George Soros Reduces Scope Of His International Science Foundation

Foundation Author: Peter Gwynne Just over three years ago, Hungarian-born financier George Soros established the International Science Foundation (ISF) with a grant of $100 million to support basic science and scientists in the countries that used to constitute the Soviet Union. Now, pointing out that he always regarded the effort as a stop-gap measure designed to lead to more permanent support from other donors, Soros is significantly reducing ISF's scope. Soros, who made his billions through canny investments in global currencies, is pulling back not because of a lack of commitment to the region's science, but because he does not want to become a permanent supporter of it. ISF's main concern is that other donors, inside and outside the former Soviet states, have not followed ISF's lead with more permanent grants. The foundation, with headquarters in New York City and an office in Moscow, won't close down, officials note. It will continue to provide grants for foreign travel by scientists, subscriptions to overseas scientific journals, and an academic fiber-optic telecommunications network in Russia. It will also administer-gratis or for a small fee-grants to scientists in the former Soviet Union (FSU) from other institutions. But the long-term research grants and emergency grants that accounted for more than $80 million of the $137 million disbursed by ISF have come to a halt. Was the effort worth it? Has the foundation kept basic science in FSU countries at a level of achievement that would have been impossible without it? And has it created an environment in which other grant-givers-inside and outside Russia and other FSU nations-are willing to continue to provide necessary support? Soros himself could not be reached for comment, and many observers outside the foundation believe that it's too early to give definitive answers. However, the foundation has certainly put up some impressive numbers. In 1993, Russian science minister Boris Saltiykov stated that foundation grants were providing 50 percent of disposable funding for Russian fundamental science. According to ISF official Alex Goldfarb, more than 50,000 scientists and 3,000 specific projects have benefited from its grants. "Had it not been for ISF support, scientists would have gone into industry or other jobs," adds Gerson Sher, who was executive director of ISF until last August. As to results, the general impression is positive. According to Irving Lerch, director of the office of international affairs at the American Physical Society, and one of a small group of U.S. scientists who helped to persuade Soros to set up ISF, the travel grants, at least, "had a salutary impact." And Goldfarb asserts that "without [ISF] there would be no Russian science." Observers from ISF and American scientific societies that have cooperated with the foundation assert that ISF has changed the way in which much Russian basic science is administered. It has started to replace a bureaucratic system based on favoritism with methods designed to funnel grants to those scientists most qualified to use them. American officials involved with the project praise its choice of recipients, its ability to deliver their grants directly without using corruption-prone middlemen, and its low administrative expenses. IN FLUX: ACS's John Malin, left, says that now "the onus falls on the Russian government to fund its own scientists." Molecular biologist Alexander Makarov of Moscow says that "people planned their lives around [ISF] money." Recipients of grants also express enthusiasm for the process, and disappointment at its downsizing. "One indication of the program's value is the degree to which its passing was mourned," notes John Malin, administrator of international activities at the American Chemical Society. Malin recently returned from visits to Russian cities Moscow and Novosibirsk and the Estonian capital of Tallinn. There were a lot of long faces when scientists talked about future funding, he recalls. "Several people," he added, "hope Mr. Soros will come up with another $100 million." That won't happen. "Soros argues that he can't support all of Soviet science indefinitely," explains Goldfarb, a molecular geneticist who was ISF's director of foreign operations and then acting executive director before resigning at year's end to resume his research. "He wanted others to take over." Disappointingly, only a few organizations, particularly in FSU countries, have taken ISF's lead in providing substantial grants. The failure to stimulate funding support from like-minded organizations represents one negative issue for ISF. The foundation has attracted scattered criticism for other reasons. However, its critics have focused on what they perceive as political and commercial missteps, such as taking an excessively high profile in Russia, rather than basic problems with the administrative concept. The seeds of ISF were sown in 1992, when it became clear that, as Lerch puts it, "the scientific enterprise [in Russia, the Ukraine, and other former Soviet states] was falling apart." Scientists were flocking from their institutes to go into nonscientific fields. "There was much pain in the scientific community," says Malin. The main reason was the lack of funds for science. The free-fall of the ruble, which devalued scientists' already small salaries and equipment funds, exacerbated the problem. Some Western sources had helped. The American Physical Society and other Western scientific organizations had started to send small grants to individual scientists; the European Union had begun a program, called INTAS grants, to channel money to FSU science; and the United States Congress had passed the Nunn-Lugar bill, which aimed to persuade Western governments to contribute $60 million to help FSU scientists in defense work to convert to civilian projects. But according to Lerch, a more comprehensive program was clearly needed. George Soros expressed interest, and gave the American Physical Society a few grants to disburse. Then, in November 1992, persuaded that the Russian government would allow grants to reach Russian scientists untaxed and unskimmed, he announced ISF (B. Goodman, The Scientist, Jan. 11, 1993, page 3). Key decisions followed quickly. "Soros insisted that we go forward as fast as we could," recalls Goldfarb. The reason: The dollar's extraordinarily high value against the ruble appeared unlikely to last (it didn't). The foundation also decided to concentrate its efforts on the basic science community. "In Russia in particular, this is a major element in the intellectual homeostasis of the country," Goldfarb explains. "Scientists were major factors in the collapse of communism, and many members of the Russian Parliament are basic scientists." The ISF program consisted of five parts. The best-known and most expensive, accounting for almost half of the foundation's budget, was the long-term research grants program. Based on international peer review, a practice foreign to Soviet-era science, it had the aim of supporting the best scientists in the FSU nations. The emergency grants program provided more immediate help, in the form of individual $500 fellowships. To qualify, scientists needed to show merely a good publication record-three papers within the previous five years in overseas journals or the top 100 Russian journals. Of 35,000 applicants, about 30,000 received the grants in the first half of 1993. "At the time, $500 in cash was a significant sum," recalls Alexander Makarov, deputy director of Moscow's Engel'gardt Institute of Molecular Biology. "People planned their lives around that money." Indeed, Goldfarb recalls that in early 1993, the typical Russian scientist had a salary of just $300 per year. Conference travel grants made up the third leg of the program. Essentially, says Goldfarb, every FSU scientist invited to give a talk or present a poster at an international conference on basic science received airline tickets and a daily allowance of $50 to $80. ISF relied on conference organizers to decide speakers and poster-givers, and to waive conference fees. "Over the past three years, we've sent about 8,000 people to conferences around the world," recounts Goldfarb. That figure exceeds the attendance of Soviet scientists at international conferences before the Soviet Union collapsed. For most scientists, access to journals on a timely basis rivals access to colleagues at conferences as a key component of significant research. ISF set out to meet this need through its library program. The foundation bought subscriptions to major journals and shipped the journals to about 400 libraries in the former Soviet Union. The least visible part of the program-and one that, Goldfarb concedes, is not yet bearing fruit-is a planned telecommunications network. Because of a lack of electronic infrastructure, Russian scientists had to pay high fees to use electronic mail and the Internet. To reduce such fees, ISF is spending $10 million to develop an academic communications network. It will consist of a fiber-optic ring around Moscow and a network in Novosibirsk. Selecting the right recipients of long-term grants proved a major challenge. In the old Soviet Union, directors of the specialized institutes used what Malin calls "an extreme form of the German system": They parceled out projects and funds as they chose. ISF and its supporters decided, instead, to rely on a process as close as possible to Western peer review (T.D. Webb, The Scientist, Jan. 24, 1994, page 3). First, using citation indices from the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), ISF framed the requirements in such a way that it didn't get too many applications. The foundation required applicants to submit the names of reviewers-generally either friends of the applicants or international experts whom the applicants vaguely knew. Working through professional societies, ISF organized panels to judge the applications. "I've never heard of a process that handled so many applications so quickly," says Malin. Chemistry panels dealt with 3,000 applications in one year; their colleagues in physics handled about 8,000 grants altogether. The foundation ended up funding one applicant out of every four, after George Soros added $30 million to the $100 million that he had already donated, and FSU governments promised some matching funds. Not surprisingly, physics projects proved the big winners, scooping about one-third of the long-term research grants; physics had long had a high profile in the Soviet Union. Next came biology, with about 22 percent, and chemistry, with just under 20 percent. Russia received about 85 percent of the grants, with Ukraine a distant second. Scientists based in Moscow earned half of the total, followed by their colleagues in Kiev, Novosibirsk, and St. Petersburg. Intriguingly, ISI predicted this geographic distribution exactly, on the basis of its citation studies, before a single application was filed. Having selected its long-term and emergency grants, ISF faced the challenge of getting the funds to researchers with the least devaluation through taxes, corruption, and administrative charges. The foundation chose not to rely on the research institutes in FSU countries as conduits for the cash. Instead, says Goldfarb, "we managed the money ourselves." After awarding grants, ISF kept the funds at its New York City headquarters. Then, at the appropriate times, it cut more than 100,000 personal checks for grantees, who cashed them at local banks by special arrangement, and it paid out on invoices that vendors sent to New York. "We combined both grant-making and grant-management authority," says Goldfarb. "We have a grant management center equivalent to the business office of Harvard University. We can produce a financial report at the push of a button." Inevitably, the process dissatisfied some powerful people: the directors of research institutes, who, in Soviet days, had exercised complete control over their researchers' budgets. To cover the scientists' overhead, ISF gave the directors of their institutes 20 percent of each long-term grant. The financial caution produced an enviable result. At about $11 million, administrative expenses for the ISF programs represent no more than 8.4 percent of total expenditure, the foundation reports. "It was a very efficient operation," boasts Goldfarb. Individuals from American scientific societies agree that the overall program operated effectively. "From an administrative viewpoint, the whole process worked well," says Eugene Brierly, director for education and research at the American Geophysical Union. "I really do think it's had a major impact on Russian science," adds Malin. Recipients of grants agree. "The grant process was not difficult," says Vitaliy Ivanov of the Engel'gardt Institute of Mo- lecular Biology, who received $22,000 for studies of unusual chain folding in biological molecules. "It's rather good money for us, as we already had instruments in our institute. Most of the money was for salaries." Chemist Mihkel Kaljurand of Tallinn Technical University Institute of Chemistry in Estonia, whose grant covered computerization of chromatography, also found the funds scientifically profitable. "The grant money was a bit small to carry out competitive research with our Western colleagues, but it helped us to survive," he tells The Scientist. His team is preparing two papers for international chromatography journals. However, Kaljurand expresses dissatisfaction with the policy of asking vendors to invoice ISF in New York. "For equipment [ISF] created a bureaucracy, and it was not easy to deal with them," he states. "There was too much bureaucracy, of a different type from that in the Soviet Union." Another criticism of ISF focuses on its initial political naivete. When ISF started, charges Lerch, "Soros did a very unwise thing: He went to Moscow with a very high profile and made pronouncements about the program that made the existing scientific establishment in Russia very defensive, to the extent that they attacked ISF bitterly." ISF doesn't deny that it has had to fight tough political battles. "We became a political factor," admits Goldfarb. Early last year, for example, a group led by Russian ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky accused ISF of being a CIA front. Parliamentary hearings, says Goldfarb, "completely cleared us of wrong-doing." The foundation also faced a commercial struggle. Relcom, a major Russian telecommunications company that offered for-profit E-mail service to scientific institutes, objected strongly to ISF's telecommunications project, because it threatened Relcom's profits. ISF overcame that objection, however, by convincing Relcom that Russian telecommunications had plenty of room for both organizations. "There is no conflict now," Goldfarb insists. Overall, he adds, the foundation "stopped a massive exodus of people from the science profession. And we showed [scientists] that they have to go out and actually seek funding and justify their research." What comes next? Although ISF has closed down its long-term and emergency grants, it is continuing its library and telecommunications programs. Its travel project will also continue, under new sponsorship. Boris Berezovsky, an applied mathematician who has become a multimillionaire through investments in Russian automobile dealerships, mass media, and banks, has donated $1.5 million to continue the program, which will be called the Logovaz traveling fellowships in honor of the holding company that he controls. ISF has also set up a service, based on its own program, to help donors to channel money to FSU scientists. More than 100 donors, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md., have signed up as clients. ISF plans to charge large donors a 10 percent management fee, but it will probably offer the service free to small organizations, Goldfarb says. By saving on taxes, duties, and quantity discounts, clients can save as much as 50 percent of grants. Fresh funding is moving slowly into FSU states. The European Union, which refused ISU's offer to help it channel cash to former Soviet scientists through its INTAS program, has finally worked out a method to deliver its grants tax-free without skimming. And last August, the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (CRDF) set up shop in Arlington, Va. PULLING BACK: Financier George Soros is reducing ISF's scope because he does not want to become a permanent supporter of science in the former Soviet Union. Headed by former ISF chief executive Sher, and funded in part by a grant of $5 million from Soros to the National Science Foundation, CRDF will support joint projects between U.S. researchers and former Soviet scientists, including those who worked in the defense industry. "We're trying to extend the notion of defense conversion to supporting defense scientists who want to work in civilian facilities," Sher relates. "We expect we will be relying heavily on the infrastructure that ISF developed." Response has been enthusiastic. "I've been receiving dozens, if not hundreds, of phone calls and E-mails" inquiring about the project, program manager David Lindeman reports. "We're not very happy with [CRDF's] tendency to include [former defense scientists]," comments Goldfarb. "Still, the bulk of the money will go to basic science. To that extent, [CRDF] is our successor." With only $10 million available, however, CRDF's role is limited. Now, says Malin, "the onus falls on the Russian government to fund its own scientists." ISF has helped former Soviet science to survive its immediate crisis of the early 1990s. If Russia and other nations can build on that foundation, supporters maintain, the program will have proved doubly successful. Peter Gwynne is a freelance science writer based in Marstons Mills, Mass.

George Soros Reduces Scope Of His International Science Foundation

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