New head in Vienna

management issues may be harder to tackle. This part of the crisis dates back to June 2004, when the assembly refused to approve the institute’s annual report because of the impending financial troubles. While Pasteur is a private nonprofit organisation that uses its income from patents to fund further research, its research is intertwined with the public funding bodies including CNRS and INSERM, and thus it has also been hit by the budget crisis that led to the revolt of the researchers last year (Curr. Biol. (2004) 14, R1031). Following open protests outside a council meeting in December, the council collectively resigned in January. Of its 20 members, only the four sent by the government remained. Hence the need to elect 16 new members on March 15. In order to overcome the crisis and open a new dialogue with his research staff, Kourilsky took the unprecedented step of opening a chat room on the institute’s intranet, where researchers could anonymously put their questions and complaints to him. In the chat, Kourilsky admitted that the institute was undergoing a crisis, which he attributed to lack of understanding between the parties, and for which he assumed shared responsibility. Replying to a question about the loss of trust between management and staff, he said: “I have learned a lot from this crisis. ... Re-establishing the dialogue is very important to me.” The coming weeks will show whether this communications exercise will be enough to win back the trust of the research staff and in particular the newly elected council. This council represents a credible new start for the institute, and the national newspaper Liberation headlined the following day that “the tension decreases at the Pasteur Institute”. So the researchers can go back to work to make the institute as successful in the 21st century as it has been in the previous two.