In a recent interview with the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller, Maxime Gauberti reflects on the importance of long-term funding, scientific freedom and interdisciplinary research.
Read the full interview here.
Below are some excerpts from the interview, translated into english :
Since 2022, the Foundation has been implementing a program to support top talent in life sciences research in France: Impulscience®. Designed for mid-career researchers, this program addresses two key objectives: preserving researchers’ freedom to innovate and providing them with long-term support. The Foundation is developing an ambitious network to engage and support the researchers it funds, with the aim of fostering new initiatives and collaborations.
Looking back over the past few years, can you tell us how the support you received (such as the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences or the Impulscience program) has made a difference for you?
Maxime Gauberti (Neuroradiologist, University of Caen; 2024 Impulscience Award Winner): Above all, the Impulscience program has given us something very valuable in research: time, resources, and therefore the opportunity to take risks. Substantial funding over five years allows us to move beyond the most obvious projects and easily attainable goals to explore more ambitious ideas, sometimes breaking away from our usual lines of research. This type of research requires accepting that it may take several years before we obtain results that are truly publishable. This is difficult to do with short-term, highly restrictive funding, which naturally pushes researchers toward safer projects. Impulscience has allowed us to take this step in a different direction, to invest in riskier technological and conceptual developments—ones with much greater potential for impact. Our laboratory has historically been rooted in basic neuroscience; Impulscience has allowed us to venture much further into biomedical engineering, nanomedicine, and imaging. It is this combination of duration, scientific freedom, and funding level that has truly changed the way we conduct research.
How does the Foundation help you maintain close ties with the community of award recipients?
Maxime Gauberti: I come from a relatively small university in Caen. We don’t necessarily have an expert in every field just a few subway stops away. In fact, we don’t even have a subway! In this context, networking is particularly important. The prestige associated with the Impulscience program makes initial contacts much easier, and the Foundation gives us access to a top-tier scientific community spanning an extremely diverse range of disciplines. For our lab, which is multidisciplinary by nature and works at the intersections of imaging, neuroscience, immunology, chemistry, and physics, this is a decisive advantage. This facilitates interactions with communities to which we might not otherwise have such easy access and allows us to quickly find the expertise that is lacking locally. In this way, the Foundation helps, in a sense, to bridge the geographical and disciplinary gaps between researchers.
I especially remember an incredible workshop on creativity held in Chaumont-sur-Loire. You find yourself sharing a table with professors from the Collège de France, a comic book artist, a philosophy researcher… and a gourmet meal. These are the kinds of encounters you’d rarely have in the usual context of our scientific work, and that’s precisely what makes them so enriching. The discussions take you far beyond your own field, forcing you to look at your own way of thinking and working in a new light. I still think about it often today. That workshop truly opened my mind to many things, far beyond scientific research alone.
Given your background, what advice would you give to young people who are hesitant to pursue a career in scientific research?
Maxime Gauberti: Medicine and research are two extremely demanding but extraordinarily rewarding professions, each for different reasons. In medicine, we sometimes forget where the treatments and technologies we use every day come from: MRI, cancer immunotherapies, and targeted therapies would not exist if researchers had simply chosen to devote themselves to patient care without seeking to invent the medicine of tomorrow. Research should therefore not be viewed as a secondary activity or as a necessary step toward certain academic positions: it is an integral part of medicine. I like to draw an analogy with aviation: to fly passengers, the pilot is indispensable, but so is the engineer who designed the plane. In the biomedical field, we have the rather extraordinary opportunity to be, in a sense, both the engineer and the pilot: to help invent new tools and then participate in using them to treat patients.
Of course, the timeframes are different. Today, we generally do not treat patients with treatments we ourselves have just invented. We treat them with the medications and technologies developed by those who came before us; and we must hope that the next generation will be able to treat patients with what we are developing today. Keeping this chain of medical progress alive is a collective responsibility. It requires not only doctors but also biologists, physicists, chemists, engineers, computer scientists, and all those who contribute to research and patient care. It is precisely this diversity that makes biomedical research so exciting. To young people who are hesitating, I would therefore say that they do not necessarily have to choose between understanding and treating. In the biomedical field, we have the opportunity to do both. It is demanding, but it is also an extraordinary privilege: to participate in the medicine of today while trying, in our own small way, to invent the medicine of tomorrow.