Deep processing of pumpkin

Dear editors!

I never tire of being amazed at the snobbery and selfishness of our scientists: for them, science is about writing a Hamiltonian or proving a theorem, but in order to do something applied, specifically useful, no, it’s not science at all. To put it bluntly: many of us turn our noses up in disgust at practically significant things, as if these are base things that a real scientist should not deal with.

Such an arrogant approach to reality, in my opinion, is the main reason that, frankly speaking, the situation in our country with innovation is not very good. You and I, dear colleagues, prefer to hover in our irresponsible empyreans, calculate some subtle corrections, look for some hypothetical particles, think about some change in the constant fine structure during the life of the Universe. Although such research is of no use to the national economy, like milk from a goat.

And so, the state allocates and allocates billions of rubles for innovation, the native ministry forms federal target programs in priority areas, the party and the government call for engaging not in so-called scientific research, but in producing technologies and developments, Duma deputy Evgeniy Fedorov sleeps and sees the construction a holistic innovation system in which financing science will not resemble pouring water into a leaky bucket, and we don’t give a damn. We pore over our highly intelligent petty topics, not caring about the plight of industry, the country and the people. Moreover, we expect that the treasury should provide more and more budget money to satisfy our idle curiosity.

Even this state of affairs would be terrible, but our callousness, our lack of consciousness makes it even more catastrophic. Namely, not only do we not want to do something useful for society ourselves, but we also ridicule in every possible way the attempts of others to do this, presenting the matter as if people are wasting money doing something useless. Thus creating an atmosphere of negativism and obstruction in relation to innovative development.

The most striking example of this is, of course, the grandiose plan for creating the Skolko-vo innovation city: how much spitting was and is being directed at this wonderful project, how much whistling and hooting, how much talk about how this is a waste, that money should be given to us, wonderful scientists, to our institutes, and not to allocate for Vekselberg’s development projects. In general, many of our scientists have done everything to present the plan for creating a Russian Silicon Valley in the most unfavorable light. It has gotten to the point that, under the influence of this unbridled propaganda, some consider it shameful to deal with Skolkovo structures.

I see in this only selfishness and childish negativism: we deny everything that comes from power, and demand that we give ourselves, our loved ones, more money for our Hamiltonians and theorems. It’s a shame, colleagues, it’s a shame for us and it’s a shame, it’s a shame for our country.

There are simply countless examples of such sabotage of party and government decisions. One of the most recent is the booing by the so-called scientific community of the competition announced by the Ministry of Education and Science within the framework of the federal target program for research and development, namely the lot for “Development of technology for deep processing of pumpkin to obtain food products.” The ministry plans to allocate only 90 million rubles for these important national economic works.

Naturally, it started: these are 90 three-year grants from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, they give money instead of science for unknown reasons, this is an outright mockery - and all that.

No, of course, I agree that certain claims can be made against our peasants, against our fruit and vegetable storage facilities: pumpkin itself, in theory, should be a food product, and it should not be brought to the point of returning it It can only be converted into an edible state through deep processing. But it is what it is, and the urgent problem needs to be solved. And there is no point in baring your teeth about this.

Yours Ivan Ekonomov