The board of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) formally approved controversial reforms (see Nature 453,573; 2008) on 27 November that would split the agency into nine semi-autonomous institutes, with a recommendation for a tenth in computing. The meeting required police protection from protesting researchers. A draft of government proposals for a reform of French life sciences was also revealed last week by the newspaper Liberation. It proposes the creation within two years of an overarching research council - the National Institute of Life Sciences - which would coordinate policy at the national biomedical agency INSERM, and health-related life sciences within the CNRS and other research agencies. The report also suggests regrouping all life sciences within a single research agency, along the lines of a recent recommendation made by an invited foreign panel led by Elias Zerhouni, former head of the US National Institutes of Health.
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