Ructions in French Science Set to Continue. (July 5, 2005)

    Six weeks ago Science reported that the much discussed reforms to France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the largest basic research agency in Europe, were beginning to move toward realisation but not without significant disquiet in the French scientific community which in the recent past hasn't been noted to suffering in silence.

Currently CNRS employs 11,600 researchers together with 14,400 engineers, technicians and administrators. Science reports the plan calls for halving "the number of the agency's departments and merge many of its directly supported labs, reducing their number from 1200 to 'perhaps 800,' according to CNRS director Bernard Larrouturou.

"The new plan calls for CNRS to reduce its thematic science departments from eight to four: chemistry, social sciences, life sciences, and a giant grouping of math, computer science, physics, and science of the planets and the universe. Two new crosscutting departments will be created for environment/sustainable development and engineering."

Larrouturou took pains to assure scientists that the French government wants to maintain the institution, not eviscerate it, but the researchers are sceptical. Larrouturou gave as reasons for the reorganisation were to clarify CNRS's mission, to improve career prospects for young researchers, to foster university research, and to be part of the "training-research-innovation continuum." CNRS will do all this, he said, by encouraging closer links between public and private-sector research and the transfer of knowledge and technology. What worries researchers is just what do all that really mean, for example, for the support of basic research by the Chirac government.

Jacques Fossey, general secretary of SNCS, the leading research union to which French/CNRS scientists belong, opposes the reform on several points, including its "lack of scientific coherence in the over diversified" math-physical sciences department and the extra layer of complexity the DIRs will bring.

Despite work on the proposed reforms being more than a year in formation the proposals put forward by Larrouturou give the appearance of being forged hastily and matters have been further complicated by the rejection of the French voters of the proposed European Union Constitution. For example junior research minister François d'Aubert has been ousted as part of the new government formed by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, and François Goulard, who served as junior transport and sea minister in the last government, now assumes France's top science policy position and will be responsible for higher education as well which Alain Trautmann, spokesperson for France's researcher protest movement, sees as a good omen.