Openletter to the government. On Wednesdays January 7 2004.
To sign by all the personnels of the research , including the personnels out statute, whatever the unification organism of their laboratory. All the signatories approve the analysis below and wish to warn the government on the extreme seriousness of the position. For lack of a quick and satisfactory response of the government, the signatories having administrative responsibilities are involved themselves to resign of these responsibilities (to see fine of the text).
Has the dawn of the 21 century, France needs a vigorous research.
This activity is essential to the innovations of tomorrow, to the economical development of our country, as well as to his cultural radiance. In current situation, the countries that will not maintain a research tool of excellence will be incapable to follow the acceleration of the economical evolution associated to the production of the knowledge. More engraves again, they will become quickly incapable to form the young generations in a competitive way. They will enter therefore in an economical one with difficulty reversible dependance.
Believe that one can limit the research to some priority axes for the corporation, this is to enter into a logic of under development.
Them useful fallen again and profitable come and will come from applied research. But this one can exist only while using the new tools and the concepts invented by the basic research. As the objective of this last one the development of the knowledge, independamment of all profitability discounted, she cannot be supported, for the essential one, that by public financings. This central responsibility of the state cannot be transferred to the organisms caritatifs, deprived, or to the international structures even if the researchers know to find with these lessors of important financing complements.
In France, we attend an abandonment of the research basic by the state.
This political one irretrievable will induce to his continuation a collapse of all applied research. We in already have examples with the closing of research centers private (Aventis, Pfizer), that prefer to exercise that activity where the link between basic and applied research is supported: to the USA. For it is necessary to repeat it: the American private industry is massively dependent on the public sector. Wholesale, in the domain of health, the big pharmaceutical companies transform themselves in financial, specialized corporations in the buyback of the start ups coming from academia, when they succeed. But there is no longer any actually pharmaceutical private research, and this is all so true one in Europe. If the parliamentary Americans , whatever their political membership, voted the considerable and recurrent increases proposed by the administration Clinton for the budget of the NIH, this is because the biologists knew to rally the pharmaceutical industry to this cause and convinced the government to inject federal money in the academic research, in order to have access to the research the more innovating possible.
In spite of the official speech asserting that the research is a national priority, the French government is beautiful and well in the process of closing the sector of the public research, without even to go counts that it there has not nothing to replace it.
It financially suffocates the research organisms public. The decreases of added credits to the cancellations of credits and to the non-payment of the credits voted by the Parliament (at the beginning of December 2003, 50% of the credits of functionings 2002 of the CNRS not yet had not been poured for him!) Put several EPST (Scientific Public Etablissements and Technical, as the CNRS, the inserm or the inra) and the EPIC (Public Industrial Etablissement and Commercial, of which the CEA) by the bankruptcy. While the research, that is an activity on the long term, needs clear perspectives, the government decides a brutal reduction of the number of recruitments of young researchers (an example, for the recruitments of research loads to the inserm: 95 recruitments in 2002, 30 foreseen ones in 2004). Coinciding with a massive departure of the frameworks of the French research to the retirement, this abandonment will do that the gap with the other countries equivalents will attain quickly a non-return point, so much more quickly than the young scientists will emigrate, an already movement widely begun.