Last summer, Professor Joshua Lederberg of the Rockefeller University, the Nobel laureate, invited me to spend some months in his laboratory continuing my lifelong studies of the evolution of infectious diseases. This is one of many remarkable opportunities I have had since perestroika.

A few days after I arrived in New York, a large box appeared in my new laboratory space. It was a new computer. That too seems remarkable. All of the changes in my professional life since perestroika have been extraordinary, in one way or another.

I obtained my M.D. degree at the Medical Military Academy in 1955, in the city then called Leningrad, in Russia. Afterward, I began to study methods of vaccination and post-vaccination immunity, and took my postgraduate degree in this field. My doctoral thesis was devoted to evolutionary aspects of epidemiology - specifically, the evolution of antagonistic interrelations between microbes and their victims.

Later, my team and I continued to explore this new concept of epidemiology: the mutual evolution of microbes and victims as ecological systems on the microscopic scale, and the ways in which natural selection operates at the level of molecular ecology to produce constitutional (genetic) immunity among victims, and pathogenicity among microbes. Our ideas were contrary to the beliefs of most epidemiologists and immunologists of the time.

As a result, my major research has focused on an area of immunology that has not been very thoroughly explored: the cellular and molecular bases of individual genetic predisposition and immunity to common infectious diseases such as influenza, hepatitis, and a legion of others. My team designed some tests for genetic predisposition and immunity to salmonellosis, meningococcal infection, and influenza, and we knew how those tests could be developed for hepatitis B and AIDS.

My first monograph, "Evolution of Clostridiosis," was published in Russian in 1974. My second, "Constitutional Immunity and Its Molecular Ecological Principles," was published in Russian in 1983. Please do not be embarrassed if you have not read them. Although I had practically unlimited opportunities to visit scientific libraries and contact colleagues in the Soviet Union, my work was all but unknown to the outside world. I had very limited opportunities to participate in or present my ideas at international scientific forums, and could never submit articles for publication in journals outside the Soviet Union.

Also, I had very little money with which to buy sets and chemicals.

After perestroika (the opening of physical and intellectual barriers to the outside world, which began in the late 1980s), all this changed . . . officially. Officially, the opportunity to contact my colleagues everywhere in the world became unlimited - by regular mail, by email, even in face-to-face meetings. It also became possible to access scientific news on the Internet.

Officially, I could travel anywhere to share my results and ideas at international scientific forums. I have visited universities and attended conferences on immunology, virology, and genetics at venues as far afield as Stockholm, Berlin, San Francisco, Paris, and Birmingham. Currently, I am a visiting researcher at Rockefeller University in New York City. Almost all of these trips were made possible by the financial support of the Soros Foundation, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation, and Pasteur Merieux Connaught.

Officially, I now also have an unlimited opportunity to publish my articles in foreign journals (and other media such as HMS Beagle). My work first appeared in English in 1992 in Immunology Today (translated by Fred Rosen of Harvard Medical School). My two most recent publications are in English-language journals published outside Russia: "Chemical Ecology and Biomolecular Evolution" in Acta Biotheoretica, and "Constitutional and Nonspecific Immunity to Infection" in Scientific and Technical Review (Office International des Épizooties). This progress is truly amazing. All of it is limited, however, by some very hard financial realities.

At home, I receive a head of department's salary - but this provides for my wife and me only the minimum in food and shelter. Moreover, our ministries have robbed me, along with most other citizens, of all of our valuables (bank deposits, life insurance deposits, bank debenture, etc.), repeatedly, every two or three years.

Before perestroika, no Soviet citizen could personally own a part of the national property. The 1992 "voucherization" program aimed to divide national assets among the population. My wife and I now own property worth four pounds of meat per year - and ours is not the worst case. Most Russian citizens have less than we, or have nothing at all.

Meanwhile, the representatives of government, the organizers of denationalization, could acquire property worth hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars. Their money is regularly transferred in foreign banks, while my request for $100 to pay for membership in the New York Academy of Sciences entailed several months of dialogue with the bureaucrats.

At the beginning of perestroika, experimental research was basically halted because of very harsh financial limitations. Most of my colleagues have left laboratory work and found other specialties.

I now have no money at all with which to buy sets and chemicals.

Sergey Rumyantsev is an immunologist studying the cellular and molecular basis of genetic immunity at the Institute of Vaccines and Sera, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Andrzej Krauze is an illustrator, poster maker, cartoonist, and painter who illustrates regularly for HMS Beagle, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, Bookseller, and New Statesman.

Tell us what you think.

Endlinks

Soviets Seek To Rebuild Labs, Renew Ties To West - discusses the scientific mood in the early post-perestroika period. From the February 19, 1990 issue of The Scientist.

Russian Science on the Rack - reveals the plight of the underfunded, underpaid scientific community in Russia. From the December 22, 1997 issue of Chemical and Engineering News.

A View of Russian Science after Soros and On Science Restructuring in Russia - two detailed reports from the National Science Foundation that discuss funding problems for Russian scientists.

U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation for the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union - a private, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Government. It funds collaborative research between U.S. and former Soviet scientists.

Defend Only the Defenseless: Genetic Variation and Vaccination - HMS Beagle Opinion in which Sergey Rumyantsev argues for the importance of genetic immunity in determining vaccination strategies.