“We Are Doing This Because It Is the Right Thing to Do”
The headquarters of the Polish Academy of Sciences sits on a busy tree-lined street very close to Warsaw’s central railway station. “We can see it from our windows,” Jerzy Duszyński, the president of the academy, told us during an interview in Warsaw last month. He went on to describe the scene that unfolded at the station after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February: “We could see hundreds upon hundreds of Ukrainian people with no idea where to go and what to do, many with small children. They were disoriented and extremely tired…. Seeing that inspired our academy to work quickly with our institutes to host and support Ukrainian scholars displaced by the war.”
As millions have fled Ukraine, the Polish Academy of Sciences, working with other national academies, has led efforts to help Ukrainian researchers and prevent a long-term “brain drain” so that these scientists will be prepared to assist with rebuilding the country when the time comes.
We talked with Duszyński about the history of the close relationship between Polish and Ukrainian researchers and how Ukrainian scientific institutions can be rebuilt after the war. “It is not an accident that many scientific institutions in Ukraine are being destroyed,” he noted. “It is on purpose—because science is crucial for the country to flourish.”
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