In the spirit: there's more to research than money

By Chris Parr. EU should place spiritual values above potential profit in funding considerations, Chris Parr hears.
Universities in the European Research Area have lost touch with the spiritual ideals of the European Union's founding fathers and should aim to restore such values to their scientific research, it has been claimed.
According to academics leading the Restoring Spiritual Values to European Science research project, policymakers in the ERA focus more on the potential for financial gain than on what research might achieve more widely. They want European science funding programmes to consider "spiritual" values when allocating grants.
John Wood, the principal investigator and former chief executive of the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, said that the values of EU architects such as France's Robert Schuman and Germany's Konrad Adenauer, with their "Christian Democratic roots", "are not being reflected today in how science is undertaken". Read more...