Switzerland's most prestigious scientific research institute is to cut costs by doing away with 13 professorial posts.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich said the jobs would be lost over the course of the next five years.

At its annual open day on Saturday, the institute's president, Olaf Kübler, made an appeal to the Swiss government to make more money available from 2004 to fund research and attract the world's best scientists.

Kübler said current budget constraints meant the institute was no longer able to fulfil its official mandate and called for a re-evaluation of federal funding levels.

The institute said the shedding of 13 posts was a regrettable but unavoidable consequence of the current economic climate.

Cutting costs

Cost-cutting measures will see the immediate removal of academic posts which are currently vacant, while a number of scientists who leave the institute will not be replaced.

The announcement comes just over a month after Kurt Wüthrich, a Swiss scientist at the Federal Institute of Technology, became a recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Wüthrich, who won the award in recognition of his research into protein molecules, said at the time that he would move permanently to the United States to continue working after his retirement in 2004.

But on Saturday, Kübler announced that Wüthrich would after all continue to conduct research at the institute in Zurich on a part-time basis from 2004.

swissinfo

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