French researchers at boiling point

Over 30,000 French scientists have signed an online petition to " save research " set up last month, with a pledge to stop their administrative duties unless the government starts listening to their complaints about funding. There is one signature for every minute that has passed since the petition — aiming to save the French public research base from the latest cuts imposed by the government — went online on January 7. Which clocks up to an impressive 30,885 by midday on January 27. Signing the petition, all group leaders and institute directors pledge to resign collectively from their administrative duties if the government does not ameliorate the situation (http://recherche-endanger .apinc.org). In the rather soft-spoken world of French research, this amounts to a revolution. But how did it come to this? There had been some of discontent over budget cuts for years, but it all started to boil over when the government passed the 2004 research budget at the beginning of December, with another cut mainly hitting the research institutes. Realising that things were going from bad to worse, geneticist Alain Trautmann, a group leader at the Institut Cochin in Paris, together with a colleague from the Institut Pasteur, wrote a pamphlet entitled " The silence of the lambs ". On December 17 he assembled a few dozen fellow biologists at the Cochin institute to discuss it. From this meeting emerged the threat of collective resignation from administrative duties. By Christmas, there was a definitive text for a petition and a list of 150 senior researchers who supported it. Under the heading " Sauvons la recherche! " (" Let's save research! "), the petition delivers a poignant analysis of the importance of publicly funded fundamental research for the economic welfare of the country. It accuses the government of effectively " shutting down the public research sector " , without offering anything to replace it. Amongst the most severe problems, researchers name underfunding and withholding of funds already agreed by parliament, a lack of career prospects for young researchers that continues to fuel the transatlantic brain drain, and misguided attempts of politicians to decide what kind of research should be done. Therefore, their key demands are: The government seems to have been wrongfooted by the massive success of the petition * Immediate payment of the funds that were withheld; * Increasing the number of entry-level appointments via the national competitions (concours); …