[FPSPACE] Russian Expats Challenge Country's Support of Science

[LARRY KLAES]

October 9, 2009


Russian Expats Challenge Country's Support of Science


by Andrey Allakhverdov and Vladimir Pokrovsky 

 

Last Friday, in the leading Moscow business newspaper Vedomosti, a letter addressed to Russia’s president and its prime minister and signed by more than 100 Russian researchers who permanently work abroad complained of “the disastrous situation in the Russian basic research,” noting extremely low levels of funding and a continuing massive brain drain. 

 

“We certainly hope to draw the attention of the political leadership of the country to the dangers of neglecting fundamental science and education,” says Andrei Starinets, a physicist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and an author of the letter. “It takes years before investments in fundamental science and education pay off. These issues therefore require strategic rather than tactical thinking.”

 

The letter hasn’t drawn any official response so far, but Russian officials this week boasted about their support of science, particularly a new program to lure back 100 expat researchers to work at least 2 months a year in a Russian research institute or university. 

 

“The process of return of researchers to Russia will become avalanche-like in the nearest future,” said the minister of science and education Andrey Fursenko at the Second International Nanotechnology Forum which has just closed in Moscow.


 

“The process has started,” Fursenko further claimed in an interview to a Moscow radio station, “and many of those who returned back noted that they have got much more up-to-date equipment than they had abroad.” At the nanotech forum, Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev also spoke of the expat researchers. “It would be inexcusable for us to neglect such a treasure,” he declared. “Our task is to interest these people by offering them proper conditions to work in our country and proper projects.” 

 

Full article here:

 

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/10/russian-expats.html

 

 
 		 	   		  
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