Poussée scientifique ou demande de médecins ? La recherche médicale en France de l'Institut national d'hygiène à l'INSERM

Abstract

Jean-François Picard: Scientifîc push or medical pull? French biomedical research from the Institut national d'hygiene to the INSERM (1941-1964) This approach of the medical research history in France focuses on the researchers themselves and assumes a dialectic between doctors and scientists. Biomedical research is typified first of ail by its close link to applied needs; clinical research closely tied to the patient. Secondly, there is research that has developed along lines of genetics and molecular biology. In 1946 this division inspired some biologists (A. Lwoff, L. Rapkine), to propose as the model for the new CNRS, the existing British Medical Research Council which funded three times as many researchers as doctors. In the same time, an active group of medical researchers, principally at the Public Assistance Hospital in Paris (J. Bernard, J. Hamburger) gave their colleagues the chance to establish laboratories at the hospital. A Claude Bernard Association was created in 1952, while, with strong support from higher education, Pr. Robert Debré achieved a real national health reform in December 1958, in the form of new Centres hospitaliers universitaires. In fact, Medical research was already the responsibility of an organization created by the Secretary of State for Family and Public Health in the Vichy regime (Law of 30 November 1941): the Institut national d'hygiène (INH). Significantly, the INH was created in the wider context of the establishment of a national health policy. After the Liberation, it kept its research function and was given a specific budget by the Caisse nationale de securité sociale (which itself had only recently been created) and so it functioned as a conduit for grants to medical researchers. But in 1958 the organization came under the scrutiny of an administrative commission which charged it - among other things - with lax management of the medical research grants. The INH became the Institut de la sante et de la recherche medicale (July 1964). From there, it was INSERM that established a real science policy in medicine. It took up the «concerted action» demanded by the DGRST (ministry of Research) while also professionalizing research. Whereas, the grantees of INH were practically ail doctors, now they constituted only 25 % of those recruited by INSERM (thus, following the model suggested by biologists forty years earlier).