Paris

Kourilsky: must maintain prestige. Credit: INSTITUT PASTEUR

France's leading medical research institute, the Institut Pasteur, last week named Philippe Kourilsky as its new director. Kourilsky, a specialist in molecular immunology who has been with the institute for 27 years, will replace Maxine Schwartz, whose second six-year term ends in January.

Under Schwartz, the institute's budget increased significantly to FF998 million (US$160 million) in 1998, and it became heavily involved in fields such as the origins and treatment of AIDS.

Scientists at the Pasteur say Kourilsky's largest challenge will be to maintain its prestige as a competitive institution, while staying true to its nineteenth-century mission as a research institution focusing on infectious diseases and public health.

“His major mandate is to make sure that Pasteur remains a prima donna in microbiological research,” says Simon Wain-Hobson, director of a molecular retrovirology laboratory the institute. “We have to modernize and at the same time maintain our history.”

Pasteur researchers say that Kourilsky is well placed to do this. He has been associated with the institute since 1972, but has also held posts at INSERM, France's national biomedical research agency, and in industry, at the Lyons-based company Laboratoires Mérieux. He is currently a professor of molecular immunology at the Collège de France and a research director at the Pasteur.

Kourislky is “both an insider — a true ‘pasteurien’ — and an outsider”, says Jean-Louis Virelizier, director of a viral immunology lab at the institute. “He has all the potential to be a good director,” says Wain-Hobson. “I think he is politically savvy, bright, dynamic. The real test will be when he gets to work.”

Major tasks facing the director, in addition to coordinating Pasteur's 22 institutions scattered throughout the world, include defining its research strategy in areas such as genomics.