Critics cite the government's recent unsuccessful attempt to impose changes on INSERM, the national biomedical research agency (see Nature 391, 110; 1998) as evidence of the shoertcomings of the government's reform efforts. Allègre has criticized the agency, for example, for failing to underpin applications of medical research such as telemedicine, biotechnology and new drugs.

To remedy the situation, he has proposed a greater emphasis on these applied goals and splitting it into distinct departments. But the reforms have been vigorously challenged by many scientists as being poorly thought through and likely to have little impact, while damaging INSERM's fundamental research capacity. Christo Goridis, head of the joint CNRS/INSERM Institut Fédéraliste de Recherche de Biologie du Développement in Luminy, near Marseilles, argues that splitting the relatively small agency into several departments would create “unacceptable” artificial barriers.

Henry Edouard Audier, a chemist at the Ecole Polytechnique and a member of the board of the national researchers' trade union SNCS, argues that the ‘diagnosis’ — that France is weak in these industrial areas — is correct, but that the proposed treatment would have done little to remedy the situation, since the causes are much wider and related more to deficiences within the industries themselves than within INSERM.

The original reforms have since been rejected by INSERM's representative bodies, while the idea of creating new departments is said to have been watered down to the creation of committees within INSERM's management. Allègre last week threatened that if INSERM does not agree to this, the government will simply take such research “elsewhere”.