"Will Western sanctions related to the situation in Ukraine affect the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Science?" - a good friend asked me a question yesterday. I didn't want to believe it to the last, but reality is reality… A number of institutes have already received "letters of misfortune" about the refusal to cooperate, about the closure of supplies of devices and reagents so necessary for our scientists.
The institutes are still cautiously optimistic, but no one knows what will happen in two or three months, a year. So far, their directors have been instructed to conduct an audit of the existing capacity, pointing out weaknesses. Since there is no combined data on all Russian institutes, the MK correspondent himself called a number of leading scientific organizations.
Let's start with the mathematicians who were recently deprived of the right to hold the International Congress and the General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in 2022. For the first time since 1966, they were supposed to take place in St. Petersburg, and now - cancellation.
Now all the participants invited to Russia who received grants for this trip are forced to stay at home. The Congress will be held online. Our scientists will make presentations in the same format. But the General Assembly, at which the leadership of the congress is elected and the award ceremony is also held, should be held only in person. It was decided that it will take place, but outside of Russia.
Cold physics
According to the director of the Physical Institute named after Lebedev RAS Nikolai Kolachevsky, physicists also managed to feel the "cold" attitude of the West associated with the Ukrainian events.
- We have received cold letters from a number of suppliers of devices that they are suspending delivery, - says Nikolay Nikolaevich. - Someone refers that they are forced to do this by head offices, state resolutions are pushed, others rely on their own principles.
Of the projects that scientists value very much, the Spectrum-UV telescope was under threat. Its manufacture is prescribed in the Federal Space Program. The scientists had close contact with the British company Teledyne E2V, which was supposed to supply some of the equipment, in particular sensitive photodetectors for the telescope. But just yesterday she sent a letter saying that the contract is suspended…
- We hope that this is not a complete break, - says Kolachevsky. - Despite the fact that a lot of equipment is made in Russia, it was the sensitive matrices needed for the telescope that we were waiting for from suppliers from the UK.
The main concern, according to the physicist, is the supply of semiconductor components: we either know how to do a lot, or we will learn soon, but establishing mass production of semiconductors will take time.
In extreme cases, experts hope that suppliers from China and Hong Kong will help them out, but… These will still be components of not quite the quality that FIAN is used to working with.
On March 1, the Polish Ministry of Science and Education announced that it was stopping cooperation with Russia in the field of science and technology, an agreement on which was signed back in 1993. According to this statement, Poland refuses "mutual recognition of certificates, diplomas, periods of study, education, qualifications and scientific degrees" with the Russian side. According to the deputy head of the department, Wlodimierz Bernacki, among other contacts, cooperation within the framework of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna near Moscow has been terminated.
- Poland and the Czech Republic are leaving us, - one of the JINR employees confirms with chagrin. - And the European Organization for the Coordination of Physics and Astrophysics in its letter used a word that I have never met in English - "disinvite", which literally means "disclosure" or refusal of an invitation. But I must tell you that we see all this now mainly at the official level. On a personal level, many colleagues are shocked by what is happening.
A dead end for "life sciences"?
Chemists and biologists, whose scientific fields are even more sensitive to sanctions, are experiencing about the same shock. After all, the production of chemical reagents "fell" in our country back in the early 90s.
To get reagents, cellular materials and other consumables in modern Russia, even before the special operation, it was necessary to wait 2-3 months and overpay 2-3 times more expensive. Now the deadlines will stretch even further, besides, chemists rely mainly on Chinese suppliers.
- In our advanced research, we do not always know what will be needed tomorrow, what unique consumables will be needed for work, - explains Sergey Kiselev, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor, head of the Epigenetics Laboratory of the N.I. Vavilov Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. - Considering also that the shelf life of many reagents is limited to six months, the situation becomes even more complicated.
- Is there no way to create your own reagents?
- We tried to somehow reproduce someone else's recipe, but the work ended in failure. The dependence of the "life sciences" on Western reagents is, if not 100, then 90 percent for sure. But the most significant point is the youth, who have already lathered up to leave for the West, so that their scientific career would not be spoiled later. It is clear that these are temporary problems. But do we have time for this?
Kiselyov also noted that even the international deposit base refused to help Russian scientists, where researchers voluntarily send their genetic constructs obtained in laboratories with different DNA sequences. This is a very useful and in-demand database. She sends samples to everyone who wants to get acquainted with them almost for free (money is taken only for forwarding). And now she has announced that due to problems with postal shipments, she can no longer provide such services to Russians.
Vladimir Ivanov, Director of the N.S. Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, noted that the sanctions will now hurt the updating of the instrument base.
- We were all waiting for this update, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education allocated a large sum for its purchase in 2022, a competition was held ... Now it is unclear how we will act, whether it will be possible or not to deliver the equipment to Russia.
Of course, some of the devices are manufactured here, but spectrometers, X-ray equipment, electron microscopes are still bought by the whole world from the USA, Japan ... Of the 8-10 positions that our institute relied on, today one has already "flown" due to the sanctions imposed.
Publications "without regard to sexual orientation"
As for the publication of articles by our scientists in foreign scientific journals, the situation is better here. However, after all, one case with a refusal managed to thunder. Chemist Vadim Bataev reported about it on the social network. The article he sent to the journal of Molecular Structure was initially returned with the wording concerning the "prohibition of cooperation with Russian institutions." But as soon as the Elsevier publishing house intervened, the scientist was assured that the article would be accepted without problems. Laura Hassink, Managing Director for Scientific, Technological and Medical Journals, said that so far there are no sanctions against Russian authors and that journal editors are asked to follow the usual practice and "evaluate the intellectual content of the manuscript - without taking into account race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, nationality, citizenship or political philosophy of the authors."
Germany imposed a lot of prohibitions on communication with Russian scientists. In particular, the relevant resolution was issued by the Foreign Ministry of this country. Not so long ago it was announced that the German Max Planck Institute turned off its telescope mounted on the Spectrum-RG spectrometer, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Alliance of Scientific Organizations froze academic programs and scientific contacts with Russia. The Americans are also trying to keep up with the Germans, in particular, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it plans to terminate cooperation with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, with which it has about 10 joint projects.
There is also a chill in relations with Russians at the European CERN, where many of our people work at the Large Hadron Collider. Oddly enough, but there are also idle voices of some participants in the ITER project - an international experimental Tokamak-type thermonuclear reactor. To this, the director of the Russian office of ITER Anatoly Krasilnikov answered us the following:
- Now we are at the stage of identifying problems. I hope in 2-3 days there will be an understanding of where we will have difficulties. We will analyze how we can overcome them. We are in contact with ITER CEO Bernard Bigot. Firstly, it is impossible to exclude those who at one time initiated the project and who invited everyone to participate in it (it was our country). Secondly, the project has passed 80 percent on the way to obtaining the first plasma (the reactor is scheduled to be launched in 2025). This is a factor that does not allow the work to stop. Thirdly, the principle of consensus operates in the project, that is, all decisions are made only with the consent of all ITER participants.
Krasilnikov recalled that Russia is manufacturing 25 systems for ITER, without which the reactor launch will be disrupted. The Institute of Applied Physics from Nizhny Novgorod, the Kurchatov Institute, the Ioffe Institute of Physics and the Novosibirsk Institute of Nuclear Physics have been working on them for many years. Budker and others. So it is impossible to dismiss Russian science just like that.
Experts are sure that in recent years, various Russian institutes have accumulated a lot of useful developments that were not in demand for the sake of imports. In particular, Nikolai Kolachevsky believes: "If now, without wasting time, we create cooperation between scientific organizations, regroup, we can quickly help our industry and state corporations."
Author: Natalia Vedeneeva
