Ever since the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, Russ­ian lead­ers have been vow­ing to trans­form their old-line, indus­trial soci­ety into a mod­ern, knowledge-based econ­omy dri­ven by inno­v­a­tive sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. The cur­rent Russ­ian pres­i­dent, Dmitry Medvedev, has repeated that ambi­tion fre­quently — not least as a way to over­come Russia’s depen­dence on oil and gas exports. Unfor­tu­nately, that trans­for­ma­tion con­tin­ues to be hob­bled by out­dated atti­tudes at the top of Russia’s aca­d­e­mic hierarchy.

A small, but telling exam­ple came to light last month when the pop­u­lar online news­pa­per gazeta.ru pub­lished an inter­view with Yuri Osipov (in russ­ian), pres­i­dent of the Russ­ian Acad­emy of Sci­ences in Moscow. Pressed by the reporter about the very low cita­tion rate for arti­cles pub­lished in Russian-language sci­ence jour­nals, Osipov dis­missed the rel­e­vance of cita­tion indices, ques­tioned the need for Russ­ian sci­en­tists to pub­lish in for­eign jour­nals and said that any top-level spe­cial­ist “will also study Russ­ian and read papers in Russ­ian”. Con­tinue reading →

11th March, 2010 View Comments

This week, I returned from the his­toric 50^th Sani­bel Sym­po­sium. Over 350 chemists and physi­cists gath­ered together to cel­e­brate half-centennial suc­cess of quan­tum and com­pu­ta­tional chem­istry. One lec­ture that caught my atten­tion was a ple­nary talk “Con­duct­ing Poly­mers: a saga of more than 50 years” by pro­fes­sor Jean-Marie Andre. Pro­fes­sor Andre empha­sized a role of the­ory in describ­ing the phe­nom­ena of poly­mer con­duc­tiv­ity. The role, unfor­tu­nately, was never prop­erly acknowl­edged… In fact, con­duct­ing poly­mers were prac­ti­cally pre­dicted in 1962 by John Pople and S.H. Walm­s­ley [1] a long before their exper­i­men­tal discovery.

In this clas­si­cal paper Pople and Walm­s­ley intro­duced con­cept of soli­tons in poly­acety­lene. The neu­tral soli­ton is a rad­i­cal mis­fit which exists in the mid­dle of a long poly­ene chain con­tain­ing an odd num­ber of con­ju­gated car­bons and which con­sists of sev­eral suc­ces­sive bonds of sim­i­lar lengths near which the unpaired elec­tron is local­ized. Authors sug­gested that such a defect could be mobile and, if charged, could be respon­si­ble of an high elec­tri­cal con­duc­tiv­ity. Con­tinue reading →

6th March, 2010 View Comments