East European talent stays at home

GODOLLO, Hungary — Andras Dinnyes is one of Hungary’s leading specialists on cloning. He has worked at prestigious research centers the world over, including the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, that developed Dolly, the first cloned sheep.

Any number of his many contacts and colleagues in Western Europe or the United States would be delighted to offer him a highly paid post tomorrow if he asked.

In short, he is precisely the kind of highly educated Eastern European the doomsayers warned would rush westward as soon as Hungary and seven other former Soviet bloc countries joined the European Union (EU) on May 1, 2004.

But instead, Mr. Dinnyes has confounded the predictions and has opted to stay home.

Of course there is no denying that hundreds of thousands of people are leaving the European Union’s new member countries to seek their fortunes in the West.

In Britain for example, the latest official figures show that 232,000 Eastern Europeans have registered to work in the country since May 2004.

The figures for Ireland, which has a much smaller overall population, are even more impressive. There are 120,000 Eastern Europeans legally living there, accounting for about 5 percent of the total work force.

But what the case of Mr. Dinnyes — and thousands of top Eastern European researchers and scientists like him — shows is that not everyone is desperate to emigrate, and in many cases joining the EU has improved conditions at home for them.

Latvian quantum physicist Rusins Martins Freivalds is working to developing a computer that will process data a million times faster than computers do now.

Like Mr. Dinnyes, he’s doing it at home, in Latvia, which was hit by a brain drain at the end of World War II, then again in the 1990s following the collapse of the former Soviet bloc.

“Latvia is my home. I don’t feel cut off from the world of science here. Latvia is a good place for conducting theoretical research,” he said.

“We don’t provide only plumbers or mushroom pickers to the world,” he added, referring to the mythical Polish plumber and the Latvians who have gone in droves to Ireland to pick edible fungi.

Joining the European Union gave Latvian science a much-needed leg up, agreed Juris Ekmanis, head of the Latvian Academy of Sciences.

“Joining the EU was a great day for Latvian science … EU funds are available for our scientists, and last year parliament adopted a law which stipulates that funding for science will grow by 0.15 percent until it reaches at least 2 percent of GDP,” Mr. Ekmanis said.

The improving economic situation in many of the Union’s new member states, coupled with an overall quality of life comparable to that found in major Western European cities, is exerting a gravitational pull.

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