The most important “anti-crisis method” does not work, does it?

Kyiv has hosted an international symposium, “The Attitude of Society and the State to Science and Technology in the Conditions of Current Economic Crises: Trends, Models, and Search for Ways to Improve Interaction.” According to organizers, the symposium was aimed at analyzing various situations in scientific research during economic crises, generalizing the experience of applying science as a most important anti-crisis method, and working out recommendations for using science as an instrument to overcome these crises on the international, national, and regional levels. But it is noteworthy that even on the fourth day of the symposium it was next to impossible to find in the media at least some news or views of the leading academics on the problem in question. Can society be taking any attitude at all to science if most people do not even know that this science really exists, even though scientific development is sort of a guarantee for the development of society and the state as a whole?

Lilia Hrynevych, chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Science and Education, proposed the other day that the Verkhovna Rada put on the agenda of its plenary session the draft Resolution No. 2164a “On the Parliamentary Commission on the Future.” “In a situation, when it takes political expediency and lobbying of interests, rather than common sense, to make an official decision, it is necessary to establish a special place for an unbiased dialogue about this country’s future, including science and education,” Hrynevych pointed out. In her words, most of the European Union’s parliaments have established special commissions on the future, which coordinate governmental policies with due account of the latest scientific achievements. “It is a difficult but extremely important task, especially now that the Ukrainian government has canceled the national high technology development program and adopted the State Program of Accelerate Economic Development for 2013-14 which focuses on the efforts to develop second- and third-phase technologies,” the committee chairperson noted.

It would be wrong to say that the problems of Ukrainian science are unique. They are common, one way or another, to all the post-Soviet countries. If you take Russia, its government spares no expense on the development of science. Suffice it to recall the construction of the ambitious innovational center Skolkovo. But they also have the same problems of young staff outflow, the quality of university research, and the necessity of restructuring the Academy of Sciences. There is also the problem of academic freedom and independence of scientific research, which was all too clear during a heated debate among Russian academics during the election of the new president of the Academy of Sciences. So, can science really be “the most important anti-crisis method” if it is itself in a crisis?

ANDRE GEIM: “IF WE LOOK AT TODAY’S ACADEMY, WE WILL SEE THAT IT LOOKS – PARDON THE EXPRESSION, I DON’T WANT TO HURT ANYBODY – LIKE A RETIREMENT HOME”

The elections of the new president of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) coincided with two scandals that are closely connected with science. Firstly, somebody posted the Common State Exam tests on the Internet, which nearly thwarted this event. Secondly, RAS gathered to elect its new president.

A more distant event was a debate on an enormous number of dissertations which have no academic value at all and are in fact nothing but plagiarism. All this means that Russian science, or, to be more exact, its management has accumulated major problems.

Three candidatures were nominated for the office of RAS president. Vladimir Fortov, who polled 766 (55 percent) votes out of 1,314 (one of which was found invalid), was elected president. Zhores Alfyorov and Aleksandr Nekipelov won 345 and 143 votes, respectively.

The voting was preceded by the speeches of all the three candidates. In the view of many delegates, Alfyorov made the most brilliant speech. In spite of his age (83!), he – the only Nobel Prize winner now working in Russia – is full of strength and ideas.

Nobody doubts that Alfyorov is an outstanding physicist and organizer of science, but he has an essential fault in the eyes of the government – his political views. The Nobel laureate is member of the Russian Communist Party, which, as the phrase goes, raises many a question in some well-known high-placed offices. Tellingly, one of the voters showed his support of Alfyorov on conditions of anonymity. It turns out that it is better not to disclose your identity if you want to express your opinion about staff placement in modern Russia’s science. Just in case!

RAS vice-president Aleksandr Nekipelov was the most pessimistic in his judgments. “The very future of the Russian Academy of Sciences is in danger. If this goes on, the academy will not hold out,” he said.

After being elected, Academician Fortov told journalists about his vision of what he would have to do. “The debate and the voting showed that, on the whole, the academy is prepared for and feels the necessity of changes. We will be making these changes without betraying the existing principles. The academy must work more dynamically, flexibly, and steadily. We are in the 21st century and must keep abreast of time,” he said.

What also illustrates difficult relations between science and the government is another failure to elect Mikhail Kovalchuk as director of the RAS Institute of Crystallography. This was the result of a secret-ballot vote at the meeting of RAS’s department of physical sciences. Moreover, contrary to the existing rules, they voted for a second time, but the result was still negative. This scientist began to carve out a brilliant successful scientific and administrative career when Vladimir Putin came to power. (Incidentally, Mikhail Kovalchuk’s younger brother Yury is a personal friend of the Russian president.) Obviously, the attempts to force through the candidature of Kovalchuk met with passive resistance. The government will solve this problem in some way, but this will have nothing to do with science.

On these days Russia welcomed Sir Andre Geim, a Nobel Prize winner, former research associate at RAS’s Institute of Microelectronics Technology and High Purity Materials in Chernogolovka, near Moscow, now citizen of the Netherlands, director of the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology at the University of Manchester. Geim spoke about RAS in no uncertain terms: “If you look at today’s academy, you will see that it looks – pardon the expression, I don’t want to hurt anybody – like a retirement home.” RIA Novosti quotes him as saying this in a speech at a meeting of the Russian Education Ministry’s Public Board. The average age of Russian academicians is 74.7. “On the other hand, if you look at universities and their level of research, it is a kindergarten. There are no people who have reached a true scientific level,” he said.

Then he noted: “The academy abroad is a very honorable club of advisors. The academy in Russia wields, for historical reasons, both the executive and legislative power in science, and you know what this usually ends with. It is perhaps hopeless to expect it to reform itself.”

The Soviet and then Russian science developed under the auspices of the state which pumped enormous funds into the research sectors that were important for the military-industrial complex. There was a total ideological control in the Soviet era, and when the reserves stocked up in the tsarist times in the field of exact and related sciences were exhausted, this triggered first a financial and then a human-power downfall.

The most talented ones emigrated. It is no mere coincidence that the Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry Andrei (Andre) Geim and Konstantin (Kostya) Novosyolov won the prestigious prize for the research they did in Britain. And the point is not only in high salaries and up-to-date equipment. Both laureates categorically rejected the invitation to work at Skolkovo. Geim said about this: “I do not think there will ever be a Silicon Skolkovo. This sounds to me as if you had begun to build a vacuum-tube Skolkovo in the 1990s, when vacuum tubes had already been replaced by transistors. The same is here… Have your people gone off their nuts altogether? Do they think they can invite anybody by measuring him off a bagful of gold?”

Obviously, the main problem of the Russian as well as Ukrainian science is lack of academic freedom. There can be no science without it. If there is freedom, all the remaining, including material, problems will be solved one way or another. Having begun to work in England, Pyotr Kapitsa was absolutely free in his scientific pursuit, although the famous Ernest Rutherford said at once that funding was the problem of the young researcher. And it was OK. Kapitsa’s laboratory was supplied with money very soon. Besides, the vast majority of businessmen and officials did not have the faintest idea of atom exploration.

Science, especially fundamental science, needs not only funds and equipment. It needs a chain from school through universities to laboratories. What really matters is human power, and the state bureaucracy in both Russia and Ukraine does not tackle this problem at all. As a result, there still remain such rudiments of the past as the current Academy of Sciences, its research institutes. Also absolutely unsatisfactory is the quality of secondary and higher school.

A separate question is the relationship between business and science. It is a comprehensive problem that has no standard solutions. Every country addresses it with due account of its own historical, mental, and material conditions. Even applied science is more and more costly. Results cannot be implemented immediately – it takes time and money to put them into practice. Yet there are some well-known ways to encourage business to forge links with science. What seriously slows down this process in Ukraine is total red tape and an inflexible system of research organization.

These problems cannot be solved quickly, but if they remain totally unattended, one will only be able to read about true science in both Russia and Ukraine in history manuals.