Under French President Nicolas Sarkozy, government officials have been pouring billions of euros into a structured campaign to revitalize the country's moribund biomedical research industry. In an interview with Nature, French scientific adviser Arnold Munnich explains that the government has been moving away from its "monolithic" state research agencies and putting the spotlight, along with plenty of money, into a campaign to make universities compete for research funds as well as top scientists.
To that end, the French budgeted €5 billion to upgrade select campuses, another €11 billion to revitalize the university system and €1 billion to each of the top universities' endowment funds. In an effort to catch up with the British, long known for world-leading research centers, France is designating top clinical performers as centers of excellence, which will help them gather more funding and spur innovation.
"Universities have become the main operators, in charge of organizing their own research strategies," says Munnich. "That has been accompanied by a marked shift away from the dominance of recurrent research funding, where the agencies funded labs on a rolling basis, to one where individual labs compete nationally for funding on the basis of grant proposals for projects - with the major player here being the National Research Agency, based in Paris, which was created in 2007 and has a budget of €850 million this year. Independent evaluation has also been added outside of the agencies, with the creation in 2007 of the Agency for Evaluation of Research and Higher Education in Paris."
- here's the Q&A with Nature