French scientist refuses 15,000 euros award

François Bonhomme is a man of principle it would appear.

He doesn't agree with the French government's policy of honouring scientific excellence with financial rewards and has turned down a payment of €15,000 made to him last December.

The 55-year-old is a director and researcher at the Institut des sciences de l'évolution (Institute of evolutionary sciences) in the southern French city of Montpellier, part of this country's Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National centre for scientific research, CNRS).

As its name implies the CNRS is a government-funded research organisation which comes under the administrative authority of the ministry of research.

In September last year the government introduced a scheme which would award extra payments of up to €25,000 for those in charge of research teams at publicly-funded laboratories as a recognition of "scientific excellence".

But some within the scientific community in France opposed the idea, suggesting it was out of step with the way in which research had always functioned in this country and that it would in fact encourage competition which might not necessarily be in the best interests of pure research.

And that was very much the reasoning behind Bonhomme's decision to turn down the award, which he says would "enable those in charge of research to negotiate with those who would be paying them while at the same time contracting work out to others."

"It's not a question of being in competition with each other where every group of researchers is concerned primarily about whether it receives extra payment for its work," he explained on national radio at the weekend.

"Maybe such a system works well within private industry, but when it comes to research at universities the same cannot be said," he continued.

"If we've chosen to work in this sort of environment it's exactly because we don't want to be put under the sort of pressure which can in fact be counterproductive and there's already a system of evaluation and promotion in place that the best and most competent to rise to the top and be better paid."

Bonhomme has requested that the payment he was due to receive be made instead to the Fondation de France, an agency set up in 1969 to "encourage the growth of all forms of private

He's also not the only scientist to take such a stand. In October last year a French physicist, Didier Chatenay, also turned down a similar payment made under the new scheme.