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FRANCE’s largest research organisation, the CNRS, is at the centre of a
full-scale political row over its funding. Guy Aubert, who took over as
director of the CNRS in June, said last week that the organisation has been
living beyond its means. He has told the 1350 CNRS laboratories to cut their
spending, and angry scientists have taken to the streets in protest.

At the end of September, Aubert informed CNRS laboratories that they could
spend only 60 per cent of the money they were told they would have at the
start of the year. He says the organisation has a budget deficit of 500
million francs (£61.7 million). Last week, the CNRS board allocated 360
million francs from its central funds to help make up the shortfall.

Scientists say the financial crisis, which has stopped work at some
laboratories, is caused by the deceptive way in which the French government
funds science. The researchers have mounted two demonstrations against the
cuts in the past month and another is planned for next week.

About three-quarters of the money the CNRS receives from government goes on
staff salaries and other overheads. Most of the rest is to cover individual
programmes that laboratories undertake. In theory, laboratories should be
given enough money to cover the costs of these programmes, but in recent years
this has not always happened.

“The current financial situation at the CNRS is a result of the fact that
money was being spent faster than it was coming in”, Aubert said last week.
According to Edouard Bre´zin, president of the board of directors, the
CNRS first started having difficulty paying for research programmes in 1992.
“The problem has existed for a long time but the CNRS was able to continue
functioning because it has other sources of funding,” he says. These other
sources include money from industry.

Directors of laboratories are not to blame for the crisis because they were
never made aware of the shortfall, says Aubert. Franc¸ois Fillon, the
conservative research minister, blames the previous management of the CNRS for
being “lax” and “disastrous”. He has ordered an audit of the CNRS and says he
does not expect its financial problems to be resolved until 1996.

Scientists say that by blaming the past management of the CNRS, Fillon is
being blatantly party political, since he appointed Aubert while the previous
director, Franc¸ois Kourilsky, was put in post by the former Socialist
government. Kourilsky argues that researchers are being penalised for the
government’s failure to come through with funds earmarked for science by
parliament in successive annual budgets.

Every autumn the parliament votes on a budget for the following year, but
the government can reduce this sum. Kourilsky says the government has cut the
money for research every year for the past three years. “France is quietly
restricting spending on science,” said Kourilsky.

Forecasts suggest that by the end of this year, the French treasury will
have trimmed 2 per cent off the budget agreed for the science ministry last
autumn. “It’s not a problem of management but a larger question of the future
of fundamental research in France,” says Kourilsky.

CNRS scientists say that behind the budget squeeze there is a plan, which
Fillon has hinted at, to radically restructure the organisation. “British
scientists have already gone through this,” says Guy Raymond, head of the
physiology section at the CNRS life sciences department. “Maybe that’s why
there are so many candidates from Britain vying for positions at the
CNRS.”