Post Cold War Soviet Science

In Time Magazine, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, support for Russian science collapsed. According to this Time Magazine piece from last year:

There are no specific statistics on the number of scientists who leave — emigrants don’t generally notify the Russian migration office that they are leaving. But this is not the first exodus. There was a massive wave of scientists who left Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Mathematicians, physicists and biologists took whole laboratories to the U.S. The second most popular destination was Israel, where a previous wave of Russian scientists had already set up shop in the 1970s.
By the beginning of the 2000s, nearly all the top names from Soviet science field were working outside of Russia. According to the Russian-Speaking Academic Science Association, there are around 100,000 Russian-speaking scientists and researchers working outside of the Russian Federation, including those who left Russia before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian Ministry of Education and Science puts the number closer to 25,000.

It has taken years for Russian Science to build itself back up. And that’s not for lack of very talented, highly educated young talent. It’s because the funding infrastructure that supported massive science investments during the Cold War imploded with the Soviet Union.

There is a lesson here for America. If the Fiscal Cliff implodes the funding structure for American science, that talent will also leave for better climes. When I was in Singapore two years ago, I was already seeing evidence that this could happen. Such a hollowing out of American science would be an unparalleled disaster.

Strategic thoughts–on holiday

I’m off to the mountains for the next two weeks. I hope to be thinking very strategically about the Institute as it heads into 2008 and the election cycle. From my standpoint, the key is aligning ourselves (from the standpoint of our scientific and educational activities) to the larger “weather” of the economy and government funding without compromising our scientific excellence. Not an easy task when that environment is as unstable as it appears to be right now.

As I’ve said before on this blog, ultimately we have to decide what not to do, given our finite size. Difficult, but tractable.

Jim

Two trends

The NIH internal review of how it gives grants out is out: among the key ideas: funding paradigm breaking research, funding more first-time investigators and telling people honestly when they have no chance ever of succeeding (on the basis of their scientific creativity or lack thereof).

Additionally, there’s the notion of how funding small science is changing–imagine a future where big science (think National Labs and huge well-established research teams) create the data sets which are then mined by small-scale individual PI’s using computational tools.

Jim

NIH takes a hard look at its grant system

Jeffrey Brainard takes an interesting perspective in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education on-line at the comprehensive review that is taking place within NIH on its granting system. The article is behind the firewall….here’s the key quote:

“Increasingly, reviewers are taking an adversarial stance — they think their role is to try to figure out how the applicant was trying to trick the government into giving them money,” said Keith R. Yamamoto, executive vice dean of the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine.

“That’s not exactly what we’re looking for in a healthy review endeavor,” said Mr. Yamamoto at an October meeting. He is a co-chairman of a working group overseeing the NIH’s evaluation of its peer-review process and a long-term member of a peer review panel.

Jim

Reading NSF grants

Yes, I’ve got quite a stack of them on my desk. Some of them are really superb. Some of the ones you would expect to be the best, however, are quite flawed. Reviewing grants takes time and lots of energy but can be very rewarding intellectually. There is something about making a case for funding in writing that is both very difficult and yet eminently possible. Hence, we all continue to write grants….and review them.

Jim

Are financial markets too complicated for mathematical analysis?

Here’s a really interesting article from MIT’s Technology Review on how the math folks (called quants) may have inadvertently caused the recent Sub-Prime crisis. The article was picked up by one of my graduate students, Mike Cloud…it’s well worth reading. Left unsaid is the question of what role individual neural behavior plays in the behavior of markets (that’s the place of neuro-economics) although from this article’s perspective it’s more and more indirect: humans create the algorithms that place the trades automatically.

Jim

Supporting the Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason

While, this blog is primarily a way for me to communicate about the Institute’s programs, sometimes, it’s good to ask our loyal readership to lend a hand. One of the ways for readers to get involved with the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study and its work on understanding the brain is to contribute financially. If you are interested in making a gift to support our science, click here.

The institute’s immediate needs include

Current use and endowed support for graduate student fellowships to recruit and retain the best and brightest graduate students.

Current use and endowed faculty support to support the work of the various research teams at Krasnow and their highly specialized scientific inquiry.

Operational support to advance the institute as a whole and provide the necessary resources to advance scientific research.

Jim

Strategic planning at universities

I’ve been through a few of them by now. Today’s Chronicle on-line has an interesting take on them that’s actually quite positive….

“To be useful, the plan must give an honest assessment of where an institution is and where it wants to go, planning experts say. It must also include specific, honest budget numbers.”

This is at odds with the camp that views “stretch goals” as the key method of strategic plans to take an institution up to the next level.

Jim

Three weeks into the Semester

I’ve been preparing a set of slides for a talk I’m giving on Monday about my vision for my second term as institute director. The process got me thinking about “institutes for advanced studies” in general and the one in Princeton in particular. The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study is someone different from the platonic model in that it’s an integral part of a university. But in other aspects, the model is appropriate, I think.

I also gave a guest lecture yesterday for a grad class on the “state of American science”. It’s something I know a bit about–I’m afraid I was a bit too pessimistic for the cohort of first year students–funding for American science is getting squeezed by non-discretionary funding in the Federal Budget, and that’s a structural problem.

Most enjoyable, I got to sit down with my co-author, Lee Zwanziger, on the neuroethics book project that we’re hatching. I think it’s got great potential and we came up with a structure that I think is going to work.

Jim