Hero city: Crippled by Russian attacks, Ukraine's science hotbed refuses to give up

KHARKIV, UKRAINE— In an SUV pockmarked by shrapnel, Mykola Shulga wends his way along the Kharkiv highway, dodging concrete barriers and antitank obstacles scattered along the road like giant toy jacks. On the northern outskirts of his broken city, he reaches the ruins of Pyatykhatky, an academic enclave set amid oak and maple groves. “This was one of the most beautiful areas of Kharkiv,” he says, on a brisk October day. Before the war, it was home to many researchers at Ukraine’s largest science center, the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT). But months of shelling left some of the district’s apartment blocks uninhabitable. Shulga, a theoretical physicist and KIPT’s director-general, gets quiet as the SUV passes a rubble pile where Pyatykhatky’s hospital once stood. “They also destroyed the primary school,” he says. Russia’s bloody war on Ukraine, now in its 10th month, has killed or injured at least 17,000 civilians, including scientists and students. It has also displaced more than 14 million, according to the United Nations. More than 1300 Ukrainian scientists—primarily women and men older than 60—have fled, finding refuge in labs in other countries. Tens of thousands of students are studying abroad. Nowhere in Ukraine has science suffered more than here in Kharkiv, an academic community that Gerson Sher, co-chair of a U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) working group on rebuilding...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news