Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to blow your Mind?
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christie Sager. Robert,
Speaker 1: did you ever see uh this movie from the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties starring John Travolta called The Experts. I have not know,
Speaker 1: so my memory of this movie is John Travolta and
Speaker 1: his co star whose name I can't remember, our nightclub
Speaker 1: managers in like New York or something like that, and
Speaker 1: they think they're going to Nebraska, but they end up
Speaker 1: going to Soviet Russia, Uh, to a fake town that
Speaker 1: is built there solely by the KGB to like make
Speaker 1: like a spies like the Americans, like Americans, where they
Speaker 1: blend in perfectly and exactly. They're Russian agents who are
Speaker 1: trained to understand American culture. And Uh. Anyways, those guys,
Speaker 1: John Travolta and his pal end up teaching them about
Speaker 1: all the great things about American culture. They love it
Speaker 1: so much that they turn against Soviet Russia. Anyways. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a proto American, it is, very much so.
Speaker 1: So I couldn't help thinking about that movie The Experts
Speaker 1: the entire time. I was researching for today's episode, which
Speaker 1: is about a little place. It's actually not so little,
Speaker 1: it's surprisingly so and it's in Soviet but it's not
Speaker 1: no longer in Soviet Russia. It's in Siberia. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it's called Akademgorodok, I believe, is how you pronounce it,
Speaker 1: which translates from Russian into academy town. Yeah, you can.
Speaker 1: All you can really think of it as the Russian
Speaker 1: Hogwarts for science. Yeah, yeah, you mentioned that earlier, and
Speaker 1: I think that that is like the perfect analogy. It
Speaker 1: is where Russia sent all of its smartest wizards to train. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's been around since the late fifties. And so
Speaker 1: basically we discovered this through an article that was in
Speaker 1: The Guardian that was really well written. Uh. It's sort
Speaker 1: of just like a biopic thing about it. And I said,
Speaker 1: let's do let's do an episode about this thing. It
Speaker 1: just sounds so weird and perfect for the show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great, it's weird, it's fascinating. And the thing that
Speaker 1: really surprised me is that I could not find any
Speaker 1: examples of fiction or even creepy pasta that takes place
Speaker 1: here like this seems like the perfect setting for all
Speaker 1: manner of weird paranormal, creepy science, mad science shenanigans, especially
Speaker 1: like you know, you mentioned Creepy Pasta. We we did
Speaker 1: an episode in the last year at least about that
Speaker 1: creepy pasta Russian science experiment, and then we you know,
Speaker 1: we've done episodes recently about the space Mirror project with
Speaker 1: project as in Maya and also the human z episode.
Speaker 1: Russian Science too academic garodoc didn't come up in any
Speaker 1: of these things, no, um, So it's kind of fascinating,
Speaker 1: especially because this place seems to be like the place
Speaker 1: for Russian science. Yeah, and I mean not only like
Speaker 1: mad science e stuff, but like spies, like why hasn't
Speaker 1: James Bond run through the streets of uh So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's keep that in mind. And hey, Hollywood producers, if
Speaker 1: you're out there listening, I don't know, it's a little
Speaker 1: late for like some Cold war mad science shenanigans, but
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe that movie, oh that was sent
Speaker 1: in World War two, Frankenstein's Army. Did you ever see that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Frankenstein's Army is a lot of fun. It's essentially haunted
Speaker 1: attraction as a film, like it's not if you go
Speaker 1: into it with that that mindset and realize you're not
Speaker 1: watching like a true like character engagement film, but you're
Speaker 1: going on a haunted house, right Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah.
Speaker 1: For the listeners, franknin Stein's Army Josh Clark from Stuff
Speaker 1: You Should Know, turn me onto that. Uh uh Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's basically Frankenstein creates a bunch a bunch of like
Speaker 1: zombie monsters for the Nazis as they like pour through
Speaker 1: Russia or is it the other way around? Is the
Speaker 1: Russian ones? I can't remember, but it's it's basically set
Speaker 1: during the invasion of Russia. Yeah, I believe that's right. Okay, anyways,
Speaker 1: go watch that, guys. I think it's on Netflix. Okay,
Speaker 1: So let's get down to basics about what this place is.
Speaker 1: It is hidden away in the cold Siberian forest, and
Speaker 1: it's actually been called Russia's Silicon Forest as an alternative
Speaker 1: to Silicon Valley. Uh. It's located three thousand kilometers east
Speaker 1: of Moscow. And the weather they are ranges from thirty
Speaker 1: degree celsius summers to negative forty degrees celsius winters. So
Speaker 1: it's like all over the place like brutal cold, and
Speaker 1: then like apparently like there's like a real mosquito issue
Speaker 1: in the summers, Like it's it's hot, and there's just
Speaker 1: mosquitoes everywhere. It's right on alongside what's called the I
Speaker 1: believe it's ob river. Anybody out there who knows Russian
Speaker 1: or has like a familiarity with Russian, I apologize in advance.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna butcher a number of things here. And the
Speaker 1: only way that I was able to figure out how
Speaker 1: to pronounce Akademgorodok and Novas Abersk was by watching a
Speaker 1: YouTube video by a dude who is American that just
Speaker 1: happens to live in Nova Sabirsk and teaches Russian to
Speaker 1: people over YouTube. And speaking of Siberia here, I mean
Speaker 1: anyone who doesn't have that have much familiarity with Russia.
Speaker 1: You might be thinking of Siberia. You're thinking like waste lands,
Speaker 1: thinking like tiny camps, and maybe you're imagining this strange
Speaker 1: artificial place in the forest there and and not that
Speaker 1: that part. Maybe he isn't completely off, but it is
Speaker 1: worth stressing that Nova Sabirsk is a major metropolitan area. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: like that was a mistake I made. I would say
Speaker 1: like through the first half of the literature. I didn't
Speaker 1: quite have that understanding until like I ran across the
Speaker 1: statistic that Nova Sabirsk is the third largest most populated
Speaker 1: city in Russia after Moscow and St. St. Petersburg. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's Siberia, but it's not the middle of nowhere. It's
Speaker 1: you know, it's pretty populated. And Academgorodoc is like Koters
Speaker 1: just outside of Nova Sabirsk, and it's it's like it's
Speaker 1: his own little end to tea, but it's connected. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: in fact, it's kind of I guess, like the best analogies,
Speaker 1: it's sort of like Cambridge to Boston, right, Like Cambridge
Speaker 1: is often used as a as a like analogy for
Speaker 1: academic Gara doc because of you know, Harvard and m
Speaker 1: I tear there. But in academic Garads case, it's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the state universities and then now like a
Speaker 1: lot of science and tech oriented companies are moving there.
Speaker 1: So okay, novas abers was founded in eight so even
Speaker 1: the city itself isn't that old, especially for European city. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this kind of falls on the long standing Russian trend
Speaker 1: of this is the place we will build a city
Speaker 1: regardless of it's uh, you know, Siberia or a swampy wasteland. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I feel that way about Atlanta where we live,
Speaker 1: Like I'm like, why why did anybody start like set
Speaker 1: up roots here? And it was I think in Atlanta's case,
Speaker 1: it was just it just happened to be where trained, Yeah,
Speaker 1: where the trains, right. Yeah. Um. So by the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: Novas of Beersk itself had already like garnered a reputation
Speaker 1: as like having several educational institutes very focused on physics. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it it really didn't like the academic Gora doc
Speaker 1: experiment didn't really come about until the late fifties. And
Speaker 1: the way I like to think about it is kind
Speaker 1: of like if our listeners are familiar with the TV
Speaker 1: show Eureka. I think it's a little bit like that,
Speaker 1: although less science fiction e and then um, some of
Speaker 1: our listeners actually turned Joe and I on. I don't
Speaker 1: think you've listened to it yet, right, Limetown, I know
Speaker 1: I've heard mention of it. So Limetown is a podcast,
Speaker 1: uh that is about a fictional American science town kind
Speaker 1: of like this that I highly recommend Anyways, those were
Speaker 1: in my head as well as John Travolta's classic The
Speaker 1: Experts while we were studying this place. And it's also
Speaker 1: worth pointing out through the realization of Gora doc Uh,
Speaker 1: it's all a part two of the seven Year Plan
Speaker 1: from A fifty to sixty five, which was a big
Speaker 1: initiative in Soviet Russia. Yeah, so what we're looking at
Speaker 1: here is basically a team up between a mathematician named
Speaker 1: Mikhail Lavrentiev and uh, everybody's favorite premier Nikita Krushchev, and
Speaker 1: their idea was basically, they're going to take the USSR
Speaker 1: smartest scientists and put them all in one place so
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be distracted by Moscow. Like apparently both the
Speaker 1: like you know, metropolitan nature of Moscow, but also all
Speaker 1: the politics going on in Moscow was becoming a problem
Speaker 1: for these scientists. They weren't getting their work done. So Sai,
Speaker 1: let's send them off from the middle of nowhere. This
Speaker 1: Novis appears, that's perfect, we'll build something right us side there.
Speaker 1: Thats all you have to do is distance yourself from
Speaker 1: the politicians and they'll leave you alone. Right. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: in fact it happened, but then it turned against too.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and we'll get into some of the the
Speaker 1: the the ups and downs. That's what you progress here.
Speaker 1: Uh So, you know, if you're a scientist and you're
Speaker 1: in Russia in the fifties, and this is actually pretty
Speaker 1: attractive to you because one you've got the freedom, but
Speaker 1: also you have like large, spacious quarters and everything super
Speaker 1: cheap and apparently even today, like it's relatively cheap. Like
Speaker 1: I'm the this this guy that I'm talking about from
Speaker 1: the YouTube video. He he was saying, you can rent
Speaker 1: like a huge spacious apartment in Nova Saverisk nowadays for
Speaker 1: like five U s. Dollars a month or something like that.
Speaker 1: Um so he recommended going to visit there. And in fact,
Speaker 1: didn't you say, like you you looked at trip advisor
Speaker 1: to get some information. Yeah, yeah, trip advisors. Trip Advisor
Speaker 1: was a great way to sort of give up to
Speaker 1: get an idea of what what kind of offerings are
Speaker 1: in the area. You know, like you can head on
Speaker 1: over to to Nova Saverisk, can go to the zoo,
Speaker 1: you can go to the awesome zoo. Yeah, like like
Speaker 1: it the way it was written about in that Guardian article.
Speaker 1: I thought, oh, this is just like this city in
Speaker 1: the middle of nothing, but actually, like there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot going on there, you know, it's it's relatively metropolitan.
Speaker 1: And even that, they were saying, Um, there's a service
Speaker 1: that's not Amazon, but it's like Amazon in Russia now,
Speaker 1: where you you know, get next day delivery or two
Speaker 1: day delivery on like basically anything you want to order, right,
Speaker 1: So any DVD that you couldn't find in a local
Speaker 1: shop or something like that, or stream you can get.
Speaker 1: You know, this isn't it's not that isolated. So uh.
Speaker 1: The other things that were there was they built an
Speaker 1: artificial beach to try to make it more attractive. And
Speaker 1: I actually saw pictures I was I was looking for
Speaker 1: pictures for this episode, and there are pictures of from
Speaker 1: the sixties of Russian women just hanging out on this
Speaker 1: fake beach. So they just dumped a lot of stand
Speaker 1: on the water. I don't know. I don't know how
Speaker 1: they put it together. Um that was that wasn't in
Speaker 1: any of the research, but I would imagine given the
Speaker 1: feats that these people were performing with science, that making
Speaker 1: a fake beach was like pretty easy comparatively. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: so the and and they also this is interesting the
Speaker 1: whole design of it was set up to preserve the
Speaker 1: natural environment of Siberia. So that's fascinating too, right, I
Speaker 1: mean you're considering the fifties like they were thinking ecologically
Speaker 1: back then too when they're setting this up. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: it's worth noting that the original plans called for what
Speaker 1: for what is called wedding cake style Stalinist architecture. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the word the Russian for that is Zuker Baker
Speaker 1: steel and uh. At any rate, luck that would have
Speaker 1: been you know, a lot more boxy communist looking buildings
Speaker 1: and less of a reliance on trees that got scrapped,
Speaker 1: and they ended up going with this uh this uh,
Speaker 1: this more natural look, or at least it's more natural
Speaker 1: when you when you factorate all the trees and mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: the um, we'll talk about it later. But there's like
Speaker 1: a main building there now that has been built recently
Speaker 1: for the sort of modern day version of this place. Uh,
Speaker 1: And it's this kind of fascinating architecture style. I have
Speaker 1: to say, like, after doing all the research, I was
Speaker 1: kind of like, this seems like it would be a
Speaker 1: fun place to go in vacation. Like it may be
Speaker 1: that's something only the people who host science podcasts think
Speaker 1: when they read about this, it's the building your thing?
Speaker 1: Is this the one that looks like an upside down you? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty crazy. Yeah, it's just this. The whole area
Speaker 1: just seems sort of fascinating and um and like it
Speaker 1: would be fun. But you know, I'm also not the
Speaker 1: type of person who goes to the beach on vacation,
Speaker 1: even if it's an artificial beach. And in terms of
Speaker 1: getting actual institutes in there, I want to point out
Speaker 1: that Mikhael Labyrintev's Institute of hydro Dynamics was the first
Speaker 1: to really become operational, uh intim Cora doc. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: as we'll talk about later, like there's basically like any
Speaker 1: university type situation, there's little silos all over this place,
Speaker 1: and there's like little institutes there. I say little, they're
Speaker 1: not little, but there's probably like I don't know, ten,
Speaker 1: maybe twelve of them, um that just have all the
Speaker 1: different disciplines that were studied there. And it's it's intense
Speaker 1: when you think about like how much was all being
Speaker 1: focused on in this different area and still is now.
Speaker 1: It took them ten years to actually build the Center
Speaker 1: of academic Gara doc. But it was essentially built with
Speaker 1: the idea being that it would be a campus for
Speaker 1: Nova SEVERERSK State University. Okay, and here's the answer to that.
Speaker 1: It's fourteen institutes, not twelve. Uh that and they were
Speaker 1: all set up as part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Now,
Speaker 1: at its height, there were sixty five thousand scientists there.
Speaker 1: Uh Now that I would imagine the height would be
Speaker 1: the mid sixties given what we've read. Um, although it's
Speaker 1: getting back up there again now, it's not as much
Speaker 1: of a public institution anymore. It's a combination of public
Speaker 1: and private enterprise. In terms of the amount of money
Speaker 1: spent on building this up initially, a nineteen two article
Speaker 1: from Lauren g Lytton published in the Bulletin of Atomic
Speaker 1: Scientists put it around two hundred million roubles or two
Speaker 1: million dollars in bucks. I saw some figures that said like,
Speaker 1: over the years, the combination of money that went in
Speaker 1: there was close to a billion um that they just
Speaker 1: they really wanted to make this thing work, and they
Speaker 1: just pumped a lot of them. Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 1: the money is going in from the state and then
Speaker 1: initially eventually they get to the point where there's actually
Speaker 1: some money coming in from industrial ventures as well. So, um,
Speaker 1: Mikhail Lavrentev, who we've mentioned, who sort of like the
Speaker 1: father of this place. He was important to cybernetics and
Speaker 1: genetics that was like his field of study, but he's
Speaker 1: mainly known as a mathematician. Now this is important before
Speaker 1: we go forward. At the time, genetics was considered a pseudoscience,
Speaker 1: especially in Moscow. I don't mean genetics like worldwide. I
Speaker 1: mean like in terms of the Russian science community. It
Speaker 1: was kind of looked down upon, and a lot of
Speaker 1: the genetics studies, especially those that went on with Foxes
Speaker 1: that we're going to talk about, which was my favorite
Speaker 1: study that came out of this place, Uh, would not
Speaker 1: have happened if it was in Moscower anywhere where the
Speaker 1: Communist Party in particular would have been aware of what
Speaker 1: it was up to. So this was also a nice
Speaker 1: way for him to sort of um hide some studies,
Speaker 1: and it allowed a certain amount of freedom for these scientists.
Speaker 1: And also my understanding is that like it was almost
Speaker 1: like a touring destination for artists and what they were.
Speaker 1: They actually referred to them as bards coming through the town,
Speaker 1: who would you know, give performances or uh do poetry
Speaker 1: slams Like it sounds like I'm joking with the way
Speaker 1: they described it. They weren't called poetry slams. That they
Speaker 1: were like poetry readings at like local coffee houses and
Speaker 1: in academic guard dog So very much in line with
Speaker 1: some of the Silicon Valley as stuff that we hear
Speaker 1: about or you know, imagine some of you actually experienced
Speaker 1: with your serial stations and your your your meditation workshops
Speaker 1: coming through through the workplace totally. And so this was
Speaker 1: like this place where all like Russian creatives could sort
Speaker 1: of like flow through and distribute their ideas to the
Speaker 1: scientific community they air uh without fear of repercussions. And
Speaker 1: one last thing before we go into the problems with
Speaker 1: this place when things started to fall apart, is the
Speaker 1: logo is super cool? Yeah. Um, so that the logo
Speaker 1: they came up with. The idea was that it was
Speaker 1: the Greek letter sigma and it was emblazoned on top
Speaker 1: of a shock wave UH. And the design thinking here
Speaker 1: was basically that it would suggest the synergy of a
Speaker 1: broad range of disciplines uh while bringing a quote flash
Speaker 1: of lightning to the area. It's a pretty good logo.
Speaker 1: I have to admit, Yeah, it's cool. I wonder if
Speaker 1: you like, there's probably like a collector's market for like
Speaker 1: old Russian academic Gara doc like lapel buttons or something
Speaker 1: like that. I should hope so, But then again, you
Speaker 1: can get them on eBay. Yeah, may it would look
Speaker 1: great on a T shirt. So if it's not already
Speaker 1: on one of these, you know, the millions of T
Speaker 1: shirt websites out serious needs to be so that that
Speaker 1: article that I mentioned earlier by um loreng G. Lighton
Speaker 1: and the Bolton of Atomic Science, it's from seventy two.
Speaker 1: The title on that is another view of a cat
Speaker 1: Imgora doc. Yeah. It was sort of like a response piece, right,
Speaker 1: because there was one that had been previously published like
Speaker 1: a year earlier in the same journal that was fairly
Speaker 1: critical I think, right, well, yeah, and this to a
Speaker 1: certain extent maybe not being critical enough, like kind of
Speaker 1: not not really dealing with the kind of the nuts
Speaker 1: and bolts, so they think we're coming together. My understanding
Speaker 1: was it was sort of like h Western scientists trying
Speaker 1: to come to grips with what this might mean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is and this ends up being I like
Speaker 1: this paper because it's a little more like I mean,
Speaker 1: it's certainly not demonizing and saying, oh this is evil
Speaker 1: Soviet science town, but it's but it's laying out just
Speaker 1: some of the basic logistical problems and human problems of
Speaker 1: trying to build what is sometimes referred to as a
Speaker 1: science utopia. And everybody knows what happens when you're trying
Speaker 1: to build a utopia. It falls apart because of dystopia. Right.
Speaker 1: If science fiction has taught us anything it's that we'll
Speaker 1: never have a perfect world. And I mean, at the
Speaker 1: very least, like this was often held up as being
Speaker 1: sort of an unlimited funds, unlimited talent, unlimited opportunity for
Speaker 1: scientific inquiry. And of course, anytime someone is trying to
Speaker 1: sell you something that is unlimited, uh, you know, there
Speaker 1: are limits. It might be that might be an all
Speaker 1: you can eat see food buffet, but there is a
Speaker 1: finite amount of steamer tray shrimp you can eat. There's
Speaker 1: only so much. Yeah, so you know what I'm already thinking,
Speaker 1: Like we've we've talked about this on the show many
Speaker 1: times before, Like all of our ideas for AMC dramas
Speaker 1: historical period pieces that come up throughout the show. So
Speaker 1: we've we've already talked about how there should be one
Speaker 1: that's sort of about like the the science psychedelic set
Speaker 1: of like um, Timothy Leary, et cetera, those those types
Speaker 1: of folk. There should be like an AMC type mad
Speaker 1: Men show that's set an academic Guara doc in the
Speaker 1: big sixties. That would be That would be fantastic, would
Speaker 1: be good, especially especially taking in some of these details
Speaker 1: that come from that light and article. And specifically she
Speaker 1: interviewed one uh Ganadi Loveovich Paspalov, who was director of
Speaker 1: the Institute of Geology and Geophysics and UM and so
Speaker 1: he had a, you know, an insider view of how
Speaker 1: things were coming together. And my understanding from the readings
Speaker 1: was that that that institute, the GEL Geology and Geophysics
Speaker 1: Institute in particular, was like one of the big successes
Speaker 1: for this place in particular because it was the first
Speaker 1: one to bring together all of the sub disciplines of
Speaker 1: geology and geophysics into like one organization. But then also
Speaker 1: like they uh somehow like came up with a new system.
Speaker 1: It's in the notes, so we'll get there later, but
Speaker 1: they came up with a new system for discovering oil,
Speaker 1: and they found major oil plots in Siberia cool And
Speaker 1: that's an example of things working the way you would
Speaker 1: hope they would. You're bringing these these all these talented
Speaker 1: individuals together. They're gonna have coffee at some point, They're
Speaker 1: gonna go to the water cooler. You know, they're gonna
Speaker 1: go to the Yeah, minds are gonna gonna come together,
Speaker 1: and new ideas are gonna be generated. But as possible
Speaker 1: Off pointed out, first of all, it was difficult to
Speaker 1: get things off the ground and moving. After all, everything
Speaker 1: was done from scratch here. There wasn't I think the
Speaker 1: example that was mentioned in the article was that, you know,
Speaker 1: it's one thing to build a factory. You know, you
Speaker 1: know that that the components that have to come together,
Speaker 1: you can put that together with relative ease. Because we've
Speaker 1: been doing them for a while. This was something entirely new. Um.
Speaker 1: And then they wound up with three types of scientists.
Speaker 1: According to possible Law, three types of scientists that ended
Speaker 1: up at caught him degoradac. The first was let's call
Speaker 1: them idea men. The quote here is, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: you've got the clever ones who give birth to new ideas,
Speaker 1: each one more interesting than the other. But they expect
Speaker 1: everything to be done right away and want it done
Speaker 1: with a wave of the hand. And they're not known
Speaker 1: for their persistence or their love of tedious labor, so
Speaker 1: nothing comes from them. Okay, so you have those. This
Speaker 1: already sounds like just any public university to me, but okay,
Speaker 1: keep going. And then there they let's call them time servers,
Speaker 1: he says, toilers who are not by God endowed. But
Speaker 1: for all that, they are a stubborn lot, and you
Speaker 1: just might get something out of them. Only they don't
Speaker 1: have ideas. Familiar with this style of academic as well.
Speaker 1: I call them turtles when I was working in academia.
Speaker 1: And then there are the enthusiastic quote, those who are
Speaker 1: neither clever nor toilers, but rather those characters who believe
Speaker 1: mistakenly there and this is his by God endowed. But
Speaker 1: don't you be in a hurry to dismiss them as ballast.
Speaker 1: These people are quite often such enthusiasts for science that
Speaker 1: you can't bring yourself to write them off as ballast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So if this works out the same or worked out
Speaker 1: the same way, that politics in you know, my experiences
Speaker 1: with public universities. I'm sure it goes on in private
Speaker 1: universities as well, But there's I imagine that these factions
Speaker 1: sort of broke off, right, and there's like they're like
Speaker 1: ven diagrams. Is a little bit of overlap, it's a
Speaker 1: little bit of cooperation, but there's also like a lot
Speaker 1: of infighting for power and expertise and uh small sticks. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so, um and and and and also you
Speaker 1: just have a lot of individualists here and occasional outright
Speaker 1: prima donnas, and they're all arriving with preconceived notions about
Speaker 1: how things are gonna go down in this science wonderland, right,
Speaker 1: But then reality hits, projects have to be adjusted, People
Speaker 1: were shuffled around, people were pulled between larger projects and
Speaker 1: their own private ventures. And it was also difficult. You know,
Speaker 1: It's one thing to say or we can bring all
Speaker 1: the best minds together, but even in communist Russia, even
Speaker 1: in the Soviet Union, is difficult to lure everyone to Siberia.
Speaker 1: So many were turned off by the harsh climate, or
Speaker 1: they're unwilling to leave their own institutes where they already
Speaker 1: had their own ventures. You know, up and running perhaps too,
Speaker 1: you know, to the degree that they were perfectly happy
Speaker 1: with um. Also money, despite the idea of unlimited funds
Speaker 1: for science stificate achievement, here there were money problems. So
Speaker 1: you had Moscow the politicians essentially holding the purse strings here,
Speaker 1: and so they're scrutinizing everything. So the the hot and
Speaker 1: cold running science funds tap definitely had some eyes on it,
Speaker 1: and this became a major problem for this area, both
Speaker 1: in the seventies and then again in the early nineties
Speaker 1: with the collapse of the U s SR. So you
Speaker 1: can run, you can distance yourself from the political head,
Speaker 1: from from the politicians, from the those who who who
Speaker 1: who guard the purse strings, but you're not going to
Speaker 1: escape them completely, especially if you're sucking this kind of
Speaker 1: money down. Also the problem of two worlds here, so
Speaker 1: you had science over humanities. You had complex specialization rather
Speaker 1: than the sort of free form idea jazz that one
Speaker 1: might dream of at least in every situation. I mean
Speaker 1: example we mentioned earlier, that's an example of things working
Speaker 1: more or less the way they should, but you're not
Speaker 1: always going to get that. Yeah, that definitely seemed to
Speaker 1: be like my take on it when I was reading
Speaker 1: about the history, was that, you know, other than these
Speaker 1: like traveling bards and you know, poets and writers and
Speaker 1: uh occasional filmmakers. Andre Tarkovsky. Yeah is that am I
Speaker 1: saying his name right? I believe that's right. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: he went through there as well and give a talk.
Speaker 1: But um, other than those folks didn't really have any
Speaker 1: liberal arts, right like, whereas like you know, my familiarity
Speaker 1: with places like Georgia Tech which is down the street
Speaker 1: from US or m I T they do have at
Speaker 1: least like some small programs that offer liberal arts. So
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of a balance. And it's not
Speaker 1: all empirical, yeah, I mean, like even in Georgia Tech here,
Speaker 1: there are definitely areas of their their their technological involvement
Speaker 1: that spill over into liberal arts their music and technology. Yeah, absolutely. Um.
Speaker 1: And finally, uh, the practical applications of findings still trumped
Speaker 1: and perhaps still trump the purity of scientific inquiry. So
Speaker 1: there were clashes that were altered between Moscow and it's
Speaker 1: party ideals as well as the the individualism and elitism
Speaker 1: at Acadam Gora Docks. So you would have these individuals
Speaker 1: that definitely had their pet projects, perhaps such as genetics,
Speaker 1: you know, something that is not as accepted. But meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the voices from Moscow are saying, all right, that's well
Speaker 1: and good, but this, this is the thing we need, right,
Speaker 1: this is why we brought everyone together. They probably wanted
Speaker 1: them to be focusing on things like UH. I would
Speaker 1: imagine like militaristic endeavors or space program stuff, things like that. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, I believe it was originally meant for military
Speaker 1: defense projects, and the founders were they the founders were
Speaker 1: able to convince the government to give non military research
Speaker 1: the highest priority. Even more surprising that we didn't hear
Speaker 1: about this when we researched projects in Maya because it
Speaker 1: seems like it's like a perfect fit for what they're doing.
Speaker 1: UM so yeah, so this like what Robert's talking about
Speaker 1: with this UH. Clash between Moscow's ideals and the individualism
Speaker 1: rising up in academic Rodoc resulted in a period of
Speaker 1: time there that is referred to now as the brain dream,
Speaker 1: and this was in the nineteen seventies. The Bresh era
Speaker 1: of Russia curtailed the freedoms of these scientists and then
Speaker 1: turned the science there more towards working on the military
Speaker 1: and the economy. All right, so this is where kind
Speaker 1: of the sad. Yeah, what happened was there's a group
Speaker 1: of scientists who, you know, let's imagine that they are
Speaker 1: in our television show. This group of scientists hangs out
Speaker 1: the coffeehouse. They watched the Traveling Bards coming through, They
Speaker 1: listened to their big ideas, they talk about them amongst themselves,
Speaker 1: and then they said, you know what, we don't like
Speaker 1: the fact that there's a secret political trials held here
Speaker 1: in the Soviet Union. Let's write something called the letter
Speaker 1: of forty six. And I think that meant it was
Speaker 1: forty six of these scientists. Uh. They basically wrote it
Speaker 1: to the Communist Party in Moscow and said that they're
Speaker 1: standing against this stuff and they didn't like it. So
Speaker 1: that didn't go over too well, and the Communist Party
Speaker 1: turned around and both had a campaign to re educate
Speaker 1: the staff there. Uh. And this basically ended the period
Speaker 1: of time that was referred to as the Thaw, which
Speaker 1: was sort of like the cold we I think that
Speaker 1: comes from us, probably more from them, but the thaw
Speaker 1: being that it was like less of a cold, frigid
Speaker 1: communist uh. You know, cold war type environment. Right, alright,
Speaker 1: so no more jazz, you're playing classical music. I think
Speaker 1: the Bard's got bumped out. Yeah. Uh. And they were
Speaker 1: informed specifically that one they were not an island of freedom,
Speaker 1: and two they were forced to publicly recant the letter.
Speaker 1: So if they wanted to keep their jobs or they
Speaker 1: didn't want to get like, you know, sent off to
Speaker 1: their own secret trial, they had to basically stand up
Speaker 1: and say, oh, it was wrong. I shouldn't have done that.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go back to my research. Then jump
Speaker 1: forward twenty years, right, so there's like the steady decline
Speaker 1: h during the brain drain, where more and more scientists
Speaker 1: start leaving academic garadoc over this time. Right, They're just
Speaker 1: like there, all all the utopian ideas that were presented
Speaker 1: to them didn't come through. Right. So you put this
Speaker 1: huge sort of industrial science town that's got like the
Speaker 1: best equipment. Uh, it's designed for the best people, but
Speaker 1: the people are leaving in droves. Uh. And so what
Speaker 1: ends up happening we get to the nineteen nineties is
Speaker 1: practically abandoned by then anyways, and then the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: collapsed and pretty much everybody who is there left uh
Speaker 1: and and went back to the West. Now there's a
Speaker 1: particular example of this that we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: when we get into the science there, and it's the
Speaker 1: fox is one that I want to focus on. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's a really kind of heart wrenching story about like
Speaker 1: the research, all the work that went into the research there,
Speaker 1: and then how it sort of faded out and the
Speaker 1: repercussions that it had for the people, but also for
Speaker 1: like the test subjects, which were like all these foxes
Speaker 1: that they were working with. Anyways, But I think before
Speaker 1: we get into that study, let's let's finish off the history.
Speaker 1: Let's get to present day. What is going on there now?
Speaker 1: So Vladimir Putin comes along. He goes to India ten
Speaker 1: years ago so I think it was two thousand five,
Speaker 1: so eleven years ago, and he sees how tech savvy
Speaker 1: India is, and he says, well, Russia's got to have
Speaker 1: this too. How about he comes back and he says,
Speaker 1: how about we mix federal and private money together and
Speaker 1: we pump it back into academ goadoc uh, and this
Speaker 1: will be like our new cradle of innovation. Okay, And
Speaker 1: it's not the only one, Like I don't want to
Speaker 1: make this sound like this is the only place in
Speaker 1: Russia where like innovation is going on. From from my understanding,
Speaker 1: there's at least three other major science tech complex centers
Speaker 1: that Putin has given funding to around Russia, but this
Speaker 1: one is the one with the like the big long history.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a point of pride, right m hm.
Speaker 1: So much so that there's actually road signs as you
Speaker 1: enter going into the science park. Now that's say the
Speaker 1: brain drain is prohibited. I think we should have that
Speaker 1: sign everywhere. That's just a good indicator that you know,
Speaker 1: nobody's gonna be squashing your ideas and there are no
Speaker 1: elithids around to um your mind mind flares better known
Speaker 1: as mind flares there. They will just totally destroy a
Speaker 1: scientific TLEs right up your nose and suck your brains out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what the brain drain is all about. Uh, the
Speaker 1: secret history of academic Garadoc. Now we're just going off
Speaker 1: on a D and D tangent. Okay, the fiction and
Speaker 1: the creepy postive basically rights. Yeah it does. Um so yeah,
Speaker 1: so so Putin puts more and more money into this place.
Speaker 1: Uh oh, this is where I got the one billion
Speaker 1: from I'm sorry, So the one billion I was talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, that's present day, Like it's received up to
Speaker 1: a billion dollars in the last ten years. Uh. And
Speaker 1: today Mikhail Lavrentiev's Ranson actually works there and oversees the
Speaker 1: repurposing of the whole place. Uh. And the interesting thing
Speaker 1: is there's an interview with him and he says that
Speaker 1: he thinks that his grandfather would appreciate the new academ
Speaker 1: Gueradoc and he would quote want business to pay for
Speaker 1: using our brains. So this is fascinating like Russian ideological
Speaker 1: shift that you can just trace throughout the history of
Speaker 1: this one town, right, like from communist ideals to sort
Speaker 1: of uh, like this countercultural sixties vibe, to back into
Speaker 1: like an economic depression, and then now it's bouncing out
Speaker 1: and it's like embracing capitalism and it's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're smart, but you gotta pay us to be smart.
Speaker 1: So now it's based around these buildings that Robert and
Speaker 1: I were talking talking about, the translates into technology park,
Speaker 1: but his academ park. Uh, it's this fourteen story basically
Speaker 1: it's a monument. It's he's conjoining twin towers and they
Speaker 1: they stand up. Yeah, like you said, it's like an
Speaker 1: upside down w kind of right, like like they stand
Speaker 1: up at a tilt and come together, and then there's
Speaker 1: like walkways at the very top between them that are
Speaker 1: also at like an angle. It's really interesting, definitely, Like
Speaker 1: do Google in image search for academic Garadoc and that
Speaker 1: that will be like the first thing that comes up.
Speaker 1: This this building. Apparently it was designed by architects that
Speaker 1: are from novis a beersk and uh. The the whole
Speaker 1: idea is basically this association of major companies that established
Speaker 1: themselves in the area, sort of like your local chamber
Speaker 1: of commerce. I guess they called themselves the CIG Academic Innovation. Well,
Speaker 1: on the occasion of Putin visiting in two thousand five
Speaker 1: for this sort of startup venture, they said, well, here's
Speaker 1: our here's our new wonderful building, and it has four
Speaker 1: clusters of studies that go on there. There's instrument engineering,
Speaker 1: information technologies, biomedical studies, nanotechnology and then oh sorry, and
Speaker 1: then nanotechnologies and new materials. That's that's one uh. As
Speaker 1: often there was a total of two hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: three companies there. That's in academ Park. That's not Academic
Speaker 1: Garadoc itself, which still has these institutes running. But there's
Speaker 1: so you've got this mix now. It's sort of it
Speaker 1: reminds me actually of the building that we work in, right, Like,
Speaker 1: so we work in this building. Yeah, I couldn't help
Speaker 1: but think about old PCM Pont City Market a little bit.
Speaker 1: Reading about this for those of you out there who
Speaker 1: are unfamiliar how stuff works. Our studios are in a
Speaker 1: building in Atlantic called Pont City Market that. Uh, this
Speaker 1: used to be like a Sears factory, uh in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: like way back in the day, like what sixty seventy
Speaker 1: years ago, Yeah, like a Sears like mega center. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they would basically like there was a railroad line
Speaker 1: that came up to our building and they would transfer
Speaker 1: goods in and out of the building. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: over time it was taken over by the City of Atlanta.
Speaker 1: It was like a part of City Hall for a
Speaker 1: long time. Yeah, Like city Hall occupied a portion of
Speaker 1: it and then the rest was just like empty waste land,
Speaker 1: you know. Building it was kind of just a big
Speaker 1: industrial shell. And that's what it was when I first
Speaker 1: moved here, just this huge monument of kind of just
Speaker 1: like public falling apart. Uh And and then in the
Speaker 1: last what three or four years, it was bought by
Speaker 1: developers and repurposed into this like mixed use office slash
Speaker 1: retail space that's also got this kind of like vibe
Speaker 1: of like there's a lot of of like tech companies here,
Speaker 1: like yeah, ourselves, twitters here, uh, male Chimp. You know,
Speaker 1: love love big name companies. I mean, it's one about
Speaker 1: making money, yeah, but you end up bringing in all
Speaker 1: these various companies and it kind of becomes an incubation center.
Speaker 1: That was maybe like the part that I was able
Speaker 1: to sort of like empathize the most most with reading
Speaker 1: about Academic guardoc was one of the key features of Atlanta.
Speaker 1: I feel like is Atlanta does a really good job
Speaker 1: of repurposing things from its past h to try to
Speaker 1: like make new use out of them for like its
Speaker 1: present day identity. Um, whether it's like old houses that
Speaker 1: get turned into like hip new restaurants or like art
Speaker 1: galleries like I drum like places like that. Um, Atlanta
Speaker 1: is just full of stuff like that. So reading about this,
Speaker 1: it kind of made me think, Oh, they're sort of
Speaker 1: operating into that same theory. Right, yeah, yeah, definitely. All right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a break and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about some of the scientific research that's
Speaker 1: taken place at Akata and Goredoc over the years. So, uh,
Speaker 1: even before Academic GUARDAC was founded, like I said, like it,
Speaker 1: you know, novas a Beers had this reputation for um
Speaker 1: physicists in particular, but it had a lot of educational facilities.
Speaker 1: It also attracted weird scientists. And the example that we're
Speaker 1: gonna give today, it's a guy named Yuri Kondratyuk. I
Speaker 1: think that's how you pronounced his name. Now, Uri was
Speaker 1: only in town for a couple of years. But this story,
Speaker 1: oh it's good, it's good, so it's worth putting in here. Uh.
Speaker 1: He only was there for a couple of years, basically
Speaker 1: because he had previously attempted to escape Russia. He didn't
Speaker 1: want to have anything to do with with communist Russia,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't get out. Uh, And so he found
Speaker 1: a student who had died of tuberculosis and he appropriated
Speaker 1: his name. He's putting on a Don Draper here or
Speaker 1: talented Mr Ripley. Yeah. Uh, and so he's taken on
Speaker 1: this new name, and he moves to Nova Sabirsk, and
Speaker 1: he just so happened to have also published his own book.
Speaker 1: He had already written this book years before, but he
Speaker 1: published it when he got to Neva Sabirsk. It's called
Speaker 1: and this is a good title for a book, man,
Speaker 1: the Conquest of Interplanetary Space. And basically he proposed groundbreaking
Speaker 1: ideas that were later put into scientific practice. Here, so
Speaker 1: things like space stations, oxygen hydrogen, mixed fuel, using solar energy,
Speaker 1: shielding space vehicles, and then in particular using gravity to
Speaker 1: map out spacecraft trajectories. All of this stuff was just
Speaker 1: in his this this this random guy's book. Uh. And
Speaker 1: he also, you know, this isn't just like some some
Speaker 1: crazy guy who had ramblings in a book, like he
Speaker 1: actually was had practical applications for the science he was
Speaker 1: talking about. I wonder which of the if he fell
Speaker 1: into one of the three categories we mentioned with he
Speaker 1: like a big idea guy was like, we're gonna, we're gonna,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have solar power, we're gonna have oxygen, hydrogen fuel.
Speaker 1: But then didn't like you figure it out, You figure
Speaker 1: the details out and get let's do it tomorrow. That's
Speaker 1: what it seemed like from reading about the book. But
Speaker 1: then this project of his struck me as like, oh,
Speaker 1: this guy actually got a thing done. Uh. He designed
Speaker 1: a thirteen thousand ton wooden grain silo that he called
Speaker 1: the Mastodon. Yeah, we've got like so many awesome metal
Speaker 1: band names popping up in this episode, right, the Mastodon
Speaker 1: is already a band, but like academ Garadoc would be
Speaker 1: a great like the Key Oh yeah, we're a metal
Speaker 1: ba and up. What does that mean Academy Town, Well,
Speaker 1: you may. I'm wondering if there's not one already out there,
Speaker 1: because in the past when we said this would be
Speaker 1: a great metal band, there has been a metal band.
Speaker 1: Like it is a metal band and it's pretty good.
Speaker 1: Recommend everyone to check him out. So this masted on
Speaker 1: thing that he built, the thing about it that's pretty fascinating.
Speaker 1: He didn't use a single nail for it. The whole
Speaker 1: thing was like, you know, it was one of these
Speaker 1: structures that locked together. Uh. And so subsequently he was
Speaker 1: later arrested and convicted be Subsequently, he was later arrested
Speaker 1: and convicted of counter revolutionary activities because there were no
Speaker 1: nails in the silo. They thought that he was purposely
Speaker 1: trying to sabotage the structure so that it would fall apart.
Speaker 1: And he had just come up with like this unique
Speaker 1: new way. And the reason why it was because nails
Speaker 1: were hard to come by at the time, Like they
Speaker 1: didn't you know do out in Siberia. Wasn't that easy
Speaker 1: to get a hold. You're limiting the need for for
Speaker 1: iron and metals a construction of a building. It makes sense.
Speaker 1: So when he was trying to conserve and bring about
Speaker 1: new ideas, they saw it as counter revolutionary. So, hey,
Speaker 1: this guy, you know, he was trying to get out
Speaker 1: of there anyways, and no matter what he could do,
Speaker 1: he was he was destined to get into trouble. Uh.
Speaker 1: But you know, basically even before uh you know, all
Speaker 1: the stuff that we're about to talk about, academic Gordoc
Speaker 1: was set up to work on everything from nuclear physics,
Speaker 1: the theoretical genetics, and like we said, the space program
Speaker 1: and weapons platforms. Uh. So we're gonna go through we'll
Speaker 1: talk about some of the institutes. Uh and you know
Speaker 1: some of them are sexier than others. Uh, So we
Speaker 1: won't you know, I'm I don't think it like necessarily
Speaker 1: we need to go through every single study that came
Speaker 1: out of them. But my favorite study is the fox
Speaker 1: one that came out of the Cytology and Genetics Institute
Speaker 1: where they bred foxes for fifty generations to be more
Speaker 1: like dogs. Oh yes, yes, this is a famous study. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you if you look this up. The young
Speaker 1: woman who at least in two thousand twelve, she was
Speaker 1: sort of like the poster child for this research. Her
Speaker 1: name is Arena. Oh man, I'm gonna get this name wrong,
Speaker 1: Arena Mukhema the Sina she uh is you know, basically
Speaker 1: like trying to train these foxes so that they will
Speaker 1: respond to commands, obedience commands and wow, Like she was
Speaker 1: really popular with European and even Japanese media for a
Speaker 1: while because she's very photogenic. She's this very beautiful young
Speaker 1: Russian woman with long, curly red hair, and she's it's
Speaker 1: it's everything like you would imagine when you're thinking about like, oh,
Speaker 1: like a female Russian scientist working with foxes, right, Like
Speaker 1: she's got like red hair that matches the coats of
Speaker 1: the foxes that she's working with, and there's all these
Speaker 1: pictures of her like playing with the foxes in the snow,
Speaker 1: or cuddling up with the foxes or whatever, like working
Speaker 1: with them on their sitting posture. That's interesting because I
Speaker 1: cannot I can't help but imagine it also plays into
Speaker 1: Asian supernatural fox motifs, both in Japan but also in
Speaker 1: the more Asian portions of Russia. But yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: to your point, Like, apparently every article I read about
Speaker 1: this uh said that there was a Japanese media company
Speaker 1: that flew out to Nova Sabirsk and filmed with her
Speaker 1: for sile days. So like, clearly this was a story
Speaker 1: that caught like the imagination and attention of a lot
Speaker 1: of people, including myself. Now, the origin story behind these
Speaker 1: foxes goes like this. There's a biologist named Dmitri Billejev,
Speaker 1: and he gathered a hundred and thirty foxes from fur
Speaker 1: farms all around the academ Gara doc Nova Sabirsk area
Speaker 1: in the early sixties, and he bred them using only
Speaker 1: the least aggressive ones from each generation, basically trying to
Speaker 1: recreate the process within which how wolves became dogs. Now,
Speaker 1: by doing so, he professed to compress thousands of years
Speaker 1: of process into just a few decades now that the
Speaker 1: idea here was he didn't want them to be pets. Okay,
Speaker 1: he was hoping to test a theory that and this
Speaker 1: is interesting, I've never heard of this before, that domesticated
Speaker 1: animals are actually physically altered over the course of their
Speaker 1: domestication through their contact with human beings, and they undergo
Speaker 1: biological changes to be more appealing to us. So in
Speaker 1: the example that he gave with wolves to dogs, floppy
Speaker 1: ears and curlier tales. Now in the case of the foxes, Uh,
Speaker 1: my understanding was that like yesday, like I've adopted things
Speaker 1: like wagging their tails. Uh. And they also they lick hands. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they apparently this this breed of foxes that she's
Speaker 1: working with today have like white patches on their heads
Speaker 1: and that's not necessarily like normal for this particular species
Speaker 1: of fox. So the idea here is what's called domestication phenotype,
Speaker 1: making animals more appealing to man. Now, remember what I
Speaker 1: said about genetics, right, Like, this was like a big
Speaker 1: no no with the Soviets, So he hid what he
Speaker 1: was doing from the authorities because they would have disapproved
Speaker 1: of it. Uh. And the foxes did physically change. They
Speaker 1: found that they had less cortisol, which is a stress
Speaker 1: hormone in their blood, and they didn't feel discomfort when
Speaker 1: they were with people. Right, Like if I just walked
Speaker 1: up to a fox in the forest, now, well, first
Speaker 1: of all, it would run away from me or bite me, right,
Speaker 1: but like I couldn't just like cuddle with it, like
Speaker 1: pick it up and hold it like my dog, and
Speaker 1: it would be you know, it would love being pet
Speaker 1: or anything like that. They had bred all of that
Speaker 1: out of these foxes, but these foxes were just kind
Speaker 1: of sitting there, especially since the brain drain. So we
Speaker 1: get to the nineteen nineties when pretty much everyone has
Speaker 1: left this area, right, and there's concerned they don't have
Speaker 1: any money. How are they going to feed all these
Speaker 1: foxes that they've got. So they actually started selling some
Speaker 1: of them. They sold a few of them to fur breeders.
Speaker 1: But they pressured them and they said, look, please don't
Speaker 1: make them suffer the stress of captivity, because these particular foxes,
Speaker 1: you know, they don't that we've read them in such
Speaker 1: a way that they don't have like the defense mechanisms
Speaker 1: of psychological mechanisms to deal with this. Go easy on them, now,
Speaker 1: who knows if that actually happened or not. But they
Speaker 1: also sold a couple of them as pets around the area,
Speaker 1: So some people in this area have foxes as pets.
Speaker 1: Along comes Arena And she's twenty two years old in
Speaker 1: two thousand twelves, so she's probably twenty six now, uh,
Speaker 1: and she's training these foxes to be obedient. She got
Speaker 1: the idea when she noticed that this special breed was
Speaker 1: seeking human attention, the ones that were left. So she
Speaker 1: had actually trained dogs all through her teens and she
Speaker 1: had been doing it professionally, but she was a student
Speaker 1: there and she said, you know what I want to
Speaker 1: I want to take a go of this. So her
Speaker 1: advisor said, all right, take these two young baby foxes,
Speaker 1: and she named them Anna and Elma, and she trained
Speaker 1: them the way that you would train dogs. So she
Speaker 1: started with food motivation to get them to respond to
Speaker 1: basic commands. Then she changed that up once she got
Speaker 1: them there, to game motivation to connect with their other instincts. Uh.
Speaker 1: As the story goes, she can make her foxes stand up, sit,
Speaker 1: lie down, they recognize their names, they come when they're called,
Speaker 1: things like that. Uh. But she stated afterwards, she was like,
Speaker 1: I made a couple of mistakes, like, they're not they're
Speaker 1: not dogs, So I made some mistakes by doing it
Speaker 1: the way that you would with dogs because their psychology
Speaker 1: is totally different. So she says that she's going to
Speaker 1: do it again. She changed her training tactics, but she did. Sorry,
Speaker 1: it wasn't her. Her advisor described these foxes as quote
Speaker 1: as devoted as dogs, but as independent as cats. So
Speaker 1: they have a different psychology, but apparently they are able
Speaker 1: to be like domesticated sort of partners to man. Interesting.
Speaker 1: All right, so that's one of the more noteworthy examples hero.
Speaker 1: But what are some of the other UH institutes. Well,
Speaker 1: they had an institute, well they still do, of thermal
Speaker 1: physics that was founded with the rest of the area
Speaker 1: UM and yeah, it was one of the first institutes
Speaker 1: that specialized in the subject. Today, you know, it studies
Speaker 1: things like heat exchange and physical hydro and gas dynamics. UH.
Speaker 1: They're known, ironically because of the shock wave logo. They're
Speaker 1: known for their shock wave propagation effects studies in gases
Speaker 1: UH and also focused on ecologically clean power. There's the
Speaker 1: Boodker Institute of Nuclear Physics. This is uh an an
Speaker 1: institute that's particularly um good at working on particle accelerators.
Speaker 1: In fact, they contributed toward the construction of CERN's large
Speaker 1: hadron collider and provided equipment to it. They also had
Speaker 1: a tool I love the name of this, called the
Speaker 1: Siberian Snake, that they used to avoid depolarization of beams
Speaker 1: of spinning electrons or protons. I don't know what that means,
Speaker 1: but I like the Siberian's nickname. There's so the Institute
Speaker 1: of Automation and Electrometry, UH, the Institute of Geology and
Speaker 1: Geophysics that I mentioned earlier, which you know sort of
Speaker 1: made a name for themselves by discovering major oil and
Speaker 1: gas rich areas. UH. There's an Institute of Theoretical and
Speaker 1: Applied Mathematics, and they in particular focus on like aero
Speaker 1: dynamic flows, and they have like an experimental facility where
Speaker 1: they can test these parameters on aircraft models. UH. And
Speaker 1: then they have institutes that are also dedicated to semiconductor physics,
Speaker 1: laser physics, chemical kinetics, combustion, as well as the two
Speaker 1: that are named after Mikhail Kavrentiev, which is their Institute
Speaker 1: of Hydrodynamics which you mentioned earlier, and their School of
Speaker 1: physics and mathematics, so they've got something for everybody there.
Speaker 1: It seems like except for the bards, there's there's there'sn't
Speaker 1: there'sn't a lot of poetry there anymore, I would imagine.
Speaker 1: So nowadays we've got Putin's Initiative in there, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of entrepreneurs moving in. There's around three hundred companies
Speaker 1: working on tech and science in the area, and it's
Speaker 1: set up in particular to provide infrastructure so these companies
Speaker 1: don't have to buy their own equipment, right, so it's like, uh,
Speaker 1: sort of like a cooperative. They they provide the equipment,
Speaker 1: you know, they provide the facilities, and they make it
Speaker 1: attractive for these companies to come in and start up
Speaker 1: and and uh work on science and tech. And these
Speaker 1: companies specialize in things like I T pharmaceuticals, metallurgy, fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: One of the like interesting kind of factoids that came
Speaker 1: out of a bunch of the magazines was that the
Speaker 1: the I T company that works on Oprah Winfrey's web
Speaker 1: portal is based out of there, uh and apparently like
Speaker 1: they didn't even know who Oprah Winfrey was when they
Speaker 1: were working on it. And then they said, but we
Speaker 1: do now. So that's my that's my Russian impersonation for
Speaker 1: the episode. So yeah, Russia's got two hundred thousand science
Speaker 1: and tech specialists who are graduating every year, and this
Speaker 1: is like a very nice new option for these young professionals.
Speaker 1: And for a lot of the same reasons that we
Speaker 1: heard about back in the late fifties early sixties. Right,
Speaker 1: it's cheap. Everything is supposedly one fifth of the cost
Speaker 1: of Western prices. It's easy to focus in one person,
Speaker 1: they asked that. He said, yeah, because it's so cold,
Speaker 1: there's literally nothing for us to do but work. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so we've got this big place now that it's contributing
Speaker 1: to the science and tech sort of high mind of
Speaker 1: the world right now. And it has you know, even
Speaker 1: like a version of Starbucks. It's called Travelers Coffee. It's
Speaker 1: their their Russian version of Starbucks. Because the cold and
Speaker 1: harsh environmental not enough to make you work. You need
Speaker 1: a little caffeine. Uh. And it has been officially inducted
Speaker 1: into the Guinness Book of World Records as the smartest
Speaker 1: street in the world. The academician Lavrentiev prospect as a
Speaker 1: two point five kilometer stretch that has more than twenty
Speaker 1: scientific research institutes there. So academ Garadac your new destination,
Speaker 1: uh for vacation. From my understanding is you probably don't
Speaker 1: want to go in the winter though. Yeah, yeah, definitely not.
Speaker 1: And hey, if you do happen to go there. There
Speaker 1: is one really interesting monument in the area and it
Speaker 1: is the Monument of Laboratory Laboratory Mice. And it's actually
Speaker 1: it's it's it's really quite cute. Um. I love the statue.
Speaker 1: It's like a little mouse man with he's wearing spectacles
Speaker 1: and he has like a cloak and he's it looks
Speaker 1: like he's sewing, but what he's sewing as a DNA.
Speaker 1: He licks knitting it together and with his knitting needles.
Speaker 1: And according to exactly how those mice contributed, Yeah, they didn't.
Speaker 1: They didn't just get sprayed in the eyes of chemicals
Speaker 1: grown in the dustbin. Yeah, it's very much. You know,
Speaker 1: there's some a certain amount of artistic liberty techn place here.
Speaker 1: And the the artist in question, Andrew Cobrech, this is
Speaker 1: his statement on it, uh. Quote. It combines the images
Speaker 1: of the laboratory mouse and a scientist because they are
Speaker 1: related to each other and serve as one case mouse
Speaker 1: is captured in a moment of scientific to discovery. If
Speaker 1: you look into her eyes, you can see that this
Speaker 1: little mouse has come up with something. But the whole
Speaker 1: symphony of scientific discovery, joy Eureka has not yet begun
Speaker 1: to sound. So even more reason to visit. I think, uh,
Speaker 1: and we hope we presented to you this sort of
Speaker 1: fascinating little niche area. I I thought it was really
Speaker 1: worth digging into, and I'm glad we found out more
Speaker 1: about it, especially because the whole Fox program. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: but hey out there, if you've got more about this
Speaker 1: that you know about, like maybe you've visited already, or
Speaker 1: or maybe you speak Russian and you want to correct
Speaker 1: us on our pronunciations, let us know. Uh. There's plenty
Speaker 1: of ways to reach out to us. You can talk
Speaker 1: to us on Facebook, you can talk to us on Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram.
Speaker 1: We're on all of those as Blow the Mind. We've
Speaker 1: also got our home base, right Robert, that's right Acceptable
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find all the
Speaker 1: podcast episodes. You'll find videos, blog post links out to
Speaker 1: those social media accounts and more. And if you want
Speaker 1: to write to us directly. You want to tell us
Speaker 1: how badly you want to move to academ Garrido and
Speaker 1: start AMC's new TV show set in sixties all around
Speaker 1: their science Park. Hit us up at Blow the Mind
Speaker 1: at how stuff Works dot com. Well more on this
Speaker 1: in thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com