Picking Brains

Russia ponders plan to bring scientists home

a new plan aimed at boosting the prestige and success of Russian science targets up to 15,000 Russian scientists who have left the country for work abroad and is designed to convince them to return. One such returnee, theoretical crystallographer Artem Oganov, describing the program to Moskovsky Komsomolets, notes that even this ambitious goal represents a small fraction of the estimated 200,000 brains that have drained from Russia in the last few decades, as scientists have sought better economic and career opportunities abroad.

The government has been scouting émigré scientific talent to inject into Russian science, still built around an outdated structure dominated by the Academy of Sciences that deters risk-taking and innovation and is heavily dependent on state funding. All past attempts in this realm have done nothing to staunch the flow of young scientists to more lucrative, less bureaucratically constrained positions outside Russia.

Oganov, who heads a working group put in charge of reversing the brain drain, admits that the goals are both limited and focused. “We don’t want to return everyone,” he said, “just the most successful.”

The idea is to offer competitive salaries as well as benefits that the often cut-throat foreign academic world does not provide, such as housing and childcare, Oganov said. To achieve this during a deep recession, when even existing research budgets are being cut, he suggested that the government could partner with business, seeking sponsors in relevant fields.

“We’ll compile some lists of people, but with a targeted approach, only a couple hundred people can be attracted. To reach a mass scale, we have to do a huge public campaign, so that scientists will want to apply to return themselves,” Oganov added.

Does the plan stand a chance?

Surely the competition in academia abroad is fierce and the stress of competing for grants and gaining tenure can discourage even the most ambitious scientists. And some expat Russian scientists are surely nostalgic for their homeland or feel responsible for aging parents who have been left behind. Yet critics say that, for now at least, Oganov’s plan is just a pipe dream.

Writing in the popular scientific newspaper Troitsky Variant, political scientist Vladimir Gelman, who works in Finland, said Russia is simply not ready. It’s one thing, Gelman writes, to invite Big Scientists short term or temporarily, enticing them with special treatment. But if they resettle permanently they will come face to face with Russia’s daunting scientific bureaucracy and its mountains of required paperwork, to say nothing of the headache of purchasing necessities through the cumbersome state tender system. And then of course there is the corruption.

“The problem is not 15,000 scientists,” Gelman writes, “but that institutionally and infrastructurally Russia is absolutely unsuitable.”

As Moskovsky Komsomolets added in an editorial, Skolkovo, a scientific institute designed as an experimental center for attracting foreign talent and venture capital, has failed to produce any notable inventions. What is more, some scientists have been prosecuted for espionage. “One might think,” the paper concluded, “that the government is actually trying to destroy science.”

Andrei Gudkov, a US-based cancer researcher, said that, although he feels indebted to Russia for his fine education, “I’m certain that I benefit science more by working abroad, since the technological opportunities and speed [of work] there allow me to obtain more results in a given period of time.”