Japanese experience

This is an attempt (according to my recollections of publications in the newspaper “Abroad”) to compare our “wanted the best” with the Japanese experience of restructuring science with a very high positive result.

About 40 years ago, Japan's executive elite concluded that they would be far behind the competition by buying patents from the US and Europe. We need to create our own developments! They gathered about 200 of their highest-level experts and gave them the task of finding 1012 breakthrough areas in each scientific discipline (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.). The experts were taken to a boarding house (far in the mountains) for a month and were completely cut off from any communication with the world (telephone, television, radio, and even communication with family).

A month later, the experts expressed their opinion.

Within 20 years, Japan became a leader in various scientific fields and made a breakthrough in industrial production based on the latest scientific developments.

I saved one of the newspaper articles from 1987 (see picture).

In addition to the general discussion about the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences (about the division of property), there is an urgent need for materials about the successful experience of reforms when they start from the head (setting tasks for scientific teams and initiative groups instead of various grants from the Ministry of Science and Education).

In our country, the RAS mainly has two goals. The first is carrying out scientific work at the world level to maintain a high level of higher and even secondary education (in physics this is, for example, theoretical and experimental research into ultra-high energy cosmic radiation, neutrinos, etc., astrophysical research, physics of weak interactions, properties of vacuum, solid state physics - nanostructured substances, quantum dot lasers, etc., soft radiation X-ray optics, etc.). I participated in many international conferences abroad, visited scientific laboratories (mainly military ones), held my own conferences in Moscow, and I can confidently say that the level of our higher education allows our employees to be at the world level and participate on equal terms in joint work with foreigners.

The second is participation in the development and creation of unique equipment in domestic and international projects, the development and creation of new operating principles and prototypes of equipment for organizations of the Ministry of Defense and Rosatom. Our country has always lagged behind in the development of scientific equipment; we have sometimes been ahead of foreign laboratories in the creation of large scientific installations and technological equipment.

The reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences proposed by the government (with the participation of M.V. Kovalchuk) is not aimed at concentrating the efforts of RAS scientists, at realizing the above goals, but aims at transferring property to dashing managers (whose salaries, as shown by NANOTECH and Skolkovo, are tens of times higher than from the President). Reforms in medicine and education aimed at economic efficiency (according to the patterns of the Higher School of Economics, at the bachelor's level - merger and simplification of management) do not bring a tangible economic effect, but create terrible inconvenience for the population. The merger of universities, etc., is reminiscent of the itch of reorganization under Khrushchev: Economic Councils and back to the Ministries. Any ill-considered reorganization leads to loss of time (pace) and confusion in management.

The Russian Academy of Sciences was kept on meager funding for 20 years, reducing the number of employees several times by 10% and sometimes 20%. The salary of a senior researcher, candidate of sciences is less than 25 thousand rubles. Many researchers were forced to take jobs as guards in garages (1 day of work, 3 days free).

The Ministry of Education and Science has developed a system of grants, but the choice of topics shows that Ministry officials do not know what the country needs, what exactly needs to be developed. Restructuring the economic management of the Russian Academy of Sciences will only lead to financial scandals, like in the Ministry of Defense.

Any restructuring (as well as modernization) needs a carefully and detailed plan (in addition, financial calculations). You need to start from the head, and not from your feet and hands and running around offices. We are not talking about several thousand academicians and corresponding members, but about hundreds of institutes and hundreds of thousands of scientists and technical personnel.

I would also like to say that the Prime Minister, the head of the United Russia party, humiliated his deputies, making them a laughing stock. Our law makers should not read (correct grammatical, arithmetic and legal errors in the law), but pass the law without reading. What kind of law makers are these - parliamentarians?

Yu.A. Merkulyev,
g.s.s. FIAN