COLUMN ONE : Ditching Research for Rubles : Russia’s best and brightest are defecting--to the country’s booming business world. The internal ‘brain drain’ is ruining many once-vaunted science programs.

Five years ago, Alexei Vlasov was a promising young cardiologist doing research in biotechnology. Today he’s a venture capitalist.

Two years ago, Andrei Tikhotsky was a plasma physicist studying the behavior of particles in super-heated gases contained by magnetic fields. Now he’s a banker.

The “brain drain” of bright minds from Russian science has swelled to a torrent.

The greatest threat to the future of Russian technology is not that brilliant biologists are immigrating to the West or that physicists might sell atomic secrets to Iraq to supplement their miserable salaries.

It is the hundreds of thousands of scientists who are shedding shabby lab coats for snazzy suits. They seek money, prestige, opportunity and excitement as members of Russia’s new class of bankers and businessmen.

Their intelligence, computer mastery, command of foreign languages and analytical skills are seen as good preparation for business. And the rewards are great. A senior scientist here earns about $150 a month, but some obscure Ph. D.s have joined the ranks of Russia’s super-rich.

“I don’t regret it at all,” said Tikhotsky, who earns five times his physicist’s salary as an analyst at Moscow Industrial Bank, one of Russia’s 10 largest.

Tikhotsky is often called on to advise the bank on high-tech investments. Four colleagues are also refugees from physics labs.

“Everybody who could leave has already left,” he said.

In just four years of post- perestroika turmoil, the number of scientists working in research and development dropped 42%, from 1.1 million in 1989 to 644,834 in 1993, according to the Russian Center for Science Research and Statistics.

Russian statistics show fewer than 10,000 research scientists and technicians have emigrated since 1989. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that the real figure is closer to 20,000 or 30,000. In any case, the overwhelming majority of those who have quit or have been forced out of science have found new occupations within the country.

The internal hemorrhage of scientific talent is “far larger, far more significant and far more harmful than those who have gone abroad,” said Harley D. Balzer, director of the Russian Area Studies Program at Georgetown University.

To the chagrin of a nation that put the first man in space and produced five Nobel laureates in physics, entire laboratories have ground to a halt. They lack staff, equipment or even chemical reagents needed to perform experiments, said Russian and Western scientists and policy-makers who gathered at a recent conference here to ponder the future of Russian science and technology.

“People are paid to sit at their desks,” complained Grigory A. Lakhtin of Moscow’s Institute for Natural Science and Technology.

The Soviet Union built a world-class system for educating scientists that trained formidable theoretical physicists and mathematicians. But today Russia is producing far fewer Ph. Ds.

The postgraduate student population has shrunk by one-fifth, and young scientists who do complete their training leave their fields in record numbers. Only 9% of the members of the prestigious Russian Academy of Science are younger than 30; half of those who have quit the academy are in that age group.

“There is a danger of destroying many outstanding scientific schools, creative teams and important areas of scientific research of both national and world value,” warned Boris G. Saltykov, minister of science and technology policy. “Preserving Russian science is now not only a national goal but also a concern for the world community.”

Western experts share the concern that Russia’s scientific base is eroding, jeopardizing the technological prowess that distinguishes this former superpower from dozens of troubled Third World nations.

“Science and technology are one of (Russia’s) greatest assets” in transforming its economy and industry, concluded a report by the OECD, which sponsored the St. Petersburg conference. “Next to natural resources . . . it may well be its principal treasure.”

Georgetown’s Balzer argues that the Soviet Union was a “technotopia,” a society that believed that science and technology could solve the world’s social and economic problems and provide Soviet citizens with a superior quality of life.

That noble goal was never achieved. Meanwhile, civilian and military science became bloated. Both were stifled by huge bureaucracies that kept laboratories isolated and hindered innovation, Western and Russian analysts said.

By 1989, when the Soviet Union had 1.1 million researchers, the United States, with an economy about three times larger, had 949,300, according to Russian and OECD statistics. (Japan had fewer than half a million.)

Just as Russian factories never got rid of antiquated equipment, which could be pressed into service to fulfill an ambitious new production quota, less-than-useful research institutions never seemed to close.

“We had a Scientific and Technical Institute of Cement,” said former scientist Boris D. Yurlov, rolling his eyes and explaining that the properties of cement ceased to pose important scientific challenges decades ago. “You would not have had this anywhere else in the world. It’s nonsense.”

The economic convulsion that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union quickly reduced the number of scientists and researchers, but nothing was done to keep the best and the brightest from joining the general exodus.

Yurlov, now chairman of the Russian Bank of Reconstruction and Development, argues that Russia should be ruthless in setting its scientific priorities, tailoring much smaller budgets to support the research deemed most vital. “We should have done it long ago,” he said.

But Balzer argues that it may already be too late.

Russia’s top scientists, those with international reputations and track records, were able to find work abroad or attract foreign money to support their work in Russia, he said. Many were rescued--at least temporarily--by $100 million in grants distributed by the Soros Foundation, the brainchild of Hungarian American financier and philanthropist George Soros.

“With so many leading researchers working abroad, working for foreign firms and receiving grants from (international agencies), the government is losing . . . its ability to conduct a coherent science policy influencing the research program of the top 10% of its scientists,” Balzer argued. “More often, it is conducting a welfare program for second- and third-tier science and technology personnel.”

In the last year, Russia has taken measures to save its science. It has designated 42 top institutes as federal research centers and given them priority financing. Special funds have also been set up to support basic research and help promising young investigators.

In a break with Soviet tradition, these scientists will be required to submit their grant proposals to peer review, then to publish their findings so that all may benefit from them.

The Soviet Union spent 80% of its research and development budget on its military-industrial complex, and Russia has yet to redirect much of this money to civilian research. According to the OECD, 60% to 70% of Russia’s scientific expenditures are still in defense.

It is small wonder that the most energetic scientists--cancer researchers along with nuclear bomb makers--have found greener pastures.

The average researcher now earns about $40 a month. A recent survey found that 47% were moonlighting to make ends meet. Many cannot afford to subscribe to foreign journals and can barely repair their lab equipment when it breaks--let alone buy new instruments.

“Poverty is degrading, always,” said Dmitri Silin, who until recently was a radiobiologist at the Moscow Institute of Biophysics, working on ways to treat brain tumors with radiation instead of surgery and publishing his findings in prestigious American journals.

Seven months ago, Silin and his lab partner quit to launch a small wholesale drug business.

Silin rents office space at his old lab, which became the leading institution studying the effects of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine and treating its victims. He said the staff has shrunk to 30% of its previous size. Lab space has been rented out to a dozen private companies--and a cigarette warehouse. He rarely sees a young face anymore.

“People sit in empty laboratories doing nothing all day long,” he said. “They are not jobless from a formal point of view. For practical purposes, they are on welfare. . . . It’s the most degrading thing.”

Despite the hand-wringing by the Russian government, Silin and others who have quit science believe that the movement of research and development talent may not be so terrible, after all. If Russia is to succeed as a capitalist system, they reason, the country needs smart capitalists. Who better to remake the Russian economy than people who understand technology and are trained to think analytically?

Besides, they say, biznes is fun.

Some of the best known “new Russians” are defectors from science. Konstantin N. Borovoi, president of the Russian Commodities Exchange, was once a computer scientist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on “Optimal Management of Large Systems Based on the Example of the Moscow Subway.”

Valery I. Neverov, the 42-year-old multimillionaire founder of Hermes, a vast conglomerate with interests in oil, construction, finance and banking, has a Ph. D. in molecular physics.

And Sergei P. Mavrodi, founder of the MMM investment company, whose shares suffered a spectacular collapse last summer as authorities accused him of running a huge pyramid scheme, was trained as a theoretical mathematician. After a brief stint in jail on tax evasion charges, he was recently elected to Parliament.

Less famous but equally radical career changers include a Moscow molecular biologist who trains vendors to sell Snickers bars; a physical chemist from Novosibirsk who runs a company that assembles and sells personal computers, and a laser physicist who was last spotted by a horrified ex-colleague peddling antifreeze.

Not all the stories end happily. Most of the unemployed who came from science are technicians and clerks. But one Ph. D. in nuclear engineering whose lab sent its workers on an extended, unpaid “vacation” is working as a bank guard and a chauffeur.

Moreover, women over 40--regardless of their scientific qualifications--have trouble finding jobs in the private sector. The OECD report concluded that the growth in private Russian R&D; enterprises will not solve the unemployment problem “because hiring preference is definitely given to men, while the dismissed are mostly women.”

Meanwhile, some of the bright scientists who have remained say they are not licked yet.

“I will not wash dishes, and I will not work as a chauffeur,” said Vladimir Vyrodov, who earns $125 a month as head of an elementary particle physics lab at Moscow’s prestigious Kurchatov Institute.

“Physicists are people who satisfy their curiosity at state expense--and now the state doesn’t always want to satisfy our curiosity,” he said.

Vyrodov has seen his lab staff shrink from 25 to 16. A few physicists have gone abroad to work temporarily, but the rest have been lured away by higher-paying businesses.

Vyrodov and his colleagues now spend part of their time in Chooz, France, where they work on a new type of detector built to study neutrinos in a project partly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Vyrodov is helped by a $1,600 annual stipend from the Soros Foundation, but even though that money is ending, he insisted that he will hang on, come what may. What saddens him most is that for the first time in memory, not a single graduate student came to work in his lab this year.

“Physicists used to be prestigious,” he said. “Now it’s merchants and bankers.”

Even Vyrodov’s son is not immune.

“He’s going to work as a salesman,” his father said, with a mixture of humor and ire. “He’s going to earn three times more than I do.”