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 ...
