Scientific collaboration with Russia begins to unravel

The country’s Mars rover project with the European Space Agency is on hold. Russian institutions have been suspended from CERN, the world’s largest particle physics lab, in Switzerland. A prestigious math conference has been moved from St. Petersburg to a virtual meeting, and Russian scientific journals are being frozen out of key international databases.

High-profile scientific journals such as Science and Nature aren’t rejecting research submitted by Russian scientists, but financial sanctions placed on Russia may make paying journal processing fees tricky. Ukrainian researchers are calling for a complete boycott of Russian institutions and academics.

But while welcoming the outpouring of support across the West for Ukrainian scientists, some academics think that shunning all Russian scientists could be counterproductive.

“Shutting down all interaction with Russian scientists would be a serious setback to a variety of Western and global interests and values, which include making rapid progress on global challenges related to science and technology, maintaining non-ideological lines of communication across national boundaries, and opposing ideological stereotyping and indiscriminate persecution,” said a letter published Thursday in the journal Science authored by five prominent scientists from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

John Holdren, a research professor in environmental science and policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the science adviser to former US President Barack Obama, was one of the authors. He said he wanted to make sure there was balance in the measures taken to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin and his regime.

“I put a very high value on cooperation in science and technology, ” Holdren said. “My colleagues and I who wrote that letter together were alarmed by reports that what was underway was a wholesale demonization and isolation of Russian scientists.”