Support nonprofit journalism.
A member of the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute sifts through the rubble of a classroom destroyed by a Russian missile attack on August 19, 2022. The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to disrupt local and foreign clinical research.
SERGEY BOBOK/AFP Getty Images
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February horrified the world. Since then, photographs of civilians fleeing their homes, damaged bodies strewn across city streets, smoking apartment complexes and mass graves have permeated news and social media platforms. This war killed tens of miles. de others and displaced 14 million more.
Wars take a stand in a vacuum. The ripple effects of the war in Ukraine, from skyrocketing energy and food costs to environmental damage and the risk of nuclear disaster (SN: 7/2/22, p. 6; SN Online: 3/ 22/7), have been felt around the world, especially in the midst of two other crises, the current coronavirus pandemic and climate change.
Thank you for registering!
There is a challenge to register.
“A convergence of all these crises at the same time is very, very much for the world,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said in May.
We turn to science to find answers to the world’s problems. But this tectonic shift in the geopolitical landscape has upended global clinical collaboration, leaving many researchers scrambling to locate forged foundations. While the final results of this replace, as do the final results of the war itself – it’s uncertain, here are some examples of how the crash has affected scientists and their research.
Ukraine’s infrastructure has suffered a lot of damage since the beginning of the invasion. Hospitals, universities and study institutes have been spared.
Some scientists have sought safe haven in other countries, while some remain in Ukraine, and male researchers between the ages of 18 and 60 are expected to serve in the military, says George Gamota, an American physicist who advises the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences. Gamota was born in Ukraine and moved to the United States as a child. He has close ties to his country of birth. When Ukraine became an independent country in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, he helped advise Ukraine while building its clinical infrastructure.
“When Russia attacked Ukraine, all hell broke loose. This scenario has not stabilized,” says Gamota.
Investment in research in Ukraine has decreased by 50 percent, he says. Scientific organizations around the world have mobilized to offer assistance through grants, employment opportunities and resettlement programmes. But monetary support, whether from the Ukrainian government or independent organizations, still takes too long. to succeed in the pockets of scientists, Gamota says. “Some don’t get anything. “
The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine is already thinking about how to rebuild. In September, the organization met with its counterparts in Europe and the United States. Latvia, Poland and other countries have described how they were restructured after the end of the Soviet Union. , says Gagota. ” It’s a workout that I think is vital to have. But what Ukrainians were probably looking for is how the world can help us right now. “
In March, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation donated one million dollars directly to Ukrainian researchers. The organization donated another $2 million in October for the rebuilding efforts, a move Gamota calls “fantastic. “
While science in Ukraine has struggled as the war progresses, Russian science has become increasingly isolated. Sanctions from Western countries have directly targeted the Russian clinical company.
In June, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that the U. S. is not yet in the U. S. “U. S. ” end” its collaborations with Russia, following an earlier ban on exporting U. S. generation. UU. allí. La policy applies to national laboratories, such as projects that get federal investment and involve universities and study institutes affiliated with the Russian government. Many think tank organizations in the West have also cut ties with collaborators in Russia.
These steps have affected some large-scale collaborations in the area and physical research.
There were project delays and the transient closure of at least one area telescope (SN: 3/26/22, p. 6). The International Space Station, jointly controlled by NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, continues to operate for now.
In the world of high-energy physics research, CERN’s particle physics laboratory near Geneva has announced that it will renew its foreign cooperation agreements with Russia and Belarus, which are aiding the Russian invasion, when the contracts expire in 2024.
When this happens, approximately 8% of CERN’s workforce affiliated with Russian institutions, or about 1,000 researchers, will not be able to use CERN’s facilities. And Russia will prevent offering resources for experiments.
These measures strongly condemn the invasion “while leaving the door ajar for continued clinical collaboration if situations allow it in the future,” CERN Director General Fabiola Gianotti wrote in a note about the decision. Until 2024, Russian and Belarusian scientists can continue to work. on existing collaborations, such as ATLAS, one of the detectors that detected the Higgs boson in 2012 and is a component of ongoing studies on theoretical components, adding dark matter (SN: 7/2/22, p. 18). But further efforts are prohibited.
Outdoor science Ukraine and Russia have not escaped the economic consequences of the geopolitical maelstrom. Rising energy prices, driven by Russia’s shutdown of herbal fuel exports, is prompting European think tanks to rethink their energy consumption, the journal Nature reported in October. CERN is a giant consumer, equivalent to about a third of Geneva’s average annual energy consumption.
The lab shut down its largest accelerator on Nov. 28, two weeks ahead of schedule, to load the power grid and prepare for sky-high costs and potential winter shortages. CERN officials have announced that the number of particle collisions in 2023 will decrease. , festival of adjustment among researchers for acceleration time, Nature reported.
The war also put pressure on an already failing global supply chain, leading to shortages and delays in shipments. through the odds with this project, and we’ll get there,” ITER spokeswoman Sabina Griffith said. ITER expects an annular magnet and other aircraft from Russia, one of the seven components of the European Union and the United States. Russia is still part of the project. But for now, “everything is frozen,” Griffith says.
Northern Russia is home to about two-thirds of Earth’s frozen soil, or permafrost. Collectively, global permafrost has nearly twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. While temperatures in the Arctic are rising almost 4 times faster than the global average, permafrost is thawing.
By the end of this century, the thawed surface could exhale billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane, according to some estimates (SN Online: 9/25/19). To better understand how climate change is reshaping the Arctic and vice versa Instead, researchers want detailed measurements of permafrost carbon, temperature, microbial communities, and more.
But deteriorating relations between the West and Russia “is a major impediment to combining knowledge so that we can get the clearest picture of the Arctic as a whole,” says Ted Schuur, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and research lead for the Permafrost Carbon Network. Now that much of the Arctic permafrost is inaccessible, Schuur and his colleagues are looking for sites in North America and Europe that can serve as a substitute for Russian permafrost, he says.
The collaborations were interrupted, “while intended to ‘punish’ Russia, realistically the global Arctic network by restricting researchers’ access to clinical data and undermining the resilience of Arctic (including indigenous ones) communities,” wrote Nikolay Korchunov, Russia’s ambassador for Arctic affairs. in an email to Science News.
Korchunov chairs the Arctic Council, an eight-member intergovernmental framework that acts as the region’s steward, agreeing agreements on oil spill cleanup, trade, conservation, climate replacement studies and more. In March, the council’s other seven member countries — Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Norway and the United States — announced they would suspend their collaboration with Russia.
The paintings among the so-called “Arctic 7” continue. But the freeze has derailed Russian plans to monitor biodiversity and pollution, Korchunov says. “A bloodless clinical environment increases the uncertainty and dangers of a futile reaction to Arctic warming. “
But some cooperation in the Arctic has continued, for now. Vladimir Romanovsky is a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who studies permafrost temperature and draws on knowledge provided by Russian scientists. This year, his team has achieved results, but it’s not clear. whether his Russian collaborators will take action in 2023, Romanovsky says. “It’s becoming so fast, so fast that we don’t know what the scenario will be then. “
Most Russian researchers Romanovsky knows of have trouble finding funds. Right now, there’s enough cash to keep your workers employed, but enough to do the cashwork. Cutting off Russian scientists from communication and knowledge sharing is a “big, big problem,” Romanovsky says. They are now almost completely excluded from meetings and collaborations abroad, he says.
In the long run, Romanovsky believes that Russian science may lose many young researchers, as happened in the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed. for their families. He and many others hope this won’t happen again.
An edition of this article appears in the December 17, 2022 issue of Science News.
Cassie Martin is an associate editor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in molecular genetics from Michigan State University and a master’s degree in science journalism from Boston University.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, non-profit source of accurate information about the latest news in science, medicine, and technology. Today, our project remains the same: empowering other people to compare existing events and the world around them. It is published through the Society for Science, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to public participation in science studies and schooling (EIN 53-0196483).
Subscribers, enter your email address to complete Science News archives and virtual editions.