Nostalgie, nostalgie ...

En 2005, le Centre Henri Tudor a réalisé un DVD pour expliquer aux nouveaux collaborateurs ses valeurs fondamentales et le contexte dans lequel il s'est développé depuis sa création en 1987.

Ce DVD contient une table ronde réunissant un panel de chercheurs posant toutes les questions et de dirigeants du CRP Tudor pour y répondre. 

Pour garantir la spontanéité des propos, les questions ne devaient pas être montrées aux dirigeants avant le débat et ceux-ci n'avaient pas le droit d'utiliser des notes de préparation. 


Vous pouvez regarder deux extraits en direct:

Introduction et présentation des intervenants (4'42'')

Extraits qui sont d'une grande actualité ... (13'50'')

Télécharger la vidéo 1,99 Go (2 h 41)

Funding science, part 2: Should scientists be salesmen as well?

In the first part of this article, I had mentioned the “all-out scramble for external funding” that has taken hold of the centre's scientists. Since the development of this “self-funding” mentality is quite general in our modern scientific system, I think it deserves some attention.

I shall start with a seemingly trivial remark about semantics and vocabulary choices. Whenever a colleague will or has presented an idea for funding somewhere, he or she will usually talk about “selling the idea”, meaning finding ways to gain the approval of whoever takes the decision to fund or not. Of the many ways to express this (try to convince of the usefulness, or the interest of the project; or simply present as concisely and understandably as one can), the chosen phrase is characteristic of salesmen's mentality. I see three problems with that mentality. First, it turns an idea into a thing, although an idea is not a thing. An idea is alive, dynamic, and its concrete realisation will change according to external constraints and the solutions man will devise for them (new ideas). A thing is finished, static, dead. Turning something alive into a dead thing is typical of a materialistic society that confuses movement with action and misunderstands the essential core of human ingenuity. Secondly, this choice follows a general trend in our society to reduce everything to an exchange of goods.