Against a backdrop of unrest over government reforms to the country's national research institutes, Philippe Kourilsky, who became director of the Pasteur Institute in January, has also put in motion changes that he hopes will modernize the country's leading biomedical research center.

Philippe Kourilsky

Many of Kourilsky's reforms tinker with the structure of the institute, and not the science itself, but he does intend to appoint a review committee to evaluate the institute's scientific research priorities.

Kourilsky, a molecular immunologist who has worked at the Pasteur for 27 years, intends to limit the post of laboratory directors to 12 years—a step implemented in 1982 in France's public research outfits such as INSERM, France's national biomedical research agency, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the country's largest research agency.

Under this plan, laboratory directors will be subject to a four-yearly review and will have to compete for reappointment at the end of a 12-year period. The move will be retroactive, meaning that around half of the current directors might find themselves ousted in the next two years.

And because he believes that “researchers get too focused on their own subject matter,” Kourilsky wants to divert 30% of individual laboratory funds to create a common pool of money for inter-laboratory collaboration projects.

A strategy aimed at bringing young blood into the institute—the Pasteur, along with France's other major research agencies, will lose roughly half its scientists to retirement in the next five to ten years—is the creation of smaller laboratories steered by younger researchers for a five-year period. This is also a move to lure back scientists who have sought refuge abroad from the rigid and hierarchical structure that still governs French research.

Most scientists at the Pasteur so far have welcomed the new policies. “Everyone says we're still good, but we need to modernize,” says Simon Wain-Hobson, director of a molecular retrovirology laboratory. “French science needs to change. It needs more speed, dynamism, and flexibility,” he adds.

In fact, a group of Pasteur researchers hashing out reforms among themselves last year by email and other forums have been pleased that many of their suggestions have been taken up by Kourilsky, says Jean-Louis Virelizier, director of a viral immunology. “There is now reform and it is being done in a spirit of consultation and transparency that did not exist before,” says Virelizier.

The reforms mirror many of those proposed by the government minister of research and technology, Claude Allègre, to modernize French research. For the last two years, Allègre has been trying to increase mobility between research agencies like INSERM and the CNRS and universities, and to recruit young scientists. These efforts, however, have engendered mostly ire from the scientific community. The last week of January saw approximately 1,000 scientists and members of scientific trade unions marching on the streets of Paris in protest at Allègre's plans.

Compared with the government's transformations, “The probability of the success with the Pasteur reforms is greater because the institute is smaller, on a single campus, has more money, and is more open minded. There's a sense of community here,” Kourilsky told Nature Medicine.