From the throes of the
Scientific Revolution came the 17th-century scientific academy. In London, the
Royal Society was founded in 1660, and in France,
Louis XIV founded the
Académie royale des sciences in 1666, which came after private academic assemblies had been created earlier in the seventeenth century to foster research. In the early 18th century,
Peter the Great established an educational-research institute to be built in his newly created imperial capital,
St Petersburg. His plan combined provisions for linguistic, philosophical, and scientific instruction with a separate academy in which graduates could pursue further scientific research. It was the first institution of its kind in Europe to conduct scientific research within the structure of a university. The St Petersburg Academy was established by decree on 28 January 1724. At the European level, there are now several government-funded institutions such as the
European Space Agency (ESA), the nuclear research centre
CERN, the
European Southern Observatory (ESO) (Grenoble), the
European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) (Grenoble),
EUMETSAT, the Italian-European Sistema Trieste with, among others, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics and the research complex Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste, the biology project EMBL, and the fusion project
ITER which in addition to technical developments has a strong research focus. == Scientific research in the 20th century United States ==