Paris

High on the agenda for Gérard Mégie (see right) and Geneviève Berger, the two new leaders at France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), is the need to respond to many French scientists' worries about the future of the country's research base.

Last week, members of the Conseil Supérieur de la Recherche et de la Technologie, the research ministry's main advisory body, relaunched a public petition calling for a long-term scientific employment policy.

The move follows a recent warning by the Academy of Sciences that many research areas — particularly genomics, nuclear science and pharmacology — face a crisis if more is not done to attract new students and to retain postdocs. The age profile of researchers in France means that some 50% will need replacing over the next ten years.

Henri-Edouard Audier, head of a chemistry laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique near Paris and trade union representative on the Conseil Supérieur, says that, although the 2001 research budget is “the best in ten years”, more must be done to secure a long-term commitment to young researchers. This is needed, he says, to attract more young people to a career in research and stem the postdoc brain drain.

The 2001 budget (see Nature 407, 435–436; 2000) provides for 265 new research posts, and research minister Roger-Gérard Schwartzenberg has said that he is committed to a long-term employment policy for science. But many of the posts falling empty are teaching posts in universities, which come under the ministry of education, rather than the research ministry.

The petition's signatories, who include nearly 1,400 eminent French scientists, want reassurance that any employment policy will be a collaboration between the two ministries. Audier says he hopes that Mégie, who signed the petition in his previous job as a university professor, will remain “consistent” in his CNRS role.

But Olivier Laprévote, a biochemist who runs a laboratory on the CNRS campus at Gif-sur-Yvette, believes that government action comes too late. He says there are already laboratories without directors, and too few young researchers with the ex- perience to replace them within the next few years.

The problem goes beyond the lack of an employment policy. Laprévote asks: “Even if we can promise long-term career opportunities to doctoral students, who will want to take them up?

“Newly qualified researchers, even with two or three years of postdoc experience, are forced to go through a complicated and, at times, random recruitment process before clinching a post that will offer them a starting salary of at best between 10,000 and 11,000 francs (US$1,300–1,450) per month, a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. It is difficult to find an argument to persuade young researchers to stay in the public sector.”