International Report Is Damning in Its Assessment of French Biomedical Science Administration. (November 28, 2008)

A remarkably candid report has been published in both French and English. The committee responsible, which included U.S. Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Peter Agre, top researchers and science administrators from Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada, and France, had been asked to review the performance of France's National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM).

However, the panel, chaired by Algerian born recently retired chief of the NIH, French fluent Elias Zerhouni, enlarged its terms of reference to assess France's entire biological and medical research sector and advised how to take remedial action.

The chief recommendation in the report is that French governmental support for the life sciences should be reorganised into a single, strong funding agency.

France's research minister Valérie Pécresse promised that the proposals would "not remain a dead letter."  On the other hand both the trade unions and Sauvons la Recherche have thrown down the gauntlet and voiced strong opposition.

As the report's panellists see it, France's life sciences sector is "strikingly" fragmented, pointing out that in addition to INSERM's €650 million support there are, as Science's Martin Enserink reports, "life science programs at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Cancer Institute, and at least four others. That leads to 'unnecessary bureaucratic turf battles' and scientists spending 'an inordinate amount of time' chasing funds." and the panel "also criticizes INSERM's byzantine and unwieldy governance structure". For example most of INSERM's researchers "are in so-called mixed units based at, and co-administered by, universities or other host institutes". As a result they are the servants of two masters and heir to the problems that brings.

The panel's remedy looks to be very much a clone of the US NIH where the successor to INSERM would, on the one hand distribute research funds to external researchers on a competitive basis, and on the other if intramural research would take place, it would be resourced under a separate funding scheme.

However, Françoise Cavaillé, an INSERM developmental biologist who's active in SNCS, a researchers' union warns that national institutes such as INSERM play an indispensable role as operators of research: "We don't feel like falling into the Anglo-Saxon model" in which universities compete for project-based funding.

In additional desolving the mixed units could engender fierce jurisdictional disputes, as well as questions of the awarding of tenure positions.