Just three weeks ago, the French science ministry created a special FF40 million (US$6.3 million) fund for grants to young researchers with original ideas in any field. It has been taken aback by the scale of the demand — some 1,000 proposals have already been received. This small injection of oxygen has clearly set alight many young minds who are otherwise too often stifled by a patriarchal French laboratory system where the grip of powerful laboratory directors on the strings of the purse and the ideas suffocates innovation.

There is also a message here for a country where everyone is growing tired of a repetitive cycle where the government introduces sweeping reforms, researchers take to the street to oppose them, and deadlock sets in until the next government arrives and the ritual begins over again. That message is that pragmatic and well-targeted reforms may be a more effective way forward than grandiose rearrangements of the research administration.

A similar conclusion seems to be emerging from a national consultation, ordered by Lionel Jospin, the prime minister, in a bid to find a way out of the current deadlock over proposed reforms by Claude Allègre, the science minister. Organized by members of parliament Pierre Cohen and Jean-Yves Le Déaut — who are also working scientists — the consultation will culminate this weekend with a national colloquium in Paris. The take-home message is likely to be that modernizations of practices, each tuned to particular situations at the grassroots, are needed more than high-profile reforms of, for example, whole funding agencies.

Ironically, the problems acknowledged as priorities by researchers are virtually identical to those that most trouble Allègre's ministry. The lack of independence of young scientists is one. The bloated system of evaluation is another. And then there is the long-recognized rigidity of a system where some scientists enjoy full-time posts in the research agencies while their colleagues in the universities — often young scientists in their prime — struggle to fit research in alongside excessive teaching loads.

Valuable months have been lost as a result of a sterile confrontation between researchers and the ministry. For the sake of science and of government credibility, this weekend's meeting must herald a more productive period where the ministry and the research community can identify critical areas where tangible progress can be achieved.