“To begin with, we cannot pretend that the Skolkovo Science & Technology Centre is founded on a new concept, the likes of which has never previously been seen in Russia. Our country has a long tradition of promoting a variety of interesting and significant innovative scientific and technological projects. I always cite two of the 20th Century’s most successful innovations as examples; the Manhattan Project in the U.S. and the Soviet Union’s atomic project. The success of these two projects was determined above all by the highly qualified personnel involved. One can consider that Adolf Hitler was instrumental in attracting qualified staff to the United States. As a result of Nazi policy, the European scientific elite immigrated to the USA and became the backbone of the Manhattan Project. In our country,Abram Fedorovich Ioffe was pivotal in resolving the staffing problem. Although he did not participate in the project himself, scientists from his school – including Kurchatov, Artsimovich, Zeldovich, Landau and Alexander – became the main players in the Soviet project. The success of our atomic project led to a host of new technologies and Russia consequently attained new technological heights.
It is no coincidence that our atomic agency has now attained a sufficiently high level of development. The Academy of Sciences played an active role in implementing the atomic project. The Moscow Physical-Technical Institute, which was a new type of educational institution in Russia, was established at that same time. It is common knowledge that the fundamental element of the Skolkovo centre will be the Educational Research Science Centre. It will not be an undergraduate university as it will only be offering Master's and Doctorate level education. But this idea is not new either as it was developed long ago. The St. Petersburg Academic University, Russia’s only nanotechnology research and educational centre, embodies precisely the same ideology. Therefore we already have experience in creating this type of institution.
Likewise, it is very important that Centre Skolkovo should not and need not compete with our other research centres but rather act in a manner that tangibly benefits the aforementioned centres. The President has identified five major high-tech areas which the centre will be working on – energy, IT, telecommunications, biomedical and nuclear technology. It should be noted that we can work on all five fields in very close cooperation with other research centres located in Zelenograd, in Tomsk, in Akademgorodok, in Novosibirsk and in other Russian regions as well. We must realise that the basis of innovative technologies – the cornerstone, so to speak, of development – is analysis and inventiveness, but essentially involves fundamental research. As my close friend George Porter, a physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and was formerly President of the Royal Society, once said, “All science is applied, and the only difference is that some applications arise very quickly, and others only after centuries”. That's why it is necessary to clearly understand that all the advantages modern civilization enjoys today are in fact the result of modern scientific achievements.
I carefully read the Rusano Corporation’s recent report concerning adoption of the draft in detail, and my reaction to the report was a mixture of satisfaction and dissatisfaction to a certain degree. I noticed that fairly all of the accepted and successful ongoing projects are actually projects based on research and development from our academic institutions in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, these developments were further enhanced. It was during those years that we saved our nation’s sciences, primarily through international scientific cooperation and carrying out joint international projects. A lot of ongoing Rusnano projects today are the result of that international cooperation, which is based on research and development in our academic institutions.
This basically means one thing: in order to avoid running aground in Skolkovo and ending up simply buying technology from the West, we need to interact with other academic institutions. Many of these educational centres have already expressed their willingness to actively participate in collaborative work.
In this particular area, our Scientific Advisory Council should work along the same lines. At this point in time there are only two co-chairs; Nobel laureate Roger Kornberg, who is a professor at Stanford University and the leading expert in biochemistry and biomedical research, and I. Although we complement each other well, a full Council will naturally be created in the near future.
In my opinion, it should certainly be more than a group of individuals who are simply worthy of the honour their inclusion implies. It is crucial that our Council be capable of understanding the interaction between physics, biology and medicine in order to determine the most promising undertakings and discern the research projects that may potentially lead to innovative technology in the future.
I would like to reiterate how the Soviet atomic project was implemented. A scientific and technical advisory board on the atomic problem was created in 1945 and continued to be active for many years thereafter. Its first president was Igor Kurchatov, followed by Academician Shchukin, who was later succeeded by Nikolai G. Basov. Over the years, the Council faced many challenges which did not necessarily pertain to the nuclear project. But at the same time, the Council encouraged an ideology of development and the rise of education and science in general. The Skolkovo project should serve to pursue exactly the same goal – finding ways to resolve problems in these five areas is the most effective way to generally promote science and education in Russia.”
