Quite an interesting article in Chemical and Engineering News on how EU membership has helped the former Soviet states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
An excerpt:
Although Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are often grouped together, the nations speak different languages, and before being absorbed behind the iron curtain after World War II, they did not share the same geopolitical past. Estonia and Latvia spent all but 30 of the past 800 years occupied by Swedes, Germans, and Russians. On the other hand, Lithuania shared political power in Europe with Poland during parts of the past millennia.
Latvia hosted one of the Soviet Union’s most prestigious chemical research institutes, called the Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis (IOS). Its laboratories were responsible for developing some 17 new drugs and, in total, producing some 25% of drugs taken in the Soviet Union. In particular, the Riga-based institute developed the cardiovascular drug Mildronate and the anticancer drug Ftorafur, both of which remain on the market today.
“The Soviet system was too big to manage science carefully,” says Margus Lopp, the chair of organic chemistry at Tallinn Technical University, in Estonia. “So many scientists were free to do what they wanted.” But Lopp suffers no nostalgia for the old system either.
Although he did the research he wanted, Lopp says he felt a frustrating isolation. “During the Soviet times we only published three times in Western journals. To get permission to do so, we had to write to Moscow and say that the research wasn’t good enough to publish in Russian journals.” It’s a prime example of “the madness of the system,” Lopp says, “because, of course, it was our most interesting work.”