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Resentment is rife among scientists from the former East German republic.
Many are still trying to come to terms with a judgment process which, in
July, sentenced them to the dole queue or retraining. Even among those who
were told they could keep their jobs, many still face an uncertain future.

The root of their problem extends back forty years to when Germany,
then one of the world’s leading scientific nations, was split up. In one
of the two German states, scientists were given worldwide contacts and good
funding, but were forced to compete for them. In the other, scientists received
guaranteed salaries, little foreign contact, and the job of reinventing
gadgets their government couldn’t buy from abroad.

Now, a year after the East German republic disappeared, united Germany
is trying to forge from these two halves a world-class scientific body.
No one expected it to be easy. But some scientists charge that bias, haste
and administrative clumsiness, coupled with efforts by industry and research
bodies from West Germany to exploit the situation to their own benefit,
have created a grossly unfair judgment process. It may also have robbed
Germany of some of its best scientists and research teams.

Until the Berlin wall was toppled in 1989, the East German academy of
sciences in Berlin was the command centre for more than 24 000 scientists.
Now, 17 000 still wait in the East, unsure of their future. The academy
building stands empty but for one floor, where federal government officials
are reorganising science in the East.

This is the KAI, the ominously named Coordination and Liquidation Office
for the Institutes of the Former East German Academy. Article 38 of the
German reunification treaty dissolved the academy, and prescribed a ‘renewal’
for research in East Germany. ‘Productive’ scientific establishments were
to be kept, but the scientific community was to be restructured to create
an internationally competitive body. The KAI’s job is to dispose of the
academy’s property, redirect scientists into new jobs, and try to minimise
loss of talent in the process.

All German scientists admit the ranks of researchers in the East need
thinning. Under the old system, almost everyone who completed a scientific
education was guaranteed a job. East Germany’s isolation meant that many
researchers specialised in areas that were alien to needs in the West or
just hopelessly out of date.

In charge of the KAI is Hartmut Grubel, who comes from the West. ‘It’s
like treating a critically ill patient. You know they’ll have a hard time
getting over the hump, but once they’re over it, they’ll survive,’ he says.

Article 38 contains social safeguards designed to ease the impact restructuring
has on people. For example, it extends the contracts of all former academy
employees until the end of the year and finances the maintenance of research
facilities until then. But on 1 January, a lot of scientists will be forced
to deal with the reality of unemployment.

‘The dismantling of the old structure will inevitably create uncertainty
and produce some unavoidable loss of potential,’ says Grubel. ‘Those are
things we’d like to minimise, where possible.’

To help prevent the loss of good research teams, Article 38 called for
a comprehensive evaluation of East German science. This task fell to the
Science Council, a federal science policy advisory body, based in Cologne,
in the West. The Council spent a year deciding which of the academy’s 130
research establishments were ‘productive’. Committees of experts from both
sides of the old border and from abroad decided which teams should be recommended
for further funding.

The council finished its task in July, three months ahead of schedule,
at a cost of DM3 million ( £1 million). It recommended that 72 new
research establishments be set up in the East, their staff sizes, their
research orientations, and whether they should be incorporated into the
existing scientific structures of the federal republic, such as universities
or federal laboratories.

The KAI will act on its recommendations. But many complain that the
council has made poor decisions in some areas.

The reasons for the failure of the judgment process stem partly from
the way individuals have been treated. ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs in the East have been
stuck in limbo, waiting first for the evaluations to end and, now, for them
to be acted upon. The Science Council’s word is not final. Even if it says
a research group should continue, it nearly always recommends fewer people.
But it does not say who should go.

More importantly, the council suggests sources of funding for the new
institutes, such as federal or state governments, or independent research
organisations such as the Max Planck or Fraunhofer Societies. But whether
these bodies wish to provide the funds is another question.

Hence many scientists from the East have decided not to wait around
for their fates to be decided, and have simply left Germany, or science.
Others, with skills in demand, have been snapped up by companies in the
West, leaving crippled research teams behind.

Science in the East could be left permanently impoverished. Dietrich
Koch, head of the Central Institute for Cybernetics and Information Processing
in what was formerly East Berlin, says many research teams in his field
were breaking up by the time the evaluation took place.

This made it harder for those who remained to impress the Science Council’s
evaluators. Even when the Science Council was positive about a team, key
people had sometimes left by the time the evaluation was issued, making
the judgment meaningless, says Koch. His field suffered especially. About
half the East’s computer scientists are now working in the West, he says,
‘many at salaries a director of a scientific institute in the East (like
Koch) can only dream about.’

Koch suspects some of the evaluators of bias. ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs from the West
involved in the evaluation commend the ‘surprisingly’ good quality of many
of their Eastern colleagues, but few seem willing to give them a leading
part to play in Germany’s scientific future.

No evaluators suggested that where East German research was better,
or on a par with work in the West, such research should be directed in the
East. ‘Even Professor Simon, the head of the Science Council, expressed
disappointment with that,’ says Koch.

Koch suspects that some evaluators gave the thumbs down to research
teams who might have competed too successfully with their rivals in the
West. ‘Some of their estimations were incorrect and tendentious – made with
the intention of shutting out competition,’ he says. The evaluators recommended
that a team at his institute, working on computer-aided design and manufacturing,
should be closed down. But the team has since set itself up as a successful
private company.

Wilhelm Krull of the Science Council notes that evaluators had to decide
which researchers in the East should get public research funds, not which
were good enough to survive at all. Public funding in Germany is confined
to research not also being done by private companies. This policy avoids
complaints from companies that competitors are being given unfair subsidies
but, to East Germans, it is another source of bias.

They also see prejudice against people who worked in projects not fashionable
in West Germany before unification. One is nuclear research. The Science
Council said only 500 of the 1500 staff at the Central Institute for Nuclear
Research in Rossendorf should stay.

Wolfgang Pompe of the Central Institute for Solid State Physics and
Materials Research in Dresden, says the institute had done a lot of good
work on safety and materials in Soviet-type nuclear reactors, many of which
still operate throughout the former Soviet bloc. That expertise could now
be lost.

Another group that came off badly from the council’s recommendations
are the scientists who developed and built devices that exist in Western
countries but could not be obtained readily in East Germany because of prohibitions
on the export of strategic technology to the Eastern bloc.

‘They fought like lions to keep up,’ Koch says. ‘In some areas they
came up with unique and valuable products.’ He cites an ultralight, 2-gigabyte
magnetic storage tape used on the Soviet Phobos spacecraft. ‘There’s no
need for those instruments now,’ says Koch, but the research is still valuable.

The fate of the Phobos team exemplifies the experiences of many good
Eastern research groups. Manfred Gollner, a member of the team, says the
10 scientists were eager to continue working on magnetic data storage. But
the evaluators advised them to avoid memory research, ‘because the US and
Japan are so far ahead of Europe’. One member of the team is now working
in the US, and six are scattered across West Germany.

East Germans also say the decapitation of the old academy administration,
with the resulting disintegration of management at research institutes,
didn’t help them impress the evaluators. Many scientists did not present
their work properly. Pompe blames their lack of preparation on poor leadership
from the administrators who took over after 1989.

‘At some institutes, work with the Science Council teams was started
by the old institute leadership. By the time of the evaluation, a new group
of administrators was in place,’ he says. All this shuffling of personnel
caused confusion.

There were also differences between the evaluators and the scientists
being evaluated. Many on the Eastern side were civil servants, who were
called to account by university professors. The evaluation, like reunification
itself, was hasty. When the work of the Phobos team was inspected, the evaluators
stayed for 15 minutes, then recommended ending research not done in the
West.

Some evaluators didn’t understand the work they were supposed to judge.
Harald Gundel of the Institute for Electron Physics in Potsdam says his
colleagues were horrified by the low level of understanding among the evaluators.
They complained and forced the evaluators to take Klaus Kitzing, a Nobel
laureate in physics, on board. He saw the significance of their work and
approved it. Many scientists in Eastern institutes have similar complaints,
but were not so lucky.

Krull says the German economy will be the biggest factor in determining
how many East Germans stay employed in their own fields. People in basic
research are doing well, he says, as are those in environmental research
and technology.

But prospects for researchers at, for example, the Central Institute
for the Building of Scientific Instruments at Aldershof in Berlin, will
depend on how fast industry in the East can set up development programmes
that could employ them. In the West, private industry does two-thirds of
all R&D, says Krull, but ‘in the East, this just didn’t exist’.

At least the number of job opportunities for scientists has increased.
The Science Council first predicted that there would be 6000 publicly funded
positions for scientists from the East. That has now increased to 10 000
(although 17 000 scientists have still to be placed).

The KAI has the funds to help retrain scientists or set them up in private
companies. But it has been hampered by policy shifts.

It was, for example, asked to fill 2000 science-related positions in
a work creation scheme involving 400 000 jobs, run by the Federal Employment
Institute. The jobs are meant to keep scientists in work while the economy
develops places for them.

But with unemployment in the East rocketing, the scheme has been overwhelmed
with applicants. This month, in a bid to give more people a turn, the time
any individual can spend in one of these posts was cut from two years to
one, and employers will now have to cover 10 per cent of salaries, and 70
to 85 per cent of overhead costs. Jens Kruger of the KAI says this might
work for most of the jobs, in construction and trade. But for research the
cuts will be fatal.

‘Many small, new Eastern firms will no longer find the programme attractive,’
he says, because they cannot afford the new salary and overhead charges.
‘Government is equating a scientist with a labourer,’ says Pompe. ‘It’s
a very big step back.’ The KAI is now trying to extend its 2000 research
posts back to two years.

Grubel knows as well as anyone that the way East German scientists are
being treated is not perfect. The KAI has had to pick its course with care,
balancing the needs of individuals amid the political and financial constraints
imposed by unification. It is not a job, he says, ‘that can be done to
everyone’s satisfaction’.

He also knows the process is forcing many to move. But, in the long
term, he believes this may be a blessing in disguise: ‘If scientists who
were not able to travel earlier now take positions in the West or abroad,
I am not going to discourage them. In several years they may come back,
and when they do, German science may be better for it.’