#4
Izvestia
June 21, 2002
SCIENTISTS READY TO PROTEST
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]
On June 20, the staff union of the Russian Academy of Sciences announced launching a march of protest by the Russian scientists. The march will begin on June 24 in the scientific town of Pushchino and will finish on June 27 near the Cabinet offices in Moscow. Organizers of the action hold the government as the main culprit of the adversities of the national science.
Russian science has been on the verge of extinction by the age factor, Valery Sobolev, the chairman of the Russian Academy of Sciences' staff union, candidate of biological sciences told Izvestia. Over the past eight years, the number of scientists in Russia has decreased from 525,000 to 400,000; 60,000 of them only are in the most efficient age between 30 and 39 against 130,000 previously. By 2010, the number of scientists in Russia will only be 260,000, with only 40,000 of them in the "golden" age for research.
The number of scientists in the West has been rising due to reflux of scientists from Russia. As some estimates have it, Russian speaking programmers have carried out about 30% of Microsoft's research projects. The number of Russian scientists working over Western orders at home has been increasing.
With the fairness of reproaches for funding cutoffs (from 2.88% in 1997 to 1.55% in 2002), the science itself must assume a part of the guilt for its adversities. There's almost no intellectual property protection in science, thinks Sergey Aldoshin, the member of the Russian Academy of Sciences' presidium. At the same time, the scientists are only learning to find common language with the business and attract it.
The figure between 500,000 and 800,000 scientists who have gone abroad is not quite correct. Most probably such scientists work on grants and spend only a few months on their business trips.
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