In 1999, I left my home country of Poland, where I had earned an MD and a PhD in neuroscience, to pursue postdoctoral training in the United States. After five years I returned to my homeland, hoping to set up my own lab there. It wasn't to be.

I was lucky enough to obtain a short-term contract, courtesy of my PhD supervisor. But I was on a long waiting list, with little chance of gaining research independence. After a year, I returned to the United States, where I took a junior faculty position at Johns Hopkins University.

Poland loses biomedical talent because its academia has difficulty accommodating new independent laboratories. A few institutions use outside recruits to replace retired scientists. Most, though, engage in 'inbreeding', which contributes to an inert and defective system. Internal recruitment also puts candidates who spend years abroad at a disadvantage. Young researchers determined to stay in their homeland often take dead-end technical positions or wait years for a chance to set up a lab.

The West offers financial support in the form of programmes to help Polish scientists return, such as the international researcher programmes at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute or the Wellcome Trust. But these are more likely to help local scientists who have already been accepted by home institutions and supported by local foundations. They do little for 'excess' scientists because they don't create new laboratory space.

In a European country with a long communist history, only government can help academia. But biomedical research and development issues are not on any political party's agenda. The ruling parties, obsessed with historic and nationalistic issues, have little interest in innovation. Politicians do not see R&D as a good investment that facilitates development.

The European Union and philanthropists may help more by not pouring resources into academia but helping to develop the commercial side of science. This could be achieved, for example, by creating more technology-transfer offices at major universities and training Polish scientists in the West to work in them. With luck, this would help create the right climate for private investors, without whom the sustainability of the industry is hard to imagine.

Despite the unfriendly climate, a handful of medical biotech start-ups has appeared in recent years. A spirit of entrepreneurship has somehow survived. I hope it will be nurtured.