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The CNRS is 80 years old this Friday, but during 365 days, the institute will celebrate, through events in France and abroad, the values at the foundation of the institution: the freedom of research, innovation, social progress and the diffusion of scientific culture. Back on a history of French science.
Created October 19, 1939 by a decree of the President of the Republic Albert Lebrun, the National Center for Scientific Research is born in a world that has just tipped into the abyss: six weeks earlier, Nazi Germany invaded the Poland. In the process, England and France declared war on him. In this context, the Center's mission is to organize scientific mobilization.
Jean Perrin, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927, is the founding father of the National Center for Scientific Research. A great organizer of French research, he is Under-Secretary of State of the Popular Front, the coalition of leftist parties that ruled France from April 1936 to April 1938; he then laid the foundation of the CNRS, but the institute will not be established until a year later.
The daughter of Marie Curie, godmother of CNRS
On September 3, 1939, France declared war on Nazi Germany, and in this very tense political context, Jean Perrin declared: " There is no possible science where thought is not free ".
The second godmother who will look at the cradle of the young CNRS is Irène Joliot-Curie, chemist and physicist, daughter of Marie Curie and mother of a major discovery: artificial radioactivity, discovery that will earn him a Nobel Prize in chemistry, with Frédéric Joliot, in 1935.
The creation of the CNRS was therefore the realization of a vision that was at once political, humanistic and scientific, and since then many Nobel laureates have grown up within it. Today, the CNRS is 32,000 people, 1100 laboratories, 22 Nobel Prize winners and the 2nd largest research institution worldwide in scientific publications.
# 80yearsCNRS 🥳 | The @CNRS is looking forward to seeing you at its "New World (s)" Forum from October 25th to 27th at @citedessciences with a civic and festive evening on Friday October 25 at @Gro_ndControl @Paris!
👉 https://t.co/50CaZ94jb6#ForumCNRSpic.twitter.com/X6iuF1Dawc