The board of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) formally approved controversial reforms (see _Nature_ 453, 573; 2008) on 27 November that would split the agency into nine semi-autonomous institutes, with a recommendation for a tenth in computing. The meeting required police protection from protesting researchers.

A draft of government proposals for a reform of French life sciences was also revealed last week by the newspaper Libération (see http://tinyurl.com/6ov4e8). It proposes the creation within two years of an overarching research council — the National Institute of Life Sciences — which would coordinate policy at the national biomedical agency INSERM, and health-related life sciences within the CNRS and other research agencies.

The report also suggests regrouping all life sciences within a single research agency, along the lines of a recent recommendation made by an invited foreign panel led by Elias Zerhouni, former head of the US National Institutes of Health.