Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Andres Metspalu still needs, politely, to enlighten many callers that Estonia is no longer a Moscow-steered country. The small Baltic republic is one of eight central European countries that joined the European Union (EU) last year. "But many people in western Europe and the United States still think we speak Russian," says the geneticist at the University of Tartu.
Metspalu is the director of the Estonian Genome Project and one of the country's most prominent researchers. Estonia's small size — it has a population of just 1.4 million people — allowed it to transform its science system in the 1990s more rapidly and efficiently than most other countries in the region. And Metspalu's genome project has further established Estonia on the worldwide map of research. But despite these achievements, even Estonia is struggling to cope with the exodus of many of its best young scientists to the West.
M. LEEGO/K. KALLBERG/HHMI
Andres Metspalu (top) and Tamas Freund hope to retain gifted scientists in eastern Europe.
EU membership means that scientists in poorly funded central European countries can easily relocate to countries offering more research money and modern infrastructure. In 2004, some 15% of the EU's Marie Curie fellowships, which facilitate mobility of young scientists in Europe, were awarded to scientists leaving central Europe, whereas only about 1% went to a university, research institute or industry lab in the new EU countries. Although some labs in central Europe have benefited from European Commission return grants, given to former Marie Curie fellows and postdocs returning home after five years or more abroad, they still haven't made up for the net loss.
This flow of scientific talent into western labs has caused European and US research agencies to set up special programmes aimed at central European scientists who would like to go home, but have been deterred by low salaries and lack of modern facilities. The UK Wellcome Trust, the US Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the European Commission and many national grant-giving agencies all run schemes aimed at helping postdocs to go back to central Europe. The next few years should see growing opportunities for central Europeans to return home, or for young scientists in new EU countries to begin a scientific career. But without more funding from individual countries, the long-term picture remains unclear.
The HHMI began funding scientists in central Europe in 1995, when the dissipation of the Soviet Union redrew political boundaries and left many talented scientists without infrastructure or support. "We felt that these countries had a strong scientific tradition but were seriously short of funding," says Jill Conley, HHMI international programme director. So the institution initiated the International Research Scholars programme, which now funds 132 scientists in 29 countries, including 48 in central European and Baltic countries.
Installing Help
The HHMI is now focusing specifically on investigators in the Baltic states, central and eastern Europe, Russia and Ukraine. This December the institution will award US$17.5 million to 40–50 investigators over five years. It has also teamed up with the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in Heidelberg, Germany, to fund 'installation grants' that would help young investigators in central Europe set up their first lab (see Nature 432, 262; 200410.1038/432262b).
The impact of such programmes is probably felt most not by primary investigators — many of whom would have received funding in a western country if they chose to take advantage of the EU's mobility — but by the home-grown students and postdocs who make up their lab. Tamas Freund, director of the Institute of Experimental Medicine at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, receives several offers a year to leave Hungary for a western university job. His HHMI grant allowed him to stay put — but also meant he could retain several students and staff scientists for a five-year stint.
Mart Ustav, head of the microbiology and virology department at the University of Tartu, had a good job at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory before his native Estonia became independent of the Soviet Union. When he returned, Ustav used money from the Soros Foundation to jump-start the department. Now he receives HHMI funds for his group and another departmental colleague has Wellcome Trust money, allowing the department to fund three groups — a total of about 60 young scientists.
In at least one case, dual awards to single investigators are helping to establish critical mass in individual labs. Priit Kogerman, a cancer researcher at the National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics in Tallinn, Estonia, is one of 23 young researchers in the region who have been awarded a Wellcome Trust International Senior Research Fellowship (ISRF), for outstanding mid-career scientists wishing to return to or remain in their home countries. Kogerman is also one of 48 scientists from the Baltics, central and eastern Europe to receive funds through HHMI's International Research Scholars programme.
A former postdoc at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, Kogerman says that he planned to return ever since he left Estonia in 1993. The ISRF and HHMI money helped him build a high-profile group at home. "Things have improved here quite a bit since the days of hardship in the early 1990s," he says. "When I first started here, we worked with all the 20-year-old Soviet centrifuges and apparatus."
Flexible Approach
J. DONOVAN
External grants have helped Priit Kogerman build a high-profile group in his native Estonia.
The ISRF scheme was set up in 2000, following a review of the quality of science and research communities in the then EU accession countries. The individual, highly flexible grants, which include a competitive salary, are available in five fields but, within Europe, are limited to Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary: the four countries with the strongest science bases in the region. The programme now funds 23 fellows — including six in Estonia and ten in Hungary — who receive some 
750,000 (US$980,000) for five years each.
"This is not an aid programme," says Hans Hagen, the Wellcome Trust's programme officer for basic immunology and infectious diseases. "We wanted to create some 'honey pots' to show that it is possible to do top-class research in central Europe, and to have a bit of leverage with local funding mechanisms."
One goal of extending the programme, which has been available in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India, is to establish a culture of postdoc research in the new EU countries. Lack of fixed-term positions and low mobility among scientists are common legacies of the academic systems in central Europe and are obstacles to high-quality science, says Hagen.
Those who have returned agree that it is crucial to gain experience in the West. "I rate my students and postdocs very highly , but I do tell them they should go abroad after a few years to propel their careers," says Gabor Tamas, a Wellcome Trust-funded neuroscientist at the University of Szeged in Hungary.
Like all Wellcome Trust fellows, Tamas has a strong research record. He used part of his grant money to equip his new lab with super-modern apparatus, such as a prototype piece of equipment for recording signals from multiple neurons at the same time.
Thus, he says, he can easily maintain the same quality of work he became used to at his former lab at the University of Oxford, UK. "Don't talk to me about 'critical mass'," he says. "We're in the age of the Internet, and you no longer need to be need to be in Oxford or Cambridge to do good science."
Most of those who have returned say they want to stay permanently. "If I find a follow-up grant I will certainly stay. From a scientific point of view there is no reason to leave," says Zdena Palkova, a yeast-cell biologist at the Charles University of Prague, Czech Republic, who in 2001 won a grant from the EMBO Young Investigator Programme, and in 2003 an additional HHMI grant.
But with national research funding in the new EU countries still low, western grants will be crucial, particularly in highly competitive fields such as molecular biology or neuroscience. "I see no chance in the next few years that Hungary, or any other country in the region, can compete without western resources," says Tamas.
Web links
Wellcome Trust
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
EMBO Young Investigator Programme
http://www.embo.org/projects/yip/index.html
Marie Curie fellowships
http://www.cordis.lu/improving/fellowships/home.htm
EU mobility portal
http://www.europa.eu.int/eracareers/index_en.cfm
EU science indicators
http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/research/era/pdf/indicators/ind_ kf0304.pdf