The last two issues of our Journal «Rayonnement du CNRS» were dedicated to Brazil and Poland and aimed at
strengthening our ties with our Alumni and friends of the CNRS in those countries. The current issue is dedicated
to the role of women in science to-day. For a very long time, girls were dissuaded from entering a scientific career
on the fallacious grounds that this was a field for men only. Nowadays, a great many women are scientists hailed
by their peers, but parity is still far from achieved, in some subjects at least as Pascale Bukhari, who is Director of
the task force on the place of women in the CNRS, stresses in her article. In order to campaign against this totally
unjustified old prejudice, we have constructed this issue around articles written by women scientists recognised
and acclaimed in their fields, providing a state of the arts in the disciplines in which they have made a name
for themselves. The overall coordination of this special issue was quite naturally entrusted to Claudine Hermann,
the founding President and now Honorary President of «Women and Science». I am extremely grateful to her for
contributing so decisively to the contents of this issue. Since we are totally non-sectarian, we commissioned a male
author to write up an account of the exceptional career of a pioneer of marine biology, Jeanne Villepreux-Power.
May these examples of distinguished female careers in science encourage many more women to embrace a scientific
profession and thus enable parity to be achieved in all fields of research.
I would like to remind our readers who do not regularly visit our website http://www.rayonnementducnrs.com that
they can now benefit from the improvements recently introduced. Thus you may now consult the list of our 2,000
+ members and chase up former friends and colleagues whom you have lost trace of. To do this you only need to
consult our Year Book on the Home Page of our website, using your membership N° as access code. You can also
consult your own Year Book entry and update it if you so wish. If you wish to enter an E-mail address accessible
to our members only, this will enable us to contact you quickly, thus freeing our voluntary staff from the fastidious
task of sending you postal updates of our activities and saving postal costs. You can check whether you are up to
date with your subscriptions and, in a few clicks achieve this. In its regional pages open to all, our site also gives
you the E-mail address of our regional representatives who will be delighted to answer any questions and are open
to any suggestions from members or would-be members. You can suggest activities you are interested in, eg in the
fields of «science for all», from teenagers to senior citizens. Last but not least, when you visit our site you will be
able to discover the various activities offered in each of our regions which you are warmly invited to participate in,
thereby contributing to the life of our Association.
Michel PETIT
President, CNRS Alumni Association