From Martin Giles, London, UK
James Harkin recounts how “bumbling British boffins” have become a standing Russian joke (23/30 December 2017, p 53). In the 1980s, I was visiting an aunt in Soviet-dominated Poland when it was under martial law. She – a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences – asked my view, as a chemist, of Russian research publications. I said that they had uses, but weren't places one looked for imagination.
If a Russian laboratory owned a spectrometer, you could be sure that it would publish painstaking compendia of spectra for ordinary inorganic compounds. If I needed to find such a frequency, I could be sure that a Russian would have published it.
This answer apparently resonated with my aunt. I knew that she had been granted the opportunity to do research in Moscow in the 1960s, and asked what she had got from it. Her answer: “Tuberculosis”.
