Opening symposium 2010-2011
The campus plan and the creation of PRES (Pôles de Recherche et d'Enseignement Supérieur - Research and Higher Education Clusters), complementing earlier reforms at universities and the CNRS, have set in motion an unprecedented drive to concentrate French research and keep it at the forefront of international competition, now extended to the major emerging countries.
International competition is not the only factor. Over the last ten years, fundamental research has undergone upheavals that have led to the creation of centers large enough to justify the purchase and high running costs of the increasingly high-performance equipment required. All disciplines have been affected, including the humanities and social sciences, which have been completely transformed by the introduction of computers and electronic publications. The use of the heavy equipment now commonplace in biology and medicine (genome sequencing, imaging etc.), in physics (Large Hadron Collider in Geneva etc.), in astronomy (Hubble space telescope etc.) is accessible only to organizations capable of financing them and guaranteeing their intensive use.
The search for financial resources is therefore a necessity. This means national and international competition, as private and government funding goes to the most renowned laboratories. There's nothing fundamentally new here: research is just the other side of the discovery coin, and discoveries demand that you be the first. What has changed, in addition to the scale of the financial resources now required, is the use of new assessment criteria: contested international rankings such as that of Shanghai University; prizes, some of which, like the Nobel Prizes, arrive years after the discoveries have been made; numerical evaluations whose elements and tools are the subject of debate.
Competition imposes secrecy until one is sure of the result. So does patenting, as well as contracts with private industry, which provide much of the funding for basic research. Yet it is the researcher's vocation to make his results known as generously and as widely as possible. Science knows no boundaries. All laboratories, including those in the humanities and social sciences, have foreign associates or full members. All are in contact with their foreign counterparts. Almost all of them use, and at the same time contribute to the development of, global tools such as large-scale instruments or electronic databases. So what do secrecy and international competition mean? How should researchers behave? Is there not a risk of ethical drift?
These are the questions that the 2010 opening symposium aims to address. The role played yesterday and today by the Collège de France in research and the teaching of research, and the fact that we ourselves are confronted with these contradictions, give us the opportunity and the duty to do so.