel Prize for my fellow countryman François Anglaire. Ladies and gentlemen, innovation is a key priority in Belgium. We are financing research through federal and regional agency and through a country-wide network of universities. In this regard, I agree with the idea as advocated in the European research area objectives of a greater alignment between European and national research programmes. More than 80% of the research budgets are managed by national authorities and their parliaments. More cooperation between these national authorities avoids duplication and creates critical mass. Ladies and gentlemen, reshaping the world also means fighting poverty and protecting our planet. R&D is a determinant factor in the creation of growth, but we will only achieve durable growth and durable prosperity if we use scientific research and innovation to reduce inequalities. Belgium researchers and Belgium-based companies, for instance, have been developing solutions to improve access to basic needs such as drinkable water, food and medical care. Ladies and gentlemen, as the future of the world depends largely of scientific developments, investment in research, education and innovation need to be safeguarded. I know this is a costly business and some European member states have reduced their research funding under the pretext of austerity. Clearly, it's a mistake. The example of Sir Hunt of François-Anglaire is clear. We must invest in fundamental research with result being appreciated in the long term. We cannot straight-jacket research by only requiring short-term objectives for industrial processes. In each case, Belgium continues to commit itself to research excellence, despite fiscal consolidation measures of around 22 billion euros. In 2012, total Belgium expenditures on R&D amounted to 8.4 billion euros, thanks to the investments of private companies, higher education institutions, public authorities and private non-profit organisations. This amounts to 2.24% of our GDP, a historical record, ranking us eighth out of the 28 European member states. Thanks to these efforts, Belgium research institutions and companies are, for example, at the forefront in the development of vaccines, stem cell research or cancer treatments. The Belgium government has also increased budgets for inter-university cooperation and opened it up to institutions of other EU countries. At the same time, we have expanded our contribution to the European Space Agency, bringing it to more than 200 million euros a year. That makes us the fifth net donor to the agency, and we have also taken favourable tax measures for research. For instance, a company hiring a researcher with a monthly net salary of around 3,000 euros can save 20,000 euros a year. The kind of support has more than doubled between 2008 and 2012, passing from almost 300 million euros to more than 600 million euros a year. That and all the Belgium measures make that within Europe, according to the OECD, only in Austria and France, public support for private research is higher than in Belgium. Ladies and gentlemen, let's be clear, R&D cost cutting must not and cannot be the answer. On the contrary, our engine needs more fuel and we want to stimulate our economy growth and to reduce inequalities. Investing in R&D is a leverage for sustainable solutions in and beyond times of budgetary restraint. Ladies and gentlemen, to conclude, I wish to salute scientists all over the world. They are at the source of our knowledge and this of our ability to improve reality. Thank you very much, Madame. Thank you very much, Prime Minister. Now I'd like to have some European perspective. We've had some very good examples of a successful country within Europe maintaining its drive for innovation. Ms Navotny, please give us the perspective of the ERC in driving frontier investment. Thank you very much. First of all, I would like to convey the greetings of my successor, Professor Jean-Pierre Beauguinion, who has taken office on the 1st of January. Unfortunately, he has a fractured arm and could not come. So this is why I'm sitting here, but it's a great honour to be here. And I'm very happy that I can complement what the Prime Minister said about the importance of investing in times of austerity, especially into frontier research, as we call it. The European Research Council was set up in 2007 and it is the first time in 2007 that there was pan-European competition for any researcher coming from Europe or even from outside of Europe under the condition that they would be willing to work in Europe. And in these past seven years, we have funded more than 4,500 top researchers, two-thirds of whom are starting grantees or consolidated grantees, as we call them, belonging to the younger generation and one-third are advanced established scientists. So this means that we have recognised the importance that Europe, as Europe is part in this global competition that we are facing and we can see the rise of publications, scientific publications in Southeast Asia and other places, that Europe as a continent continues to invest in frontier research. Now, with the new framework programme called Horizon 2020, which also starts on the first of January this year, the ESC has been recognised as a success story. And the form that this recognition has taken is that we have seen a considerable substantial increase of our budget going from 7 billion euros now to 13 billions for the next seven years. And the topic that we are really all of us here are interested in is what is the connection between frontier research where you do not know the outcome of your work. Frontier research means you are pushing the boundaries of what you know into the unknown and you cannot say what you will find. And yet this is what the history of science has taught us over the last 450 years. There are just some very fantastic technological, medical and therapeutic and other things that come out of investing in frontier research. And the connection to what I would like to call radical innovation, the change of a paradigm as it has come about with the rise of the computers, the kind of data-driven research that we now are all habituated to. All this goes back to the work of theoretical and experimental work that was done 50 years, 60 years ago. And therefore, I think it is a necessity and imperative, in fact, if we want to reshape the world that in times of austerity this must continue and at European level it will continue. We have also, from the ERC, set up a very small scheme, it's called the proof of concept for those researchers who are awarded a very prestigious ERC grant. And we have gained an enormous recognition as the gold standard in Europe in terms of top research. And these grantees, if they have an idea themselves or in their team that they think that this can be brought to market, they can apply for proof of concept, they get a relatively small additional sum of money that allows them to look into patents, allows them to set up a business plan for startups, et cetera. So this is a very concrete contribution we make to the field of innovation, but above all we are raising the awareness of these 4,500 people who are really passionate about their research. And they cannot say what will come out of it, but they are aware if there is a good idea we can take this idea one step further to market. So I would just like to conclude in summing up, why is the ERC here at Davos? These 4,500 researchers that are all over Europe, although we see a concentration in some parts of Europe as you would expect, and Belgium, by the way, does very well in terms of ERC grantees, given the size it has 140 ERC grantees, and some excellent universities and research organisations where they are working. I would like to emphasize that it is important for the ERC to have this visibility, and you as the ones who come from the media, you can help us to continue with this visibility. And the message is even if policymakers not all are as wise and ffarsighted as the Prime Minister here, who think we now have to go for the short term and the impact driven short term impact driven research, that it is important that we keep the long term perspective that science offers. Thank you very much. Before we go for questions I would just like to invite Tim Hunt, Professor of Cancer Research UK, to talk a little bit about the theme of excellence only and how you ensure ongoing excellence in European innovation. Thank you very much. So we really have two motos in the ERC. Keep it simple and keep it excellent. Those are our guiding principles and they are the only ones. Just like running a restaurant and keeping it at the peak of perfection day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, it's easier said than done. Maintaining high standards isn't easy. How do we do it? Well the answer is really very simple. We identify the top experts in a variety of fields and one thing I'd like to stress is that the ERC doesn't only support scientific research, we also support research in the social sciences including politics and economics, art history, literature. I mean it's a broad church but the key to identifying these excellent 4,500 grantees is to have panels and people who screen the grant proposals that come in and the success rate of these grant proposals that come in is not high. It's somewhere what 12% something of that sort. So your chances are only about one in ten of getting a grant. That means hopefully if our panels are doing their job these are really the top people in their field and as long as that continues I think we can be sure that European money will be well spent supporting basic research into all kinds of fields. And it's a very strange thing but this is something really relatively new for Europe because in the olden days I was shocked to discover the idea of the European research was to support industry in various forms and actually remarkably the most important thing was really sort of mobility of the people contracts for doing research. I maintain you can't contract to do research because as hell goes stressed. You don't know what you're going to find so how can you make a contract to find something when you don't know what it is that's there? It was absolutely crazy and actually they didn't even bother to measure the outcomes of the research. PRC has changed all that and I think it's one of the best research councils and even better than the ones we have in my own country where there is a terrible tendency these days to put a strong emphasis on what people call translational research in other words research which is dedicated to particular topics. This implies that we already know everything that there is to be known and we don't. I mean there are just hundreds of things. I mean one only has to think of the brain for example. I mean we don't have a clue how the brain works. You know it has nerves in it but that's about it. How those nerves are connected together. Some about 25 years ago Sydney Brenner in Cambridge worked out how the nervous system of the nematode worm was wired up. But they still don't know how the worm wriggles. Amazing. So even such a simple thing. I forget how many neurons it has. It only has about 100 neurons and you would think it would be easy to figure out how the worm thinks and works but it isn't. Now there are people who want to sort of work out the connectivity of all the human neurons. I say if you can't work it out for a worm it's unlikely you're going to succeed with humans but maybe I'm wrong. Anyway the ERC is a fantastic advance and this idea that we judge each other in a pan European, not only European by the way we have several Americans and other people from outside Europe on our granting panels really ensures this high degree of excellence and long may it continue because it's absolutely crucial so much to find out. Thank you. Thank you to Tim. Possible insight into future research of the ERC into neuron behaviour in worms. Before we go for questions could you please give me an indication who would like to ask a question, raise your hand please. Was that a hand at the back? Yes madam. Microphone here please. Could you give us your name please and also your organisation. Thank you Ting Yan from China Business News. I'm wondering which are the areas you think China and Europe can deepen co-operations to build innovative economies and also does ERC have any co-operation with Chinese government or Chinese institutions? So Chinese European co-operation past and present and future. Well from the ERC perspective I want to emphasise the ERC is part of the Horizon 2020 programme entity framework. There are parts of the programme where you have co-operation outside Europe etc. The ERC is focusing on individuals, individual principle investigators. So from this point of view we welcome also Chinese if they want to work in Europe and we were in Dalian last year and we were also in China before. But there is a new development that may be of interest also to China. We now have signed two agreements, one with the National Science Foundation of the United States and one with the Government of Korea to make it possible to have persons selected on the US side or on the Korean side to work with our grantees in Europe. And this is a way of co-operating if you want. But the topics and this is a peculiarity of the ERC as you heard from Sir Tim and myself in frontier research you do not know what you will find. So the ERC has no semantic priorities because we think the researchers know best where the next hot topics are. Then later comes the phase when you have goals, you have mission driven kind of research then comes the step where you actually build prototypes etc. But we are at the very upfront of knowledge generation and there we say we leave it up to the individual researcher. We try to find and fund the very best. So I would invite China to come to us and also we could have such an agreement also in the area of frontier research. Prime Minister, would you like to have any comments on that? Okay, next question please. Okay, gentlemen at the front. If you think that there are other measures that need to be done to prevent this phenomenon. Sir, please. I think it's not a correct vision of our researchers. We have, as you have said a few minutes ago, many top level researchers. Many failed and we are well known to have such a great top researchers and I agree with what is said here on the table. And we have taken a lot of measures. For instance, the tax incentive to keep the researchers in Belgium cost a lot of money for the government. 600 million euros per year for a middle size country as Belgium, it's a lot of money. And the reason is to the will to keep the researchers in our country. But be sure that we have for vaccines, for cancer, all the medical field. Also material sciences, particles, a lot, a lot of very top researchers and also in the economy of other fields. So I'm not convinced that there is a flow from Belgium to the other countries. But we have to do more if it's possible with European Union to keep in Europe and to welcome in Europe more and more top researchers. I was very happy to see where Helga and I visited the University of Louvain and I was shocked and surprised to find two of my colleagues working there. So it's not all one, it's not all go away. From the ESC point of view, we speak about brain circulation. And especially young scientists are well advised to go and see how the scientific world looks in another place. Of course we don't want to lose all of them forever. So it is important to be attractive for those who wish to come back. And I think especially for Europe this is very important and there are some countries that clearly have an enormous loss of young talented people, especially in southern Europe these days. And this is again one of the reasons why I think it is so important in times of austerity not to cut the branches of young talented people. Otherwise in these countries you have a lost generation and it takes many years of training. It takes many years of hard work. And even if science is a passion you still need to work hard at times also. And on this then is lost if these young people see no chance anymore. So I think for Europe as a whole we have to recognize that in parts of Europe this is becoming a real, real problem and this is possibly a lost generation of young talented researchers. And I could single out the example of Spain where they were 20, 30 years ago fairly scientifically, at least in my field biology, rather scientifically backward country. And then the government started investing and both in Madrid and Barcelona particularly, I mean really fine laboratories sprang up and young Spaniards who had been trained elsewhere in Europe and America came to Spain. And the government has been so mean and it's just sort of uncertain, that's the problem. I mean the minute you get people not sure whether they're going to have a long term future in basic research they vote with their feet because they're unbelievably talented people these. I mean they're really, they're the tops and they vote with their feet. Thank you very much, lost generation and of course a recurring theme of this year's annual meeting is what we do to avoid a lost generation and avoid intergenerational crisis which Professor Clare Schwab identified as the number one challenge we faced today in our press conference last week. So I thank my panel very much for contributing to the discussion and outlying the role, the very important role that innovation across the world has to play in helping us avoid this and thank you all for joining us as well. I wish you a very successful meeting. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. You can use this room. Absolutely. You can stay. Absolutely.