Английский язык для аспирантов и соискателей. Минакова Т.В. - 25 стр.

      I don’t know about prizes, but I believe that Russia’s scientific potential is far
from being exhausted. There are some scientific schools that are still up to the finest
international research standards. Say, excellent results are being achieved in the field
of thermonuclear energy and elementary particles physics. True, the number of such
schools is shrinking: Their founders pass away while their talented students go to
work in the West. Students of science theory know very well that the golden age of
Soviet science was in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the country was awash with
petrodollars. That was the time when new laboratories, research centers, and entire
branches of science were emerging with young people coming to work there. A 25-
year-old lab chief or a 30-year-old deputy director or even director was a perfectly
normal thing then. Almost all ideas that are winning prizes today originated in those
years.
      The command economy is no more and the money is even scarcer, but the old
principle of financing is still in place?
      Not only the principle of financing. The entire paternalistic command-and-
administer structure of science is still alive. Say, the Academy still acts as a kind of
fundamental science ministry. It manages vast state property and distributes
enormous state resources between institutions under its jurisdiction.
      But what the science infrastructure needs is not so much support as
development. In other words, the lion’s share of resources should be given to the best.
It is an open secret that the majority of the once densely populated research institute
building today are half filled at best, while researchers go to work abroad. Russian
scientists are in 40th position or thereabouts in the frequency of quotation in the
world’s leading science journals. Should we still take pride in our fundamental
science?
      Clearly, Russian fundamental science is hard put to develop within the bounds
of the old structure, which does not fit into a new economic system. So why is the
Academy not reforming itself?
      The idea was aired in early 1990s. But academicians managed to persuade the
political leadership at the time that reforming the Academy would be tantamount to
destroying science, putting forward an interesting thesis: In Russia, two things are not
subject to reform, the Church and the Academy of Sciences.
      Domestic fundamental science has indeed developed mainly within the
academic structure.
      Mainly, yes (although the most successful research programs in nuclear physics,
for example, have been conducted at institutes affiliated with the Ministry of Atomic
Energy). But times have changed. Today, sad as this may be, our science has been
“conquered” by the West without a single shot being fired: Tens of thousands of
Russian scientists are successfully working abroad. One of them quipped: “They
talked about the need for global expansion of Russian science, didn’t they? So it has
now come about”.
      Should the brain drain be lamented in the first place? If fundamental science is
beyond the state’s means, perhaps it could develop elsewhere.
      It should be lamented, although fundamental science, unlike applied science,
indeed has no commercial value. The results are published openly, immediately
                                                                                     25