Tatarstan to support Russian science

The academicians of the Russian Academy of Sciences led by its Vice-president A.Andreyev, visiting Kazan, had two main objectives. First, to carry out a complex inspection of the Kazan physicotechnical institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and second, even more important, to enlist the support to their ideas and the Russian physical science on the part of Tatarstan President M.Shaimiev. They discussed it on June 6 in the Kazan Kremlin during the meeting with the Tatarstan President.

Today, when the science has insufficient financing and there is a real threat by 2010 to lose all scientific genetic material, we have the only chance - to follow the regions, to ask for their support, said A.Andreyev. He asked M.Shaimiev as "one of the most influential politicians of Russia, the President of the republic with the highest level of the fundamental science", to support science, in particular physical, and to involve in this idea heads of other regions, politicians.

Today the Kazan Physicotechnical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences is run much better than even institutes of Moscow and St. Petersburg and it plays a strategic role in the Russian Academy of Sciences in the field of radiospectroscopy. It has a unique in Russia Center in the field of radiospectroscopy, where experts from all over the country investigate samples and materials, using its unique tomographs. It conducts basic researches in the field of physics of solids, geology, medical physics. And certainly, it has a direct application in materiology, medicine, oil extracting etc. Huge means are necessary to equip this center up to the international level. The academicians asked to allocate part of them from the Tatarstan budget (about $800-900,000). The Tatarstan President offered to solve the problem jointly - half-in-half. In general the parties agreed that Russia needs such a climate, where science will be in demand. Then the necessary means will come.