Sir

The French scientific community is seriously worried about a furtively proposed government decree on the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Claude Allègre, the science minister, has proposed a sweeping reform without consulting the organization's director general, the scientific directors, or the members of its scientific committees.

Even in the best scenario, Allègre's proposal will lead to the break up of the CNRS, effectively ending its involvement in formulating research policy (see Nature 396, 607; 607 1998). The CNRS would become a funding agency ruled by the short term political aims of the government.

As disturbing is the apparently seductive notion that the break up of the CNRS will bolster French universities by entrusting them with the principal responsibility for scientific research. In this utopian plan, a relatively small number of CNRS researchers would be dispersed among the much larger university population with the aim of ‘improving’ these institutions. A much more likely outcome will be the dissipation of the research community without significantly affecting the universities. Allègre, fascinated by the US research establishment, seems to forget that French universities, faced with the hard reality of mass teaching, are not elite institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Caltech. He also tends to forget that public organizations exist in the United States (the National Institutes of Health), the United Kingdom (Medical Research Council) and Germany (Max Planck Institutes), and that these institutions have an important role in establishing science policy.

Belgium and Italy have experimented with proposals similar to those of Allègre, and we all know how catastrophic this has been. Interference by the state in planning and recruitment has nearly destroyed the research community.

Never before have the CNRS and its researchers been so involved in working with the French universities. As an independent research organization, the CNRS has had a pivotal role in developing regional research centres affiliated to universities. The CNRS would not have been able to do so if it had been integrated into the university system. So it is all the more strange that a project breaking up the CNRS has been proposed now.

Other research organizations such as the biomedical agency INSERM and ORSTOM, the research agency for developing countries, are likely to be next on the list to suffer from the same measures.

Our aim is to convince Allègre that the proposal needs serious reconsideration. This poorly thought out reform is not the solution, because it will inevitably disrupt the research community. French scientists have an important role in reforming the system, and they deserve to be heard.