At a ceremony to mark the foundation of CERN -- a pioneering research centre that houses a huge particle collider in a 27-kilometre (17-mile) circular tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border -- Chirac said Europe was losing ground to its rivals.

The French president reiterated a call for public spending on scientific research to be exempted from the cap on government budget deficits imposed on EU member states under the European Union's growth and stability pact.

Such spending represented "an investment in the future", Chirac said as he warned that Europe was "losing ground to an alarming degree" against the United States, Japan as well as emerging powers such as China and India.

"It would appear to be desirable and more in line with Europe's ambition to become the most competitive knowledge-based economy to place it outside the criteria of the growth and stability pact," he told the assembled dignitaries.

"We must not give up this vocation, which is the key to our future," he added.

Founded on September 29, 1954, the publicly-funded CERN now groups 20 European states. But the Geneva-based agency has also become a symbol of global cooperation on scientific research.

Some 7,000 scientists from 85 countries are working on its experiments, including research recreating the conditions that existed barely a fraction of a second before the "big bang", the creation of the universe.

CERN's centrepiece is a new 2.27-billion-euro (2.83-billion-dollar) hadron collider buried in a huge cavern 100 metres (330 feet) underground which is 2,000 times more powerful than the original, 15 year-old atom smasher it will replace.

The organisation's director-general, Robert Aymar, said the project was "essential for the future of fundamental physics".

The new energy beam of subatomic particles, which is due to be finished in 2007, is meant to deepen exploration into the forces that shape the universe.

The ceremony at CERN's headquarters in Geneva was also attended by the Swiss President Joseph Deiss and King Juan Carlos of Spain, who praised the "visionaries" that created the nuclear physics laboratory.

One of CERN's leading officials in the 1950s, Francois de Rose, said the huge project had allowed Europe to prevent scientists from moving abroad to carry out fundamental research.

But he also underlined that CERN also owed its existence to two leading US nuclear scientists, Robert Oppenheimer and Isidor Rabi.

"They underlined how the development of fundemntal physics would from then on require research instruments that would demand financial resources and manpower that exceeded the capacity of each European country," he said.

"Science does not know any boundaries," he added.

During the Cold War, when Russian, US and European scientists worked side-by-side at the CERN, secrecy was shunned and the organisation was obliged to make the findings of its research public.

One of the most recent spin-offs of that rule is the Internet. CERN researchers created the software for the World Wide Web in order to share scientific data from their different bases around the world.

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