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TWO MONTHS after delirious crowds jammed into Wenceslas Square in Prague
to celebrate the election of Vaclav Havel as president, three generations
of Czech and Slovak scientists are methodically cleansing and re-establishing
their country’s scientific institutions.

Some of them, like Jirina Siklova, a researcher and an active member
of the new ruling party Civic Forum, feel there has been a lost generation
in Czech science. ‘My generation either emigrated, or compromised with the
regime, or was pushed out,’ she said. ‘The 60-year-olds survived. The 35-year-olds
survived. The generation in between is gone.’ Siklova is cheerfully caustic
in describing her battles with the old regime, her year in jail for organising
samizdat publications in the West, and her newly acquired status as government
expert on all kinds of social issues.

In 1968, she was an assistant professor of sociology at Charles University
in Prague and head of the Communist Party in the university’s philosophy
faculty. Dismissed in 1969 for refusing to endorse the Soviet invasion,
she cleaned floors in a local hospital for her living.

Siklova’s resourcefulness is typical. Whether ‘official’ dissidents
or non-Party members in low-level jobs, scientists kept up their work by
subterfuge, by avoiding research with ‘political’ implications, and by changing
their field of research.

Petr Pajas, 52, says his story is unexceptional. A nuclear engineer,
he spent three years at the Dubna Institute for Nuclear Research at Moscow
University before returning to work at the Institute of Nuclear Physics
of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. ‘I joined the Communist Party when
I went to Moscow because it was the only way to participate in society,’
he said.

Pajas repeatedly refused to sign a paper welcoming the Soviet invasion,
so in 1972 the new director of the institute gave him a choice between manual
labour or a low-level position in the public transport office. He took the
latter and has been there ever since. Since 1972, he has managed to publish
occasional papers, and has now developed a computer program to analyse the
economic and environmental implications of different transport systems.

Although both Siklova and Pajas have been invited back to their old
positions, neither is sure about accepting. Pajas thinks that his new career
might be more worthwhile than his old research post.

It was, however, social scientists who were hit hardest by the political
consequences of the Soviet invasion. ‘After 1968, there were strong pressures
on the intelligentsia generally, but less in seemingly ‘nonpolitical’ fields
such as maths or physics,’ says Josef Vavrousek, an ecologist who chairs
the programme committee of Civic Forum. ‘Chemistry is not so badly off;
biology, with the exception of molecular biology, is much worse off; philosophy
and the social sciences were systematically and cruelly oppressed,’ he says.
The philosophy faculty at Charles University, once an intellectual centre
of Europe, lost half of its 700 teaching positions during the period of
‘normalisation’. About 10 per cent of the faculty emigrated.

Sometimes it became almost impossible to publish scientific results.
Shortly after the Soviet invasion, a law was passed forbidding scientists
to publish research on public health or the environment. Even as late as
1987, no paper could be published without the approval of the Communist
Party.

Czech scientists feel they were crucial in laying a foundation for the
revolution. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s groups met in different parts
of the country to obtain and translate scientific texts by foreign authors.
Samizdat publishers provided a forum for philosophers and ecologists, as
well as for the writers of fiction known in the West.

A group of ecologists that formed part of the Biological Section of
the Academy of Sciences found themselves in trouble in 1984 for a report
they published on the state of the environment in Czechoslovakia. But by
1988 the system had loosened up so much that they published a second, much
more detailed and politically explosive, report with the help of a member
of the Party. This report catapulted the environment to the top of the political
agenda.

In September 1989, eight scientists issued a statement to the international
press announcing the formation of an ‘independent’ and illegal organisation
called the Circle of Independent Intelligentsia. Among them was Miroslav
Katetov, 73, a mathematician who later played a leading role in the birth
of Civic Forum. The names and addresses of the other 50-odd members were
kept secret to avoid government reprisals.

The scientists announced that their goal was ‘re-establishing the status
and influence of science, education and culture in the life of Czechoslovak
society’. They drew up a programme of research projects to be carried out
secretly, to ‘fill in the blank spaces on the map of Czechoslovakian knowledge’.
By the end of 1989, more than 800 scientists had agreed to collaborate.

One of the original eight was Vavrousek. ‘We are in a paradoxical situation
now, because the majority of the projects can be done officially with support
from the government,’ he admits.

In his New Year speech, President Havel stressed that nobody could escape
responsibility for collaborating with the former regime. Siklova agrees
with him. When she was giving lectures to striking students last autumn,
she asked them: ‘Who rejects or is ashamed of their parents because of their
immoral compromise with the system?’ All the students of political science,
philosophy, law and theology answered positively, compared with only six
out of 300 technical students, she says.

‘This has great meaning for today’s generation of scientists. It means
that they don’t understand moral values. All of their parents compromised,’
she told me. Her colleague Vavrousek agrees: ‘Our first goal for science
is to keep our moral values, our commitment to truth as high as possible,’
he says.

One of the biggest problems facing the reformers is what to do with
the Academy of Sciences. It is a mammoth enterprise, employing more than
15 000 scientists. One proposal is to replace the academy with a new institution
modelled on the National Academy of Sciences in the US; the institutes would
be split off and attached to university departments. The academy, directed
by senior people in government, industry and funding institutions, would
simply provide grants for research.

Otto Wichtere, inventor of the contact lens and head of the country’s
Institute of Micromolecular Chemistry and Physics until the Soviet invasion,
disagrees. ‘We cannot maintain scientific quality if the institutes are
made self-supporting,’ he argues. ‘The academy’s institutes, like my own,
are devoted to interdisciplinary research. We have mathematicians, physicists,
chemists and biologists. This would be very difficult to organise inside
the universities, in the light of their division into departments and teaching
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Wichtere nevertheless sees an overwhelming need to depoliticise the
academy’s system of elections, and to make the relationship between the
academy’s president and its scientists a democratic one. ‘We are pre paring
a draft law to present to the newly elected federal parliament in the autumn,’
he said, ‘We have time to prepare it carefully.’

Wichtere is optimistic about some areas, such as molecular biology and
organic chemistry, but thinks that Czechoslovakia must concentrate on those
areas where its scientific strengths already lie. ‘Applied research institutes
are already outside the academy; they should be linked to research around
the whole world,’ says Wichtere. ‘But we claim that we are and would like
to be a cultured country. This means that we must maintain basic research
for the betterment of humanity.’

Bedrich Moldan, an analytical chemist, stepped into the brand-new office
of Czech Minister of Environment on 1 January . Never a Party member, he
was not allowed into management, but he has written extensively about the
environment, most recently co-editing with Vavrousek the second report on
the state of the Czechoslovakian environment.

Moldan agrees that, compared with social scientists, the natural scientists
are in fairly good shape. ‘Most of us were able to create our own micro-universe
with contacts to the West, or else emigrate,’ he says. But he is worried
about the chance of competition between the returning ex-communists of 1968
and those scientists who were never communists, and who have been working
in low-level positions all their professional lives. Both groups are hoping
that democracy will give them the chance to revive their lost careers. ‘They
(the ex-communists) are talking about 20 years. We are talking about 40
years,’ says Moldan.

How much time is needed to restore Czechoslovakian science? Siklova
says: ‘I used to think that it would take at least a generation. Now, when
I see people’s enthusiasm, I think it will take only five years.’ She and
other politically active scientists say that they are counting on the Czechoslovakian
scientific diaspora to help. ‘People are already contacting us with offers
of help, but we are not organised to receive it yet. They should contact
us again after the elections this summer.’

Their needs differ according to their scientific disciplines. Nobody
is talking yet about investment in equipment or laboratories, although they
are frustrated by the dearth of typewriters, word processors, facsimile
and photocopying machines. The scientists want books, journals, newspapers
and courses for the country’s teachers.

Economics and the natural sciences will be able to shake off the past
more easily, but there is a serious shortage of recent scientific journals
because of their expense. The reformers also see a need to give younger
professionals early opportunities for graduate study and work abroad. These
initial measures, say the reformers, will help the Czech and Slovak scientists
to overcome the effects of the past 40 years and get on with the future.