Disobedient French Researchers Make Government Meetings Moving Targets

Simply holding a meeting is becoming increasingly difficult for the leadership of France's top science agencies as the unionists and researcher-protesters get more and more disruptive. In June, representatives of the trade unions and the researchers' movement Sauvons la Recherche developed a new protest tactic: To prevent a vote on hotly debated restructuring of the research agency CNRS, they simply occupied the meeting room of the 21-member Board of Trustees, forcing CNRS director Catherine Bréchignac to cancel the meeting. They tried the same game plan on 27 November, but Bréchignac outfoxed the protesters by secretly moving the meeting to another CNRS building a few streets away, where police had been lined up to prevent them from entering. The four union representatives on the board were notified at the last minute, presumably to prevent them from leaking the news to demonstrators.

Yesterday afternoon, the same scenario played out at the headquarters of the biomedical research agency INSERM, whose board was to vote on the 2009 budget, which includes a cut in the number of permanent jobs. When several hundred protesters blocked the entrance to INSERM's headquarters, already cordoned off by riot police, they learned that the meeting had been moved to the suburb of Bagnolet; cars were waiting for six union representatives on the board, for whom the move was a surprise.

Meanwhile, students from France's University Institutes of Technology are stepping up demonstrations against the law on university autonomy, passed last year, which they say is unfair to their institutes. And anger is still building up about the plan to reform the entire biomedical research sector, presented 2 weeks ago by Elias Zerhouni. The winter could be long and hot in France.