French Academy of Sciences
[8] The needed reform came late in the 20th century, in 1987, when the academy decided against the practice and to begin filling vacancies with people with new disciplines.
[11] The academy was originally organized by the royal reform hierarchically into the following groups: Pensionaires, Pupils, Honoraires, and Associés.
However, even someone like Magendie that had made breakthroughs in Physiology and impressed the academy with his hands-on vivisection experiments, could not get his study into its own category.
[4][circular reference] Despite Magendie being one of the leading innovators of his time, it was still a battle for him to become an official member of the academy, a feat he would later accomplish in 1821.
[4] He further improved the reverence of the academy when he and anatomist Charles Bell produced the widely known "Bell-Magendie Law".
[18] In 1816, the again renamed "Royal Academy of Sciences" became autonomous, while forming part of the Institute of France; the head of State became its patron.
[19] The academy came to control French patent laws in the course of the eighteenth century, acting as the liaison of artisans' knowledge to the public domain.
The civil engineer Augustin-Jean Fresnel entered the competition by submitting a new wave theory of light.
[21] Siméon Denis Poisson, one of the members of the judging committee, studied Fresnel's theory in detail.
Poisson thought that he had found a flaw when he demonstrate that Fresnel's theory predicts that an on-axis bright spot would exist in the shadow of a circular obstacle, where there should be complete darkness according to the particle-theory of light.
However, the head of the committee, Dominique-François-Jean Arago, and who incidentally later became Prime Minister of France, decided to perform the experiment in more detail.
[15] The overwhelming majority of members leave the academy posthumously, with a few exceptions of removals, transfers, and resignations.
Members expected to remain such for life, but interference occurred in a few cases where the government suddenly terminated membership for political reasons.
Still this relationship between the academy and the government was not a one-way affair, as members expected to receive their payment of an honorarium.
[17] One factor behind its decline was the development from a meritocracy to gerontocracy: a shift from those with demonstrated scientific ability leading the academy to instead favoring those with seniority.
[17] It became known as a sort of "hall of fame" that lost control, real and symbolic, of the professional scientific diversity in France at the time.
[17] Another factor was that in the span of five years, 1909 to 1914, funding to science faculties considerably dropped, eventually leading to a financial crisis in France.
[28] The French Academy of Science originally focused its development efforts into creating a true co-development Euro-African program beginning in 1997.
The standing committee COPED is in charge of the international development projects undertaken by the French Academy of Science and their associates.
Specifically higher education in sciences, and research practices in basic and applied sciences that deal with various aspects relevant to development (renewable energy, infectious diseases, animal pathologies, food resources, access to safe water, agriculture, urban health, etc.).
