For East Europeans, Open Door To West Is A Revolving One

Researchers find visits increasingly necessary for career advancement, high-tech lab work, and hard currency earnings. As pluralism and democracy move to replace communist rule in Eastern Europe, researchers in the West can expect to see a steady increase in the number of scientists traveling to Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. "It seems to me that there are three key issues: one is freedom of travel, and in all of those [Eastern Europe] countries the travel barriers will be relaxed," says one official at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) who is involved in foreign exchanges. "We've already seen it in Poland and Hungary. But that has to be balanced with the lack of access to hard currency, which will be a constraint, both for international cooperation and for upgrading the laboratories. Coupled with those two are the worries about the brain drain." While some researchers have emigrated to improve their working and living conditions, officials and East European scientists visiting U.S. laboratories believe future exchanges will continue to operate more like a revolving door. In recent years, many researchers have traveled West for months at a time, returned home, and gone back to the West again. "I think that maybe some scientists will find a job abroad but only for a defined time," says Richard Drozdowski, a 28-year-old doctoral candidate at the University of Gdansk. Drozdowski has been working on atomic spectroscopy since July at the physics department at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. "It is not very easy to find a job abroad. They will come abroad to make money and go back." For some, getting money to go in the first place may prove difficult, though many Eastern European institutions, recognizing the importance of travel to career development, provide money for junior and senior scientists to make trips to the West. At the Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, they are given funds to travel to conferences within Europe once or twice a year. "This system is our lifeline, which enables us to be in touch with other scientists," says S. Danko Bosanac, a theoretical physicist who in the last 12 years has studied molecular collisions at the Max Planck Institute in G”ttingen, West Germany; Sussex University in England; and various U.S. research institutions. He is now back in Yugoslavia after a brief stint at the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory. While career opportunities play a major role in keeping the revolving door between East and West spinning, the opportunity to earn Western money - any Western money - is also important to these scientists. "Even if I stayed in a Western country for two weeks, it was very significant to me that I [could earn] some amount of Western currency," says one electronics engineer from Warsaw Technical University. Since 1984, he has been invited to the West once or twice each year and is able to live comfortably on his Polish salary because of the money he saves during these brief visits. National Science Foundation East European Cooperative Science Program 1800 G St., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20550 (202) 357-7494 National Academy of Sciences Department of Soviet and East European Affairs (HA166) 2101 Constitution Ave., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20418 (202) 334-2644 International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) 126 Alexander St. Princeton, N.J. 08450 (609) 683-9500 Fulbright Scholar Program Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) Suite M-500 3400 International Dr., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20008-3097 (202) 686-7866 Acquiring Western currency has become important because the decline of Eastern Europe currencies has made everyday life there a struggle. Some things are unavailable in Polish zlotys, Hungarian forints, and East German marks. For many scientists, a trip to the West provides the hard currency needed to make life bearable. "The Polish salary covers only food and basic dress," says Drozdowski. "If I want to buy anything more, I must take additional work. But with my salary here [$700 per month], I can afford to buy electronic goods like a VCR or compact disk player when I return to Poland." While unmarried researchers may opt to forgo the extras for themselves on their meager salaries, scientists with families have little choice. Polish physicians in government-run practices earn the monthly equivalent of about $30 in Poland, says Adam Dziki, a colorectal surgeon at the Medical Academy of Lodz, Poland. For over two years he had to work three jobs to provide for his wife and two children. He says, "So much time is wasted. Real life makes me tired, not the practice of medicine." Since September 1988, Dziki has been working in the Surgical Research Unit of the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Although he originally came to the U.S. on a Fulbright Scholarship to work with John W. Harmon, professor and chairman of surgery at the medical center, he was invited to extend his visit until June 1990 as a paid visiting scientist. The lure of modern equipment is another major draw for Eastern European scientists. Drozdowski traveled to the West to complete work on his thesis because the equipment in his laboratory was not sophisticated enough to measure weak atomic spectra, which requires the use of a superconducting magnet. "We can make a lot of equipment ourselves, but it is often of poor quality," he says. "If I didn't travel to the West, I would not have been able to finish my experiments." Ironically, this lack of modern equipment has made Eastern European scientists valuable collaborators in the West. "These scientists are theoretically well-trained and prepared, but since they have had to make do with minimal equipment, they are very ingenious in the ways that they approach an experiment," says Joseph J. Loferski, professor of engineering at Brown University and a former science councilor at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw. "So when they come to the West where they don't have to be parsimonious with equipment, they are ready to take advantage and quickly become productive members of the research team." Dziki has worked on several projects at the VA and has contributed to 12 papers. One of the studies, which he researched alone, compares the effectiveness of three methods used to reconstruct the continuity of the bowel after surgey. According to Harmon, "Dziki was so delighted with the environment for research in our laboratory that he was tremendously enthusiastic and energetic. He has become an indispensable and valued member of our team." While contact with such highly trained and innovative professionals often makes collaboration with East Europeans rewarding, it also helps Western scientists stretch their research dollars. When Geoffrey Price, a professor of chemical engineering at Louisiana State University, was unable to find a graduate student interested in zeolite catalysis and did not have the budget to hire a full-time research assistant, fate seemed to step in. The National Academy of Sciences Inter-Academy Exchange Program contacted him with a request from Bulgarian physical chemist Vladislav Kanazirev to collaborate on Price's research. Kanazirev, a member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, had been active in zeolite catalysis for the past 20 years and the aromatization of paraffins for the last three. Both researchers have been trying to learn more about these mechanisms as a means to convert natural gas to liquid fuels. Equipped with only a "good quality" gas chromatograph in his lab at the Institute of Organic Chemistry in Sofia, Kanazirev was limited to monitoring the products of zeolite catalysis. With access to X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance techniques available in the U.S., he has seen how researchers analyze the molecular structure of zeolites and correlate it with catalytic activity. In return, Price gained from his colleague's three-month visit. "Since he already knew what conditions needed to be employed to get the catalysts to work and how to gather the data, the research work was completed in a particularly short period of time," says Price, who adds that he thinks of Kanazirev as "manna from heaven." Through travel to the West, East European scientists hope to develop an international reputation. "With- out travel you would be in the second line of research, just repeating experiments reported in journals, and not regarded as someone doing something," says Janos Posfai, a biophysicist from the Biological Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged. At his institute the number of citations is a direct measure of performance. While traveling to the West is important to one's career, the competition for positions makes researchers careful of the time spent away. They often negotiate for sabbaticals to ensure that their jobs are held open. But as researchers shuttle from one country to another, they experience difficulties as they adjust to living in such vastly different worlds. After spending three years in the U.S. working to develop a computer model to predict the function of unknown amino acid sequences, Posfai became accustomed to accessing computer networks. But when he returned home for a brief visit, he says he felt "isolated and completely out of touch" with his work. The absence of computer links to the West coupled with the poor and expensive telephone service made it difficult to communicate with his colleagues. "Just a few calls back to the U.S. and I spent my whole budget," he says. Despite the troubles some of these traveling scientists experience, the opportunity to transfer information about the basic freedoms in the West to colleagues back home is an important motivator for continuing these exchanges. "There is a big difference when people are open and care," says Posfai. "By channeling information about how life is in the West, I believe I can make a difference at home." Bosanac agrees: "The future of science everywhere is freedom of communication and understanding each other." Carole F. Gan is a freelance science writer based in Philadelphia.

For East Europeans, Open Door To West Is A Revolving One

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