Russia Struggles to Revive its Past Renown in Science
DUBNA, Russia -- As he walks darkened hallways toward an acclaimed particle accelerator, Yuri Lobanov remembers the early 1960s, when he arrived at this science city.
That's when science was a high priority for the Soviets, a point of pride in a decades-long competition with the United States. The space race and Cold War were in full swing, and money flowed. Patriotism and prosperity attracted the best students to work in what was considered the highest calling.
This lab, part of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, was built as a communist counterpart to Western scientific partnerships.
"It was a place of culture," says Lobanov, as he walks into a control room for an accelerator whose exciting results in recent years include creating new elements on the periodic table, but whose sturdy black dials and silver switches now have the distinct feel of a 1950s science fiction movie. "It was like an island."
Ten years after the Cold War's end, Russian science scrimps for every ruble. Researchers get by with old equipment and dim hallway lights to save electricity.
Once among the most pampered members of society, scientists have seen their salaries plummet below those of Russian secretaries because of massive decreases in federal funds for science. Some of the most talented, especially young, promising students, have left science or left Russia to seek better-paying jobs.
"If you're a hotshot engineer at an institute, 98 percent would say they would like to go abroad," says Glenn Schweitzer of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, author of "Swords into Market Shares," which is about Russia's economic and scientific prospects.
There is,however, a hint of change. A decade-long decline in college science majors is reversing. Officials at the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences are considering plans to put more money toward young scientists' careers and encourage older ones to retire.
Scientists in Dubna, a quiet city of tall trees and low brick buildings 75 miles north of Moscow, are lucky. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research has a 40-year tradition of collaboration with international researchers, something stifled in many institutes in a formerly closed Russia. Those connections give researchers a chance for grants to supplement average $100-a-month salaries.
Scientists at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, for example, have created previously unseen elements in intense competition with German and American groups. They have a longstanding partnership with Lawrence Livermore Laboratory scientists that brings money and prestige to both.
"We can't come back to the former organization of our science," says Vladimir Fortov, a vice president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "It is impossible because the economic system and the social system is quite different."
A dismal decade
The second-floor classroom is humid and filled with healthy houseplants, a sharp contrast to the still-wintry April air of Akademgorodok in southwest Siberia.
Ten high school students, boys with short haircuts and blazers and girls in ponytails and skirts, scribble notes as the gray-suited teacher writes the familiar "Aa+Aa = aa" of a basic genetics lesson.
His deep voice holds their attention. They giggle as Gregory Dymshits ribs them about chicken heredity and their grandparents' eye color.
Granted, these aren't typical students. They're attending an elite physics and math boarding school for Siberia's best students in this science city created by Stalin to rival intellectual centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And Dymshits isn't a typical teacher. He's a professional genetics researcher who has taught high school for 35 years.
Ten years ago, he was chosen as one of Russia's best high school science teachers. That entitled him to a salary supplement from the International Soros Science Education Program, a fund set up by billionaire U.S. investor George Soros to keep Russian and other regional secondary schoolteachers, college professors and graduate students in science during a time when many were leaving to feed their families.
That exodus was a big change for a country where science was among the most respected professions and a common career choice for smart young people. Communists saw science as a vital competitive tool and a way to prove the Marxist ideal. They rewarded its practitioners with well-paying jobs and hard-to-get apartments and cars.
That commitment was mirrored in a Russian education system that emphasized science, especially physics and math. The result: a massive science infrastructure that at one time employed as many scientists as the United States, although this country's population is smaller by nearly 100 million.
After the financial and political fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, salaries for these elite professionals fell from the equivalent of a U.S. scientist's salary to nearly nothing. Now a full professor at Moscow State University, Russia's top institution of higher education, earns $100 a month, and those at other schools earn $50 or less. High school science teachers are paid less than $30. Scientists once earned twice the average salary, which is now about $60 to $80 per month.
That shocking dip created an equally disturbing departure from science. The most talented researchers, with good reputations and Western contacts, could leave for research jobs elsewhere. Many did, especially young people. Others left for business, which seemed a quick way to discover the joys of capitalism.
Most Russia experts assumed the downturn would be just a blip while the economy recovered. An initial influx of Western philanthropy, most notably from Soros, who donated $70 million from 1994 to 1997, aimed to support the best scientists and science teachers for a short time by paying salaries and buying scientific journals.
But in recent years, that support has begun to wane as few signs of an economic recovery have emerged. The Soros science program has halted programs to pay high-profile retired scientists and has severely cut back on salary supplements.
"We can't stop it, but definitely, we helped a lot, " says Lydia Ryabova, a friendly former engineer who runs the funding programs for Soros professors.
Federal and local Russian governments have not picked up financial support for Soros programs, as some had hoped. The government now spends less than half of what it spent on research 10 years ago, about 1.06 percent of its gross domestic product, or $2 billion -- even less than New Zealand or the Czech Republic. Few Russian businesses are motivated or financially strong enough to fund research.
Remaining scientists often stayed because of family commitment, patriotism or a lack of opportunity abroad. Many work part-time jobs, as translators, computer teachers or drivers for visiting reporters, so they can continue in science. Others, such as physicist Alexander Bukin, spend months each year researching or teaching in Europe or the United States, earning enough to live the rest of the year.
Each year for 13 years, Bukin has traveled from Akademgorodok almost 6,000 miles to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where he works on high-energy physics experiments.
It is difficult to leave family to come where you feel uncomfortable with the language, he says, sitting in the SLAC lobby in June with fellow Russians, including a first-time scientific visitor and a UC Berkeley student.
"Many people choose to stay ... and not go abroad," Bukin says as he ducks down, uncomfortable with his perfectly passable English. "It is a quite personal decision."
One of those who don't want to leave is 17-year-old science student Alexander Kurgan who is in Dymshits' biology class.
Kurgan, from the Ural Mountains, understands that salaries might be better elsewhere, and many fellow students want to leave. But Kurgan, whose father is a policeman and whose mother works in a state insurance company in a town 750 miles away, is patriotic and wants to work here after he has his degree in physics, or maybe computers.
"The future depends on us," he says.
Saving science
Keeping Kurgan and those like him will be a determining factor in whether science can survive and thrive in Russia.
Some think Russian science just needs money to quickly recover. That's a partial solution, but the "youth problem" is the most serious issue, says Schweitzer of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
"It used to be that being a professor was it. ... It is so much tied to financial status now," he says. "I think (the challenge) is convincing the young people that if they go into science they have a chance of making a living."
Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin did little to acknowledge this or other science problems, but Vladimir Putin has mentioned science in several speeches, an encouraging sign for those hoping for restoration of money to science.
In his large, picture-filled office overlooking the Moscow skyline, the Russian Academy of Sciences' Fortov says he will ask Putin to give more money to young scientists. His plan would allocate 10 percent of Russia's science budget to 10,000 promising young researchers, money they can use to buy equipment and hire graduate and post-doctoral students.
"If the talented will be inside the country, we will find a solution," says Fortov, a large, serious man with a picture of himself and U.S. physicist Edward Teller in their younger days on the wall. "If they leave the country, nothing will help us."
Russia has already implemented a competitive grant-based funding system, called the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. This, more than the overarching funding of the past, may allow the country to prioritize funding on research with the highest potential for success.
Others think Russian business itself may one day save science. Two young businessmen, including the governor of an Eastern province, have promised millions to research.
The young, dark-haired executive director of Soros' science education programs in Russia, Vladimir Zarnitsyn, says that won't happen until the tax code changes; money for science from philanthropists is taxed upwards of 40 percent.
Zarnitsyn received his doctorate in physics from one of Moscow's most prestigious scientific colleges and has seen most classmates leave Russia or science. That, combined with what he sees as governmental failure to address the problem, leaves him less optimistic about the future.
Pushing ahead
Back in Dubna, Flerov lab scientists have lofty plans to build a new accelerator, announced with a colorful diagram to those entering the sturdy brick building's front door. They hope to explore the nature of an atom's nucleus with this new machine, continuing their international collaborations despite problems.
"I could not say that the salary and the general resources strictly determine the results," says Yuri Oganessian, the Flerov lab director. "If you are a painter or a writer, if we pay you 10 times more it does not become 10 times better."
The most successful part of Russian science is small labs such as his that raise their own funding, both from Russia and abroad, and produce good science, Oganessian says.
"The scientific level is not made by the big institutions," he says. "The small groups are really the diamonds."
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