Paris

The governing board of France's largest research university is facing a hail of protest from researchers both at home and abroad over its demand that the European Union (EU) sever its most important formal scientific link with Israel.

The outcry is a response to a motion passed by the board of the University of Pierre and Marie Curie — also known as the University of Paris 6 — calling for Israel's participation in the EU Framework Programme for research to be suspended. Around 2,500 protesters demonstrated at the university's Jussieu campus on 6 January, and an Internet petition against the move has attracted some 24,000 supporters.

The university's 60-strong board passed a motion on 16 December saying that Israel should be excluded from the programme until Palestinian universities, which are in dire straits because of the Israeli occupation (see Nature 417, 209–210; 200210.1038/417209a), are able to operate normally.

The motion, which was backed by trade unions and passed by 22 votes to 4, stopped short of its initial demand that the university itself also suspend research collaboration with Israel. It also called on the university and Israeli researchers to act to alleviate the plight of Palestinian researchers.

Among those backing the Internet petition are nine Nobel prizewinners — among them David Baltimore, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Elie Weisel and François Jacob. Cohen-Tannoudji, an honorary professor at the university, wrote in the French newspaper Le Monde of his “shame” at the motion's contents.

Critics of the motion include the national council of university vice-chancellors and Luc Ferry, the education minister. They say that the idea of punishing Israel's universities runs counter to the values of scientific collaboration, and that research is one of the few areas in which Jews and Arabs can still interact.

The petition's instigator, Bernard Maro, director of the developmental biology laboratory at the Paris university, wants the board to revoke the motion at its next meeting on 27 January. Otherwise, he says that he will leave the university and take his lab and its 120 staff elsewhere.

Maro is not alone: last week he led a delegation of scientists that presented Gilbert Bereziat, the vice-chancellor of the university, with a letter signed by 91 of its leading scientists, calling on the university to “denounce without ambiguity the motion, and apologize to our Israeli colleagues”.

Bereziat, a biologist, says that the policy of the university — which has strong links with Israeli scientists — has not changed as a result of the motion, and that he would never cut off contacts with Israeli scientists.

The board itself remains deeply divided on the issue. Michèle Glass-Maujean, a physicist and board member who was abroad during the December meeting, says that the decision is beyond the board's remit. “I was elected to help run a university, not to take political positions — particularly on a situation as delicate as this,” she says, adding: “The board would have done better to have done nothing.” Supporters of the motion complain of hate mail calling them “fascists”.

The vice-chancellor of the University of Paris 7, also on the Jussieu campus, intervened last week to block discussion of a similar motion by its board. Instead, the board passed one that lauds collaboration as fundamental to the international scientific community and a weapon against “extremism”.

Meanwhile, 17 vice-chancellors of universities in the Paris area took this idea a step further, by calling on the EU to extend its agreement with Israel to explicitly include Palestinian universities.