Footballer and researcher Marc Belloud (Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2021)

Thehe is Coincidences are sometimes useful. August 10, daily the scientist It tells us that the salary of footballer Lionel Messi at Paris Saint-Germain (Paris Saint-Germain) will be 40 million euros annually, and that the average salary of CAC 40 managers will rise from 3.8 million euros in 2020 to 5.3 million in 2021. After a few pages, we find out that The annual budget of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is €6 million per year. Thus, a football star’s salary corresponds to the nearly seven years’ resources of an institution of 195 member states, coordinates the work of hundreds of international scientists and performs an essential function in understanding the causes and consequences of global warming.

We suggest using Messi’s salary amount as the new unit of measure. We will call it General- GF “, NS “ A year of great fortune This figure of 40 million euros is undoubtedly much lower than the reality since the magazine’s estimates Forbes The revenue of this player in 2020, including advertising contracts, amounted to 126 million dollars (103 million euros). But let’s keep 40 million, or 110,000 euros of income per day, or enough to pay, for a year, 1,500 French people with an average salary.

This standard salary deserves to be included in the research budget in biology and health, which one might think in times of health crisis is a priority for the government. Two recent reports provide detailed information on this topic. The first observation, that the share of the budget of the Ministry of Research and Higher Education devoted to biology and health decreased by 400 million euros between 2015 and 2020. The second observation, the support paid by the state to the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) and the Institute of Biological Sciences of the National Research Center (… ]