Since the mid-2000s, research policies have undergone dramatic transformations. In western countries, the creation of new public agencies, the generalization of project-based funding and the reforms of research assessment have deeply modified the governance of research. Building on the French case, this paper aims at understanding how these transformations have impacted academics’ participation to research policy in biomedicine. Analysing the historical evolutions of the relation between the French State and the academics, the paper shows that the scientists’ participation in the governing bodies has undergone a triple process of expansion, of work division and of role specialisation. These transformations are not only the consequence of a neo-managerial turn of public policies but the product of political processes whose history begins in the 1960s.