paris

The French science ministry is engaging in administrative juggling with the finance ministry in a bid to overcome a crisis in the supply of laboratory reagents to research agencies.

The problems stem from the agencies' difficulty in meeting new procurement rules for public markets. The law now requires all orders above FF300,000 (US$50,000) to be put out to competitive tender.

This sum is quickly reached by the big national agencies, which buy many items such as animals, scientific apparatus, biological reagents and journals in bulk. Companies submitting the winning bid become the sole source of supply to that institution for the year-long contract.

The finance ministry last year ended an exemption from these rules for researchers (see Nature 396, 297; 1998). As a result, agencies must now buy most supplies in competitive tenders at the start of the year; a delay in doing so at the biomedical agency Inserm has led to its established orders drying up before the new ones have come into effect.

The problem is less acute at the basic research agency, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which, according to one official at the science ministry, anticipated the difficulties better. As an emergency measure, the ministry last week negotiated bridging funding for orders from Inserm.

But the ministry is also pressing the finance ministry to take into account the specific needs of research agencies. It argues that the law is badly suited to research, as it is difficult to predict so far in advance the reagents that are needed.

The finance ministry also ruled that orders should specify the ‘product’ and not the ‘supplier’ — although any scientist knows that supposedly identical reagents can behave differently. One official at the finance ministry is unsympathetic to this claim. “If the products are different, researchers can buy from different suppliers, but it is up to them to show a technical imperative,” he argues. “If one product works better than another, then they must be different.”

One administrative manoeuvre under consideration — and which the science ministry hopes to have accepted within six months — would allow agencies to pass ‘virtual contracts’ with several suppliers for a particular product, with orders for specific products only being made as needed.

“The agencies would act like a supermarket,” explains a science ministry official. “They would order all the varieties of pasta on the market — and then allow scientists to choose between the brands.”