Moscow

Vladimir Putin, Russia's acting president and prime minister, said last week that scientists “must get salaries higher than anyone else in the country”.

Speaking during a visit to Zelenograd, a town outside Moscow that is known as Russia's ‘Silicon Valley’, Putin said that “if a country lacks a working economy, it has no present, but if it lacks a competitive science, it will never have a future”.

The visit took place on 8 February, the date on which Peter the Great signed his decree founding the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1724, and which was designated last year as the annual Day of Russian Science by then president Boris Yeltsin.

In a bid to demonstrate that the new administration has a keen interest in science, many of the nation's top officials were present.

In an address, Putin said that the process of acknowledging the economic and strategic importance of science had already started. He pointed out that last year, for the first time in a decade, all the money allocated to science in the state budget had been paid.

He added that he was confident that this current year would see a breakthrough in funding for science.

Science provided the United States with 20 per cent of all its wealth, but Russia with less than 1 per cent. “The major problem here is an abyss between science and its implementation,” said Putin. “As time passes, we are still unable to derive benefits from our own ideas.”

Although stopping short of promising a substantial increase in the science budget, he suggested that the whole approach to raising money for research should be changed. It needed to be multichannel and to make effective use of intellectual property. Most important, said Putin, was that scientists should remember that the “real value of their research is confirmed by the market”.

On the eve of his visit to Zelenograd, Putin met privately with Yuri Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a move which suggests that real reforms may be implemented. The planned science budget for the year 2000 is already 40 per cent higher than last year, with a high proportion of this being allocated to basic research. But the total science budget is just 15.9 billion rubles ($550 million).