Red tape puts chill on Siberian research

摘要

One of Russia's most prominent international science projects has fallen foul of cold-war-era concerns. An expedition to study carbon transport around Siberia's Yenisey River has been postponed for a year after officials blocked the use of sampling equipment and put some sites off-limits. The episode highlights the tension between Russia's bureaucracy and its growing ambition to develop wider research collaborations -part of a strategy to revitalize domestic science. In July, Ernst-Detlef Schulze, a carbon-cycle researcher and founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, and 35 scientists from Germany, the Netherlands, France and Russia, had their bags packed for the journey to Siberia.