MOSCOW: The first law of scientific research - that it costs big money - is as immutable as the laws of gravity. So no surprise that Russian science fell into a black hole due to economic upheaval in the decade following communism's collapse. Economic freedoms that transformed Russia for good and ill brought despair to laboratories and research institutes as budgets were slashed and bright young scientists fled abroad while others (most famously the mathematician turned oligarch Boris Berezovsky) moved into banking and other businesses.

This internal and external brain drain will impact Russia's economy for decades to come. It is also an unintentional gift from Russia to the West. The scale of this transfer of intellect may be unsurpassed in human history, and is greater than the flight of scientists from Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Take the institution which I headed for thirty-five years, the physics department of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Techniques (MIPT), comparable to America's acclaimed Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the last ten years 1500 graduates from our Institute left for the US. According to a common means of assessment, educating a scientific specialist at a high level costs approximately $1million dollars. Thus, one Russian institute alone subsidized America with scientists with a nominal value of $1.5billion!

Of course, the seeds of the collapse of Russian science were sown in the Soviet era, when three-quarters of scientific research was financed by the military. Without that Cold War imperative, science became an easy target for Kremlin budget cutters. But more than the bloated branches of military science were slashed. Over the past decade expenditures on total scientific research were reduced to less than 5% of their former value. Oceanographic and geological research, traditionally strong in Russia, have virtually ceased to exist.

Harsh reforms have followed this starvation diet. Before 1991 there were 4,500 research and development (R&D) institutes in Russia. About five hundred belonged to the prestigious Academy of Sciences and worked mainly in basic science. The remaining "branch institutes" - industrial research facilities, design bureaus, field stations and so on - belonged to one or another ministry. These carried out applied R&D that, in capitalist systems, is mostly done by the private sector. Government privatized some 1,100 branch institutes, making their finances somebody else's problem. But privatization is brutal, because most of these bodies are ill-prepared to survive in a free market.

For no system exists in Russia to translate research into marketable products and technologies. No system of venture capital - ie, one where investors support promising new scientific developments - exists. There is neither financial nor tax support for it. Russian banks would not know where to begin. Moreover, there are no technology parks of the type often connected with universities in the West and which facilitate the translation of achievements in modern science into useful applications. Without these support systems, Russia will continue to lose not only good people, but hope for its future.

Yet, all is not lost. Compared to R&D activities, fundamental research is cheap and it is here that, although damaged, a solid Russian tradition remains that can be built upon. Asia's tiger economies have a strong high-tech base but are not noted for their scientists. Once our economy adopts - if it does - we will have a base of knowledge to feed off of.

Adaptation is underway. Old structures are crumbling and being replaced. The Russian Academy of Science, the most powerful body in Russian science, has opened itself to new blood, increasing the number of specialists by 20% in recent years.

Outside influences also matter. Financial and moral support from George Soros's International Science Foundation, for example, buoyed a peer review system established in 1992 within the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. Peer review is vitally important to the coming generation of scientists. With a viable peer review system in place, the chances of getting money is directly related to performance. The RFBR's main drawback is that it hands out only 6% of the national science budget. By comparison, 90% of civilian research in America is peer reviewed. Yet, despite continuing bias toward state control, the system is opening up.

The Internet also assists this opening as it favours transmission of information and connections to and from Russia and the world. Russians, because of their high level of education, are very receptive to the Internet and use it with great familiarity. But it is not nearly enough. Despite open borders, scientific contacts, participation in conferences, even the exchange of publications, remain problematic.

Isolation, indeed, is unbridgeable for some. A generation of scientists and R&D workers - those too old and entrenched to uproot their lives and adapt, but too young to retire - have no where to go. Many are in formerly powerful research centers now wasting away, some form entire populations in once closed research cities and one institute towns that were wholly dependent on a single defence institute or project. Their fate is like that experienced by the generation of Russian serfs liberated in the mid-19th century. After a lifetime under the yoke, feudal or communist, freedom is not an easy thing to get used to.

Those who do adapt provide a model for all Russia. Modern science is democratic and meritocratic. Open to talent, and only talent, people who discover something new are recognized and rewarded. In science, a dictatorship of reason is combined with the freedom of ideas. That fusion is what all Russia needs, a reconciliation of the cold-minded calculations of the market with the search for truth. In that reconciliation lies the future of Russian science and of Russia itself.