Evolutionary biologists are the latest victims of the global economic downturn. In a move that has generated a worldwide outcry, Leiden University in the Netherlands is firing nine evolutionary biologists, half of its total evolution-related staff.

Leiden officials say the layoffs are in response to a smaller annual science budget, following the Dutch government's reallocation of €100 million ($133 million) last year to fund the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

But an online petition -- which has already been signed by more than 2,700 people in the past three days -- questions why only evolutionary biologists were laid off while molecular biologists were spared the axe.

"We are under pressure," Frietson Galis, the president of the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology and one of the Leiden staff given the pink slip, told The Scientist. The dismissals will eliminate Leiden's research in population biology and theoretical modeling because there will no longer be any researchers working in these fields, she added. "It's not possible anymore to have masters and PhD students who work at the population level, but that's necessary to study natural selection."

"We're losing knowledge," Bastian Reijnen, an associate researcher at the Naturalis National Museum of Natural History in Leiden and a former Leiden University student, told The Scientist. "That's what you have to give to the new students, and when [the staff] are gone, they'll probably retire or go to foreign countries."

Galis said she expects to be paid through until February 2010 but she's been told that her lab and her office will be shuttered by March 1st. She and her colleagues, however, have hired a lawyer to protest the move. "We hope it will be stopped," she said.

Targeting only evolutionary biologists "is sad for the people affected," but it's better to cut deep in one field than to spread the financial woes around, Sjoerd Verduyn Lunel, dean of Leiden's Faculty of Sciences, told ScienceInsider.


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