Cosmos, Genome, Superheavies: The Afterlives of Post-Soviet Science

At its height in the late 1980s, the Soviet science system was the largest national infrastructure of science and technology in the world. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991, the science systems of Russia and the other post-Soviet successor states â€" as well as former and current socialist regimes around the world â€" underwent a tremendous contraction and a widely recognized crisis. What followed was a significant transformation of science in this region, one which cannot be assimilated into frameworks of "decline" or "collapse," and which had major impacts on transnational and global scientific organization. This talk will outline that heterogeneity by following three rather different trajectories through the post-Soviet science systems across several successor states: the space program, the Soviet-era program to sequence the human genome, and the efforts to synthesize superheavy elements.

Speaker: Michael Gordin, Princeton University