COLUMN ONE : Mexico Out to Plug Its Brain Drain : During the ‘80s, the country lost many of its top scientists. Now, with a free trade pact looming, it’s trying to bolster its economic muscle by luring its best and brightest back home.

Enrique Geffroy earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Caltech and landed a prestigious teaching job in the United States. Yet when the Mexican government launched a drive to bring scientists back home 1 1/2 years ago, he was among the first to respond, even though it meant taking a position at half the pay.

“I decided that, given my experience, I could contribute something to the development of physics in Mexico,” Geffroy said. “I believe that if industry in Mexico wants to be internationally competitive, they need the same weapons as international companies--highly trained people.”

During Mexico’s economic collapse in the 1980s, hundreds and perhaps thousands of scientists like Geffroy abandoned this country to study or work in the United States and Europe. The brain drain was a problem Mexico shared with most of the Third World; there was little the bankrupt government could offer to keep its best minds at home. Mexican industries, comfortably protected from foreign competition, didn’t worry about the exodus.

But now, as Mexico prepares to enter a North American free trade agreement, there is widespread concern among officials and industry leaders that the loss of so many of its “best and brightest” has weakened the country for battle in a regional trade bloc that includes a U.S. economy 17 times the size of Mexico’s.

If Mexico is to prosper in a global economy--and to be more than a station for foreign-owned assembly plants--its industries must improve the quality of their own products and continue to put out new ones, analysts say. They must become more modern and more efficient in production. And for that, they need scientists.

“Scientific research and technological development have become strategic factors in a country’s competitive capacity,” Mexican presidential adviser Guillermo Soberon told a UC Riverside conference in April.

To bring home engineers, physicists and other experts, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s government is offering to pay scientists to “repatriate,” raising university salaries and increasing funding for research.

In the last 1 1/2 years, Geffroy and 348 other scientists have returned to Mexico under the program. The government pays their moving expenses and salary for a year, giving the institutions where they locate time to create permanent positions for the returnees.

In a somewhat more controversial move, the government also has brought about 100 scientists from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to work in Mexican universities. Their travel, salaries and research are paid for, primarily so they will help train a new generation of Mexican scientists.

“The principal obstacle to any plan for expansion in this country is people,” said Miguel Jose Yacaman, deputy director of the National Council for Science and Technology. “Human capital is our problem. . . . There are not enough trained people in Mexico.”

The scarcity has benefited foreign scientists such as Alexi Popov, a 26-year-old computer engineer and graduate of Moscow University who came from Russia last June and quickly found a job administering the computer network of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s geophysics institute. Popov expects to continue working in Mexico for another three to five years--until there are more highly trained Mexicans to take over the jobs held by foreigners.

“In Russia, we are just beginning to install computer networks. Here they are already installed. When I got the job, there was nobody else around to do it,” Popov said.

The National Researchers System, through which the government subsidizes salaries, counts just 6,735 scientists nationwide, about 80% in the natural and applied sciences necessary for technological development and 20% in the social sciences. Yacaman said the government hopes to double that number of researchers in Mexico over the next decade.

Mexico’s scientific population is low, not only in comparison with the United States but also with similar Third World countries. According to 1989 United Nations’ figures, Mexico had 10 researchers per 100,000 inhabitants, while the United States had 342; by way of comparison, Argentina had 33 per 100,000, Brazil 25 and Turkey 16.

“Science is part of culture,” said Dr. Antonio Pena, director of the Institute of Cellular Physiology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “If a country does not have scientists, it is like not having painters or musicians or writers.”

The loss is also pragmatic and financial. When Third World scientists work in U.S. or European universities and companies, their research belongs to those developed countries. Their discoveries are converted into money-making patents for the United States and Europe.

For Mexican scientists who have trained abroad, the decision to return home often is difficult. Many left the country when teaching and research salaries--like most wages--plummeted by about half. Although salaries have improved greatly under the Salinas administration, scientists still can earn two to six times as much in the United States and Europe as they can in Mexico.

Further, scientific work is naturally more advanced in the First World, and the possibilities for international recognition are greater. Not only are there more resources in universities, there are more opportunities to do research for private companies in natural and social sciences.

“In five or six years in the United States, I have managed to create a reputation in my area,” said a Mexican demographer and mathematician working for a policy research firm in New Jersey. Like several scientists who have decided not to return, he asked to remain anonymous.

“I am publishing internationally and competing among the highest 10% of researchers in my area in the world. I’m in the competition and I like it,” he said.

Some scientists who have trained in the United States find they are overqualified for the kinds of jobs available in Mexico.

Dr. Sergio Saldivar, a kidney specialist, is about to receive a master’s degree in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health. In the United States, he has been offered a job that combines his two expert fields; in Mexico, he doubts he could find any job in the one highly specialized field of biostatistics.

“In Mexico, my options would be to work full time in a clinical position with a small amount of research or to get a position in the Health Ministry that would be more administrative than research,” Saldivar said. He said he hopes that, in three or four years, he can find a job in Mexico, perhaps in a pharmaceutical company, that might be able to use his skills.

Like physicist Geffroy, several scientists who have returned under the government program said they did so out of a commitment to train young scientists in their own country. But even they express frustrations over the computers, laboratories and resources they have to work with and the bureaucracies of their institutions.

Few complain about the pay--they knew they were taking a cut when they came home. But they would like more support from the government and industry for their research--everything from more funding to ordinary supplies for experiments.

“I need baby food jars (to store materials) for my research,” said Carlos Arias, who returned to Mexico City’s National Polytechnic Institute in December, 1991, with a Ph.D. in biotechnology from Sheffield University in England. “I have to go around to nursing homes and orphanages to get them.”

He said that while the government has granted his university funds to build a lab for his group of four researchers, university bureaucracy has delayed construction. The government does not pay for the lab assistants needed in the study of plant life--work they hope someday could be used by pharmaceutical companies.

Although the Salinas administration has approximately doubled funding for scientific research and development, presidential adviser Soberon acknowledges the country is far behind its trade partners.

While the United States spends about 2.7% of gross domestic product, or $624 per capita, on science and technology research, Mexico spends about 0.4%, or $13 per person. Canada spends 1.4%, or $241 per person.

Soberon also notes that while the private sector in the United States pays for more than half of research--about 57%--in Mexico it pays for less than a quarter.

“In our country, the participation of the private sector is very limited,” he said.

“If Mexico wants to develop,” Yacaman added, “industry has to invest.”

Industry is slowly coming to the same conclusion.

As long as the Mexican economy was closed, national industries were able to purchase much of the computer software and production technology they needed abroad; it was the only way for foreigners to enter the Mexican market, and they were more than willing to sell.

But now that Mexico’s borders are open--and Mexican companies are going out into the world--new technology is not as readily available.

“With open borders, companies can enter the Mexican market directly with their own goods,” said Eduardo Garza T. , chairman of the Monterrey Productivity Center. “They don’t need to sell technology to Mexico. And they see us as competition now. This situation makes us see the need to develop our own technology.”

But understanding is one thing, spending is another. While some of Mexico’s biggest industries lay out 1% to 2% of sales for research and development, most companies spend less or nothing at all. And just when companies should be expanding research, some large firms have cut back because of the U.S. recession and slowed growth in Mexico.

“I know that goes against future development, but we have to look at short-term survival over long-term competition,” said Daniel Chavez Baigts, a research director at the Monterrey-based glass manufacturer Vitro.

Industry leaders, meanwhile, argue that the government should spend more on research and development and change its focus. They say the government finances esoteric research with little or no practical application for industry.

This lack of communication among industry, government and the scientific community seems never-ending. Arias of the Polytechnic Institute says that even when practical studies are done, universities and private companies often are unable to agree on the terms for use of the research; they bicker over who owns what.

Geffroy, 40, said he has been asked to design a new graduate program in the material sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he is a teacher and researcher.

“I want to invite researchers from industry to participate in designing the program,” Geffroy said, “but I am having trouble finding qualified people. I am going to have to invite them from the United States.”