Ukrainians Want Independence For Labs

As the process of political decentralization accelerates in the Soviet Union, it is being matched by the decentralization of the country's massive science bureaucracy. The Ukrainian Scientific Association, founded in Kiev in June, is among the latest independent scientific organizations springing up throughout the USSR that are seeking direct contacts with foreign institutions. These organizations hope scientists from the United States will help them take quick advantage of perestroika and glasnost. They are appealing for joint projects, faculty and student exchanges, and improved communications. The Ukraine, the second most populous republic in the Soviet Union with 52 million people, already has a scientific agency, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, that controls virtually all government funding for science and is modeled on the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. But according to Alexander Demchenko, a biochemist who is a member of the new organization's executive board, the Ukrainian Academy is too dependent on its Moscow counterpart. "This is evident in the meager financial support for science and the working conditions of scientists," Demchenko and the association's vice president, Myroslav Kratko, write from Kiev. Members of the organization are striving to forge independent links between Ukrainian and foreign scientists that would have been impossible just a short time before. Mikhail Zgurovsky, an applied mathematics professor and the first deputy director of Kiev Polytechnical Institute, was in the United States earlier this month, arranging for exchange programs involving American institutions. Students and faculty from KPI, the largest academic institution in the Ukraine, make up a large portion of the Ukrainian Scientific Association's membership. Beginning in 1991, six professors from Oregon State University will be giving lectures at KPI, with perhaps the same number of Ukrainians visiting Oregon, according to Zgurovsky. On his tour of the U.S., Zgurovsky also arranged for a student exchange program with the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is looking forward to creating, with Colorado's help, an English language-teaching facility, in order to make it possible for other Ukrainian scientists to visit U.S. laboratories. "Before we had no opportunity to set up direct programs between the Ukraine and USA organizations," says Zgurovsky. "Any kind of cooperation was on the government level. This level in both countries was very bureaucratic." With the support of the Ukrainian Scientific Association, Zgurovsky is looking forward to many institution-to-institution agreements. Both Demchenko and Kratko are severely critical of the Ukrainian scientific establishment, blaming it for the republic's environmental problems and delays "in evaluating the dangers of the Chernobyl catastrophe." They add that the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences has divided official science "into parts according to departmental bureaucratic subordination with the results that scientists in the same field who work in different institutions have little opportunity to collaborate." One hundred and thirty-five scientists--including eight academicians--attended the association's first meeting. They pledged their determination to "consolidate the work of scholars in deciding the needs of society, to identify and realize the freedom of scientific creativity, to share information, to renew forgotten and destroyed branches of science, to foster and prepare young scientists, to develop international scientific collaboration and cooperation, and to protect scientists socially." They are recruiting ethnic Ukrainians not only from here in the Soviet Union, but also from the "diaspora" outside the USSR. The organization intends to advise the Ukrainian parliament--in which democratic forces have recently increased their strength--on scientific matters, especially on the consequences of the Chernobyl accident. Demchenko and Kratko also foresee an independent international university, which would attract scientists from throughout the world, to be created in Kiev. The organization says that it does not expect much official support, so it is hoping to raise funds through contract work done for agriculture and industry--a relatively new, money-making concept in Soviet science. For more information, contact Myroslav Kratko at the Kiev Mathematical Association, 3 Regina Street, 252022 Kiev, Ukraine, USSR.

Ukrainians Want Independence For Labs

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