Top French Scientists in Threat to Quit

More than 5,300 leading French scientists have threatened to resign unless the government increases the country's research budget, unblocks frozen funds and reverses big cuts in jobs available to postgraduates.

"Despite its official line that research is a national priority, the government really is in the process of shutting down the public research sector," the scientists - including the heads of some leading national laboratories - said in a petition in circulation on the internet since late last week.

"If the authorities do not grasp the seriousness of the situation, and, in particular the despair of our younger researchers, the undersigned team and department leaders will collectively resign their management posts," the petition warns.

President Jacques Chirac, aware of the mounting anger, last week pledged a national plan to "give new impulse to the research and development field". The 2% of gross domestic product France spends on research and development would be increased to nearer 3%, the level in the US, Japan and Germany, by 2010, the president said.

But the scientists say that in the past two years, more funds have been cancelled or frozen than ever before at world-renowned institutes such as the Curie and Pasteur laboratories, the national medical research centre Inserm and applied research centre Inra. Funding of £100m was withdrawn in 2003 and £138m was paid more than six months late. The CNRS, the national scientific research centre, is still owed 50% of its funding for 2002.

Simultaneously, the scientists say, whole swaths of junior research jobs have been scrapped. More than 550 permanent postgraduate research posts have been withdrawn this year, with the result that Inserm, for example, can offer only 30 such jobs this year, compared with 95 in 2002.

Axel Kahn, a leading geneticist and director of the Cochin Institute, a prestigious medical research centre, said the petition was "a cry of anxiety, revolt and injustice ... A historic phenomenon, because we are in a situation of unprecedented gravity."

Mr Kahn said young scientists were increasingly heading abroad, almost always to the US, to pursue their work. "For youngsters who want to carry out research at the very highest level in the world, we can now offer contracts of limited duration, worth between €1,800 (£1,244) and €2,000 a month, with no prospects, inadequate technical back-up and absolutely no job security."

Few figures on the brain drain are available. Some 60% of science graduates who study in America work there for at least a few years. An estimated 4% of France's scientific community is thought to be based permanently in the US - including Luc Montagnier, the co-discoverer of the HIV virus, and Jean-Loup Chrétien, France's first astronaut.

Claude Allègre, a respected geologist and a former education and research minister, said he was considering moving to the US.

The prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said yesterday it was "absolutely wrong" to say that public-sector research funding had declined. A spokesman for the state secretary for research, Claudie Haigneré, said the scientists' campaign was unhelpful.

"At a time when the president announces that he wants to make research a national priority and promises a new law to govern the funding of the sector, threatening to resign is not a very good way to begin the dialogue." he said.