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THE SOVIET Union has set up a new fund to finance research teams putting
forward ideas that run counter to the ‘established authorities’ in science.
Although it is at present relatively modest, with a budget of only 20 million
roubles (Pounds sterling 20 million) for 1990, the ‘anti-monopoly’ fund
represents an important breakthrough in Soviet science planning at a time
when the country’s scientists are finding it difficult to respond to the
challenges of perestroika.

The fund is part of a general effort to free Soviet science from its
bureaucratic and hierarchical straitjacket after 70 years of direction from
the centre.

Mikhail Gorbachov has demanded that science be made more ‘cost-effective’
and that bureaucratic barriers hampering the free flow of scientific information
be eliminated. Last month, however, almost five years after Gorbachov came
to power and four years after he launched perestroika, a 2500-strong meeting
of Soviet scientists in Moscow concluded that the country’s science still
needs a major reform.

As the emphasis on the new slogans of glasnost, perestroika and demokratizatsiya
(democratisation) increased, many scientists attending the meeting expressed
the fear that the old slogan of ‘scientific-technical progress’ is being
downgraded.

Their concerns have recently been voiced by senior members of the scientific
community. At last month’s Plenum of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
for example, Borys Paton, president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences
and a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU, complained that science
had been accorded an ‘undeservedly modest’ place in the party’s election
platform.

‘We are losing out to the developed Western countries precisely because
in recent decades we have not known how to make proper use of the fruits
of the scientific-technical revolution,’ he complained. ‘The party has put
too little in its programme about the role of scientific-technical progress
in the renewal of our society.’

Although Gorbachov has always urged scientists to make their research
more responsive to social needs, Soviet law still provides no basis for
them to do so. In spite of more than a year of ‘public debate’ in the media,
there is still no law on patents and the ‘intellectual property’ of scientists
and inventors. Nor is there legislation on the establishment of independent
research cooperatives.

Even without such legislation, there are already some 8900 research
cooperatives, worth an estimated 1900 million roubles. But after decades
in which any form of private enterprise laid the perpetrator open to a charge
of parasitism, many scientists are reluctant to move out of the safe frame
work of state-sponsored research. Nor is the role of science-related organisations
such as the Council of Scientific and Engineering Societies or the Znanie
(‘knowledge’) society for adult education clearly defined.

The Moscow management conference was preceded by preparatory discussions
in major research institutes and industrial enterprises. On the eve of the
conference, radio, TV and the principal daily newspapers all carried lengthy
reports on the failings of Soviet science and problems that the delegates
would address.

The party leadership considered it worth sending two members of the
Politburo, and three Central Committee secretaries, in addition to VIPs
with an ex-officio interest in science such as Nikolai Laverov, head of
the State Committee for Science and Technology.

Yet the outcome, as set out in the final report by Nikolai Slyunkov,
a member of the Politburo, was relatively bland. It amounted to little more
than a statement of the importance of working out a system of credits and
tax incentives for ‘progressive’ areas of science and technology. Questions
remain, such as who would decide on what areas were ‘progressive’.

Slyunkov’s report asserted that the introduction of a system of competitive
financing of research projects would make it possible to ‘overcome monopolies
in respect of scientific truth and to break down the barrier between science
and production’. This barrier is to a considerable extent a legacy of the
old centralised command-economy, with its inexorable schedule of quarterly,
annual and five-yearly targets, and thus likely to yield to looser market
mechanisms.

One of the problems that the conference discussed was the hierarchical
structure of Soviet life, which not only still conditions many people to
wait for directives from above, but inhibits them from challenging what
they see as the establishment.

A number of solutions to this psychological barrier were discussed,
among them the new ‘anti-monopoly fund’. Recent research projects which
had failed to win official approval through the hierarchy involved subjects
such as synthetic blood and a possible vaccine against AIDS.

Another new idea has been to develop the ‘technopolis’ model of industrial
development, involving the creation of new science parks and centres of
technical excellence in towns with no past academic tradition.

Yet the conference itself showed how difficult Soviet science is finding
it to shake off the past. The closing report of a meeting convened to promote
democracy and self-determination in science was delivered by a Politburo
member with no apparent connection with science, but who has a considerable
reputation as a party hard-liner.