Noted Researchers Laud Donation To Russian Science

George Soros, a Hungarian-born investor active in promoting free and open societies in Central and Eastern Europe through his philanthropy, has announced a $100 million donation to support scientific research in the countries of the former Soviet Union. His donation will establish an International Science Foundation for the Former Soviet Union. Although details about the foundation's staff and procedures remained sketchy when Soros announced the donation at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on December 9, he made it clear that he envisions a grant-making body loosely modeled on the United States' National Science Foundation. It would leapfrog the hierarchical structure of science that existed in the former Soviet Union, in which senior scientists got money to disburse to more junior colleagues. Instead, the new foundation plans to make grants to individual scientists based on merit. "I very much hope the foundation will work to the transformation of what used to be Soviet science and make it science in the spirit of open society, which is my ideal," Soros said at a news conference announcing the donation. "I believe only Western assistance can help the former Soviet Union from slipping into a black hole," Soros said. Life for researchers in Russia and the other newly independent states is truly bleak, according to reports of Russian scientists present for the announcement and U.S. scientists recently returned from Russia. Lev Okun, a physicist with the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said at the news conference, "There are no funds for real work--only salaries, heating, and electricity--in many institutes." Furthermore, government salaries have sunk so low that some scientists make just $6 a month, according to accounts from Russian scientists. As a result, scientists rank with "old-age pensioners and invalids" as the three most disadvantaged groups in Russia, Soros said. Nina Fedoroff, a molecular biologist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., recently returned from a National Academy of Sciences trip to Russia, where she visited the Komarov Botanical Institute in St. Petersburg. U.S. engineers who went on the trip found greenhouses falling apart and "wiring so old they had never seen any of that kind," says Fedoroff, who is one of a number of scientists asked to advise Soros on his foundation. Plans for the International Science Foundation call for emergency grants during the first months of 1993 totaling $6 million or more, mostly for salaries. Two emergency projects are intended to help libraries and improve telecommunications, says Alex Goldfarb, a Russian migr biochemist at New York's Public Health Research Institute. Goldfarb has been asked by Soros to coordinate the foundation until a permanent director is named. The foundation will temporarily be headquartered with Soros's other foundations in New York City. Its permanent home, says Goldfarb, will be in the West, possibly in the U.S. or Switzerland. The foundation will ultimately have a permanent staff, though how many and where they will be based is "a hard question," says Goldfarb. "This is a big experiment, trying to set up a grant award and management system in a foreign country in the middle of an economic crisis." There will also be review panels in the various disciplines. For the time being, at least, the panels are likely to be largely ad hoc, drawn from pools of reviewers from other foundations and with help from scientific societies, Goldfarb says. Most of Soros's donation will go toward peer-reviewed fellowships and grants to principal investigators, with overhead to their institutions. Peer review has never been a part of Soviet science, notes Joshua Leder-berg, University Professor at Rockefeller University in New York, who, along with Fedoroff, was asked to serve on the foundation's international advisory council. The International Science Foundation can have lasting influence by helping to establish a fair and effective peer review system, Lederberg says. The $100 million is not an endowment, said Soros at the news conference, but money to be spent during the next two years. He left open the option of giving more money to the foundation and said that he hopes governments and other private foundations will support it. The 62-year-old Soros is the founder and manager of the multibillion-dollar group of Quantum investment funds in New York. According to news reports, the funds earned nearly $1 billion last fall from currency trading. "My personal wealth has doubled in the last few years," Soros acknowledges. "The amount I can devote to philanthropy has taken a quantum leap." Since 1979, Soros's foundations in central and eastern Europe have funded many educational and social initiatives that help advance his goal of independent, open, market-oriented societies. This is his first large-scale funding of the natural sciences, which, he notes, always received money under communist regimes. But, speaking of Soviet science, he says, "Something that is of unique importance for the world is in the process of disintegrating." In the last year or two, says Okun, 10 percent to 15 percent of the best scientists in many institutes have gone abroad. Others have forsaken science to become entrepreneurs. At an inaugural meeting of the advisory council, "the room was full of [American] Nobel Prize winners [and others] whose mouths were open with admiration," says John Bahcall, professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. At the meeting, a Russian scientist stood up, Bahcall recounts, and said, "For us this document is a dream." Billy Goodman is a freelance science writer based in Upper Montclair, N.J.

Noted Researchers Laud Donation To Russian Science

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