Chirac: Europe Can Do More in Science Race

GENEVA (AP) -- A European laboratory that was the birthplace of the World Wide Web and home of Nobel prize-winning developments in understanding the origins of the universe celebrated its 50th birthday Tuesday. But French President Jacques Chirac warned that despite those illustrious achievements, European scientists are falling behind.

Chirac and King Juan Carlos of Spain were featured speakers at the celebrations of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by the French initials CERN, which was created in part to help stop the brain drain from postwar Europe to the United States.

"In terms of Nobel prizes, publications, patents and science students, Europe is losing ground at an alarming rate," Chirac said in addressing the 50th anniversary celebration of the world's largest atom-smashing laboratory.

"Scientific competition is increasing today," Chirac said. "It no longer comes from the major powers in the developed world, such as the United States or Japan. Each passing day sees more competition from the large emerging countries, like India and China."

Chirac said Europe plans to spend 3 percent of its wealth on research by 2010, but more is needed and the spending should be placed outside the European Union's stability and growth pact, which limits deficit spending.

King Juan Carlos said CERN helped Europe regain the position it held earlier in the 20th century, when it was the home of such leading scientists as Albert Einstein.

"CERN is certainly the leading particle physics laboratory in the world, a center of excellence that attracts world experts in the field," the king said.

After the U.S. Congress pulled the plug on the construction in Texas of the proposed Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, CERN became the focus of much of the world's research into matter and understanding the origins of the universe.

Chirac noted that 6,500 scientists from 80 countries -- half the world's researchers specializing in particle physics -- work at CERN.

A number of the speakers said that support from the United States played a major part of the founding of CERN to help reunite Europe following the devastation of World War II.

"The idea for CERN can be traced back to two American scientist -- Robert Oppenheimer and Nobel laureate Isidore Rabi," said Francois de Rose, the only surviving scientist from the dozen credited with creating the laboratory.

Among the highlights of CERN's history was the awarding of the 1984 Nobel physics prize to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer for the discovery of two particles, the W boson and Z boson.

In 1992 Georges Charpak of CERN was awarded the Nobel physics prize for his invention, the "multiwire proportional chamber," which revolutionized the tracking of particles and is used in many medical applications.

In 1990, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN when he proposed a way to help researchers by linking related pieces of information across the Internet in what became the World Wide Web.

The 50th-anniversary observance came at a time of reduced research at CERN because the largest collider is being replaced in the 17-mile circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border.

The previous equipment -- the Large Electron-Positron collider -- has been pulled out of the tunnel big enough for a subway train. It is being replaced by the $1.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.

That massive machine, with underground detectors the size of cathedrals, is to be finished and switched on in 2007 to provide even more power in the search to understand the makeup of subatomic particles that are the building blocks of all matter in the universe.

Besides the European member nations in CERN, other observer nations whose physicists work at CERN include Japan, Russia, Israel and India.

Many scientists from the United States, which still has major rival laboratories, are among the hundreds of physicists who take turns conducting experiments with the particle accelerators.

"The scale of the experiments we perform is so huge that no one institute or even country can conduct them alone," Richard Webb, a 25-year-old British scientist at CERN, told The Associated Press.