Sir

Eastern European countries have a tradition of stressing the importance of solid scientific education and research. Even under communism, Polish scientists allowed to work in western laboratories were able to perform at the level of their colleagues from the host country.

This level of performance has been improving since the rise of democracy. Recently, leading western European laboratories — the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the Max Planck Society — have created special PhD programmes to attract talented young scientists from eastern Europe. These programmes provide excellent opportunities for students to begin their scientific careers in well-funded western European laboratories. Unfortunately, they also have drawbacks. One is the risk of a flight of PhD candidates from eastern European laboratories such as those in Poland.

In Poland, there have been two major changes in the way laboratories are funded and operated since the transition to a democratic system of government. As a result, a new emphasis has been placed on the importance of graduate students in making a research programme successful. First, there has been the creation of a government grant scheme, awarding grants to researchers holding PhDs and Habilitation degrees — the qualification that allows a PhD to teach at university — on merit, as determined through a peer-review process. Second, there has been a movement away from the strict hierarchical structure which typified the traditional Polish laboratory. Instead of a team of researchers holding permanent positions and led by the head of the laboratory, contemporary Polish laboratories are associations of research groups consisting of principal investigators and graduate students working on the realization of research proposals.

Unfortunately, the government fellowships now offered in Poland to graduate students are inadequate to maintain a reasonable standard of living. As a result, principal investigators in Polish laboratories, facing strong competition from the West, will be unable to keep enough graduate students to perform research. Furthermore, there will be little incentive for the new generation of Polish scientists trained in western Europe to return to Poland and start their own laboratories, if they find a lack of qualified candidates for their research programmes.

What can be done to avoid this pessimistic scenario? Until economic conditions in eastern Europe improve, one solution would be to allocate a small percentage of the funds used in current EMBL and Max Planck fellowship programmes to a fellowship fund that would allow eastern European students to work in their home countries. Western European institutions funding fellowships could monitor the PhD programmes by sending advisers to participate in committee meetings, examinations and public defences of PhD theses.

Not only would this help to preserve and promote good-quality research and scientific training in eastern European countries, but it would also create a platform for collaboration between researchers in western and eastern Europe.