WIKIMEDIAI was born in the USSR and now work as a postdoc at University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Once, my PI and I were returning to a hotel after dinner with our collaborators in a different UK city, where one of the postdocs had the same post-Soviet background as me. My boss commented that there seems to be a lot of people of Soviet extraction working in Western science and joked that we are close to taking over it. I replied that he doesn’t have to worry; the supply of Soviet scientists is gone, never to be replaced.
After the demise of the USSR in 1991, science in the former Soviet Republics lost most of its funding, and as a result, most scientists lost their once-prestigious, middle-income jobs. The prevailing mood of the society changed; most of the population, including many scientists, decided that the only thing that mattered in life was earning money—fast. Many academics, such as Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, a former department head at The Institute of Systems Control of the Russian Academy of Sciences, changed their careers, leaving old professors and young PhD students alone in the lab. Without their mentors, many young researchers who actually cared about science abandoned their home universities for work in the West.
Fast forward 20 years: the devaluing of the pursuit of knowledge ...
