Mediaboss Marketing

Katarzyna Komorowska/Wrocaw Res. Centre EIT+

Scanning electron microscope image of a grain of sand engraved at EIT+ in Wrocaw, Poland.

In a lab so new that it still smells of fresh paint, Katarzyna Komorowska expertly handles what looks like a futuristic coffee machine. It is actually an advanced scanning electron microscope with the power to manipulate delicate samples and visualize minute details one of several impressive-looking machines in Komorowska's lab in the city of Wrocaw in southwest Poland. Komorowska turns on the device's ion beam. Minutes later, a screen shows the razor-sharp image of a bearded dwarf clutching a graphene molecule that she has just engraved on a grain of sand.

The etched sand is a historical reminder as well as a technological feat. The dwarf became an unlikely symbol of the 1980s protest movement that grew in Wrocaw against Poland's ruling communist regime. It is now something of a city mascot: Wrocaw hosts more than 300 dwarf statues, and visitors can track them down using a brochure and app. The fact that the dwarf can be engraved on a grain of sand in seconds also symbolizes the formidable efforts that this city is making to become a science hub in central Europe. Since 2007, more than 200 million (US$250 million) in European Union (EU) funds have helped to turn Wrocaw's abandoned military hospital into a campus dedicated to academic and commercial science just one part of Poland's high-flying ambitions for science as a whole.

Change has swept through central and Eastern Europe since the collapse of communism there 25 years ago. The revolution was quick and unforeseen. For a few months in 1989, protests swelled behind the Iron Curtain, the political barrier that since the end of the Second World War had isolated communist central and Eastern European countries from the West. Then, on 9 November that year, the East German government opened the Berlin Wall and first a trickle then a flood of East and West Germans began to scale the barrier, delirious with joy. A year later, Germany had been reunified and almost every other former communist country in the region had instituted a democratic government.

Researchers shared in the elation: the fall of the Iron Curtain brought them personal and intellectual freedom. But it came with a host of new problems. During the 45-year communist rule, research institutions from the Baltic to the Balkans had been academically isolated and unable to compete with the rest of the world. Now they were suddenly being judged by international standards, and their science looked hopelessly out of date. For many, political change also brought poverty, as economies collapsed. Pitifully low salaries, lack of funding and antiquated labs prompted swathes of scientists to go west or seek careers outside academia. Those who stayed relied almost exclusively on foreign aid. After the Iron Curtain had come down, science and higher-education institutes were thrown into turmoil, says Liviu Mattei, pro-rector of the Central European University in Budapest. Few places in the world have gone through such rapid and brutal changes.

Twenty-five years on, researchers find themselves in a more stable scientific landscape. The economic decline of the 1990s has mostly ended, and in the past decade some countries have enjoyed a marked economic upswing that has allowed governments to inject money into science. Membership of the EU has been a major driver of change. In 2004, the union welcomed eight former communist countries, including Poland, Estonia and Hungary. Romania and Bulgaria followed in 2007, and Croatia in 2014. One EU citizen in five now lives in one of these new member states.

Nik Spencer/Nature. Source: Publications: Scopus; Spending: Eurostat; Grants: ERC

These relatively poor countries have enjoyed huge financial injections from EU structural funds, which are designed to narrow economic and social disparities between European regions and are distributed by each country's government. In the 200713 financial period, Brussels invested a staggering 170 billion in cohesion and regional development in the new member states, and more than 20 billion of this was earmarked for science and innovation. Most countries have also created funding agencies that allocate grants on a strictly competitive basis. Scientists had to learn that performance is now the sole basis of getting funded and published, says Franci Demar, director of the Slovenian Research Agency in Ljubljana. It has been a difficult process, but it has greatly improved science produced in this part of the world.

But within central and Eastern Europe, different nations have followed starkly different trajectories in science, as a spotlight on three countries in the region reveals (see 'Science in the new Europe'). Poland hosted relatively little research until recent years, but the nation is now becoming a political and economic powerhouse in the region and is rapidly expanding in science. Estonia, a small country on Europe's northern fringes, reformed its research system early on and is now reaping the benefits. Hungary, by contrast, maintained some scientific strengths during the communist era, but a lack of investment is now putting that legacy at risk.

Original post:
After the Berlin Wall: Central Europe up close