Akademgorodok: Siberia's Super Science Town

eighties starring John Travolta called The Experts. I have not know, so my memory of this movie is John Travolta and his co star whose name I can't remember, our nightclub managers in like New York or something like that, and they think they're going to Nebraska, but they end up going to Soviet Russia, Uh, to a fake town that is built there solely by the KGB to like make like a spies like the Americans, like Americans, where they blend in perfectly and exactly. They're Russian agents who are

trained to understand American culture. And Uh. Anyways, those guys, John Travolta and his pal end up teaching them about all the great things about American culture. They love it so much that they turn against Soviet Russia. Anyways. It's kind of a proto American, it is, very much so. So I couldn't help thinking about that movie The Experts the entire time. I was researching for today's episode, which

is about a little place. It's actually not so little, it's surprisingly so and it's in Soviet but it's not no longer in Soviet Russia. It's in Siberia. Uh. And it's called Akademgorodok, I believe, is how you pronounce it, which translates from Russian into academy town. Yeah, you can. All you can really think of it as the Russian Hogwarts for science. Yeah, yeah, you mentioned that earlier, and I think that that is like the perfect analogy. It

is where Russia sent all of its smartest wizards to train. Uh. And it's been around since the late fifties. And so basically we discovered this through an article that was in The Guardian that was really well written. Uh. It's sort of just like a biopic thing about it. And I said, let's do let's do an episode about this thing. It just sounds so weird and perfect for the show. Yeah,

it's great, it's weird, it's fascinating. And the thing that really surprised me is that I could not find any examples of fiction or even creepy pasta that takes place here like this seems like the perfect setting for all manner of weird paranormal, creepy science, mad science shenanigans, especially

like you know, you mentioned Creepy Pasta. We we did an episode in the last year at least about that creepy pasta Russian science experiment, and then we you know, we've done episodes recently about the space Mirror project with project as in Maya and also the human z episode. Russian Science too academic garodoc didn't come up in any of these things, no, um, So it's kind of fascinating, especially because this place seems to be like the place

for Russian science. Yeah, and I mean not only like mad science e stuff, but like spies, like why hasn't James Bond run through the streets of uh So, Yeah, let's keep that in mind. And hey, Hollywood producers, if you're out there listening, I don't know, it's a little late for like some Cold war mad science shenanigans, but I don't know. Maybe that movie, oh that was sent in World War two, Frankenstein's Army. Did you ever see that? Yeah,

Frankenstein's Army is a lot of fun. It's essentially haunted attraction as a film, like it's not if you go into it with that that mindset and realize you're not watching like a true like character engagement film, but you're going on a haunted house, right Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. For the listeners, franknin Stein's Army Josh Clark from Stuff

You Should Know, turn me onto that. Uh uh Yeah, it's basically Frankenstein creates a bunch a bunch of like zombie monsters for the Nazis as they like pour through Russia or is it the other way around? Is the Russian ones? I can't remember, but it's it's basically set during the invasion of Russia. Yeah, I believe that's right. Okay, anyways, go watch that, guys. I think it's on Netflix. Okay, So let's get down to basics about what this place is.

It is hidden away in the cold Siberian forest, and it's actually been called Russia's Silicon Forest as an alternative to Silicon Valley. Uh. It's located three thousand kilometers east of Moscow. And the weather they are ranges from thirty degree celsius summers to negative forty degrees celsius winters. So it's like all over the place like brutal cold, and then like apparently like there's like a real mosquito issue in the summers, Like it's it's hot, and there's just

mosquitoes everywhere. It's right on alongside what's called the I believe it's ob river. Anybody out there who knows Russian or has like a familiarity with Russian, I apologize in advance. I'm gonna butcher a number of things here. And the only way that I was able to figure out how to pronounce Akademgorodok and Novas Abersk was by watching a YouTube video by a dude who is American that just happens to live in Nova Sabirsk and teaches Russian to

people over YouTube. And speaking of Siberia here, I mean anyone who doesn't have that have much familiarity with Russia. You might be thinking of Siberia. You're thinking like waste lands, thinking like tiny camps, and maybe you're imagining this strange artificial place in the forest there and and not that that part. Maybe he isn't completely off, but it is worth stressing that Nova Sabirsk is a major metropolitan area. Yeah, absolutely, like that was a mistake I made. I would say

like through the first half of the literature. I didn't quite have that understanding until like I ran across the statistic that Nova Sabirsk is the third largest most populated city in Russia after Moscow and St. St. Petersburg. So yeah, it's Siberia, but it's not the middle of nowhere. It's you know, it's pretty populated. And Academgorodoc is like Koters just outside of Nova Sabirsk, and it's it's like it's

his own little end to tea, but it's connected. Yeah. Uh, in fact, it's kind of I guess, like the best analogies, it's sort of like Cambridge to Boston, right, Like Cambridge is often used as a as a like analogy for academic Gara doc because of you know, Harvard and m I tear there. But in academic Garads case, it's uh, you know, the state universities and then now like a lot of science and tech oriented companies are moving there. So okay, novas abers was founded in eight so even

the city itself isn't that old, especially for European city. Yeah, this kind of falls on the long standing Russian trend of this is the place we will build a city regardless of it's uh, you know, Siberia or a swampy wasteland. Yeah. Sometimes I feel that way about Atlanta where we live, Like I'm like, why why did anybody start like set up roots here? And it was I think in Atlanta's case, it was just it just happened to be where trained, Yeah,

where the trains, right. Yeah. Um. So by the nineteen thirties, Novas of Beersk itself had already like garnered a reputation as like having several educational institutes very focused on physics. Uh, and it it really didn't like the academic Gora doc experiment didn't really come about until the late fifties. And the way I like to think about it is kind of like if our listeners are familiar with the TV

show Eureka. I think it's a little bit like that, although less science fiction e and then um, some of our listeners actually turned Joe and I on. I don't think you've listened to it yet, right, Limetown, I know I've heard mention of it. So Limetown is a podcast, uh that is about a fictional American science town kind of like this that I highly recommend Anyways, those were in my head as well as John Travolta's classic The

Experts while we were studying this place. And it's also worth pointing out through the realization of Gora doc Uh, it's all a part two of the seven Year Plan from A fifty to sixty five, which was a big

initiative in Soviet Russia. Yeah, so what we're looking at here is basically a team up between a mathematician named Mikhail Lavrentiev and uh, everybody's favorite premier Nikita Krushchev, and their idea was basically, they're going to take the USSR smartest scientists and put them all in one place so they wouldn't be distracted by Moscow. Like apparently both the like you know, metropolitan nature of Moscow, but also all the politics going on in Moscow was becoming a problem

for these scientists. They weren't getting their work done. So Sai, let's send them off from the middle of nowhere. This Novis appears, that's perfect, we'll build something right us side there. Thats all you have to do is distance yourself from the politicians and they'll leave you alone. Right. Yeah, And in fact it happened, but then it turned against too. And yeah, and we'll get into some of the the the the ups and downs. That's what you progress here.

Uh So, you know, if you're a scientist and you're in Russia in the fifties, and this is actually pretty attractive to you because one you've got the freedom, but also you have like large, spacious quarters and everything super cheap and apparently even today, like it's relatively cheap. Like I'm the this this guy that I'm talking about from

the YouTube video. He he was saying, you can rent like a huge spacious apartment in Nova Saverisk nowadays for like five U s. Dollars a month or something like that. Um so he recommended going to visit there. And in fact, didn't you say, like you you looked at trip advisor to get some information. Yeah, yeah, trip advisors. Trip Advisor was a great way to sort of give up to get an idea of what what kind of offerings are

in the area. You know, like you can head on over to to Nova Saverisk, can go to the zoo, you can go to the awesome zoo. Yeah, like like it the way it was written about in that Guardian article. I thought, oh, this is just like this city in the middle of nothing, but actually, like there's there's a lot going on there, you know, it's it's relatively metropolitan.

And even that, they were saying, Um, there's a service that's not Amazon, but it's like Amazon in Russia now, where you you know, get next day delivery or two day delivery on like basically anything you want to order, right, So any DVD that you couldn't find in a local shop or something like that, or stream you can get. You know, this isn't it's not that isolated. So uh. The other things that were there was they built an

artificial beach to try to make it more attractive. And I actually saw pictures I was I was looking for pictures for this episode, and there are pictures of from the sixties of Russian women just hanging out on this fake beach. So they just dumped a lot of stand on the water. I don't know. I don't know how they put it together. Um that was that wasn't in any of the research, but I would imagine given the feats that these people were performing with science, that making

a fake beach was like pretty easy comparatively. Uh yeah, so the and and they also this is interesting the whole design of it was set up to preserve the natural environment of Siberia. So that's fascinating too, right, I mean you're considering the fifties like they were thinking ecologically back then too when they're setting this up. Yeah. Now, it's worth noting that the original plans called for what

for what is called wedding cake style Stalinist architecture. Uh. And the word the Russian for that is Zuker Baker steel and uh. At any rate, luck that would have been you know, a lot more boxy communist looking buildings and less of a reliance on trees that got scrapped, and they ended up going with this uh this uh, this more natural look, or at least it's more natural when you when you factorate all the trees and mean, yeah,

the um, we'll talk about it later. But there's like a main building there now that has been built recently for the sort of modern day version of this place. Uh, And it's this kind of fascinating architecture style. I have to say, like, after doing all the research, I was kind of like, this seems like it would be a fun place to go in vacation. Like it may be that's something only the people who host science podcasts think when they read about this, it's the building your thing?

Is this the one that looks like an upside down you? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Yeah, it's just this. The whole area just seems sort of fascinating and um and like it would be fun. But you know, I'm also not the type of person who goes to the beach on vacation, even if it's an artificial beach. And in terms of getting actual institutes in there, I want to point out that Mikhael Labyrintev's Institute of hydro Dynamics was the first

to really become operational, uh intim Cora doc. Yeah, And as we'll talk about later, like there's basically like any university type situation, there's little silos all over this place, and there's like little institutes there. I say little, they're not little, but there's probably like I don't know, ten, maybe twelve of them, um that just have all the

different disciplines that were studied there. And it's it's intense when you think about like how much was all being focused on in this different area and still is now. It took them ten years to actually build the Center of academic Gara doc. But it was essentially built with the idea being that it would be a campus for Nova SEVERERSK State University. Okay, and here's the answer to that. It's fourteen institutes, not twelve. Uh that and they were

all set up as part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Now, at its height, there were sixty five thousand scientists there. Uh Now that I would imagine the height would be the mid sixties given what we've read. Um, although it's getting back up there again now, it's not as much of a public institution anymore. It's a combination of public

and private enterprise. In terms of the amount of money spent on building this up initially, a nineteen two article from Lauren g Lytton published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists put it around two hundred million roubles or two million dollars in bucks. I saw some figures that said like, over the years, the combination of money that went in there was close to a billion um that they just they really wanted to make this thing work, and they

just pumped a lot of them. Yeah, a lot of the money is going in from the state and then initially eventually they get to the point where there's actually some money coming in from industrial ventures as well. So, um, Mikhail Lavrentev, who we've mentioned, who sort of like the father of this place. He was important to cybernetics and genetics that was like his field of study, but he's mainly known as a mathematician. Now this is important before

we go forward. At the time, genetics was considered a pseudoscience, especially in Moscow. I don't mean genetics like worldwide. I

mean like in terms of the Russian science community. It was kind of looked down upon, and a lot of the genetics studies, especially those that went on with Foxes that we're going to talk about, which was my favorite study that came out of this place, Uh, would not have happened if it was in Moscower anywhere where the Communist Party in particular would have been aware of what

it was up to. So this was also a nice way for him to sort of um hide some studies, and it allowed a certain amount of freedom for these scientists. And also my understanding is that like it was almost like a touring destination for artists and what they were. They actually referred to them as bards coming through the town, who would you know, give performances or uh do poetry slams Like it sounds like I'm joking with the way

they described it. They weren't called poetry slams. That they were like poetry readings at like local coffee houses and in academic guard dog So very much in line with some of the Silicon Valley as stuff that we hear about or you know, imagine some of you actually experienced with your serial stations and your your your meditation workshops

coming through through the workplace totally. And so this was like this place where all like Russian creatives could sort of like flow through and distribute their ideas to the scientific community they air uh without fear of repercussions. And one last thing before we go into the problems with this place when things started to fall apart, is the logo is super cool? Yeah. Um, so that the logo they came up with. The idea was that it was the Greek letter sigma and it was emblazoned on top

of a shock wave UH. And the design thinking here was basically that it would suggest the synergy of a broad range of disciplines uh while bringing a quote flash of lightning to the area. It's a pretty good logo. I have to admit, Yeah, it's cool. I wonder if you like, there's probably like a collector's market for like old Russian academic Gara doc like lapel buttons or something like that. I should hope so, But then again, you can get them on eBay. Yeah, may it would look

great on a T shirt. So if it's not already on one of these, you know, the millions of T shirt websites out serious needs to be so that that article that I mentioned earlier by um loreng G. Lighton and the Bolton of Atomic Science, it's from seventy two. The title on that is another view of a cat

Imgora doc. Yeah. It was sort of like a response piece, right, because there was one that had been previously published like a year earlier in the same journal that was fairly critical I think, right, well, yeah, and this to a certain extent maybe not being critical enough, like kind of not not really dealing with the kind of the nuts and bolts, so they think we're coming together. My understanding was it was sort of like h Western scientists trying

to come to grips with what this might mean. Yeah, and this is and this ends up being I like this paper because it's a little more like I mean, it's certainly not demonizing and saying, oh this is evil Soviet science town, but it's but it's laying out just some of the basic logistical problems and human problems of trying to build what is sometimes referred to as a science utopia. And everybody knows what happens when you're trying to build a utopia. It falls apart because of dystopia. Right.

If science fiction has taught us anything it's that we'll never have a perfect world. And I mean, at the very least, like this was often held up as being sort of an unlimited funds, unlimited talent, unlimited opportunity for scientific inquiry. And of course, anytime someone is trying to sell you something that is unlimited, uh, you know, there are limits. It might be that might be an all you can eat see food buffet, but there is a finite amount of steamer tray shrimp you can eat. There's

only so much. Yeah, so you know what I'm already thinking, Like we've we've talked about this on the show many times before, Like all of our ideas for AMC dramas historical period pieces that come up throughout the show. So we've we've already talked about how there should be one that's sort of about like the the science psychedelic set of like um, Timothy Leary, et cetera, those those types of folk. There should be like an AMC type mad Men show that's set an academic Guara doc in the

big sixties. That would be That would be fantastic, would be good, especially especially taking in some of these details that come from that light and article. And specifically she interviewed one uh Ganadi Loveovich Paspalov, who was director of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics and UM and so he had a, you know, an insider view of how

things were coming together. And my understanding from the readings was that that that institute, the GEL Geology and Geophysics Institute in particular, was like one of the big successes for this place in particular because it was the first one to bring together all of the sub disciplines of geology and geophysics into like one organization. But then also like they uh somehow like came up with a new system.

It's in the notes, so we'll get there later, but they came up with a new system for discovering oil, and they found major oil plots in Siberia cool And that's an example of things working the way you would hope they would. You're bringing these these all these talented individuals together. They're gonna have coffee at some point, They're gonna go to the water cooler. You know, they're gonna go to the Yeah, minds are gonna gonna come together,

and new ideas are gonna be generated. But as possible Off pointed out, first of all, it was difficult to get things off the ground and moving. After all, everything was done from scratch here. There wasn't I think the example that was mentioned in the article was that, you know, it's one thing to build a factory. You know, you know that that the components that have to come together, you can put that together with relative ease. Because we've

been doing them for a while. This was something entirely new. Um. And then they wound up with three types of scientists. According to possible Law, three types of scientists that ended up at caught him degoradac. The first was let's call them idea men. The quote here is, on the one hand, you've got the clever ones who give birth to new ideas, each one more interesting than the other. But they expect everything to be done right away and want it done

with a wave of the hand. And they're not known for their persistence or their love of tedious labor, so nothing comes from them. Okay, so you have those. This already sounds like just any public university to me, but okay, keep going. And then there they let's call them time servers, he says, toilers who are not by God endowed. But for all that, they are a stubborn lot, and you just might get something out of them. Only they don't have ideas. Familiar with this style of academic as well.

I call them turtles when I was working in academia. And then there are the enthusiastic quote, those who are neither clever nor toilers, but rather those characters who believe mistakenly there and this is his by God endowed. But don't you be in a hurry to dismiss them as ballast. These people are quite often such enthusiasts for science that

you can't bring yourself to write them off as ballast. Yeah, So if this works out the same or worked out the same way, that politics in you know, my experiences with public universities. I'm sure it goes on in private universities as well, But there's I imagine that these factions sort of broke off, right, and there's like they're like ven diagrams. Is a little bit of overlap, it's a little bit of cooperation, but there's also like a lot

of infighting for power and expertise and uh small sticks. Yeah, yeah, I think so, um and and and and also you just have a lot of individualists here and occasional outright prima donnas, and they're all arriving with preconceived notions about how things are gonna go down in this science wonderland, right, But then reality hits, projects have to be adjusted, People were shuffled around, people were pulled between larger projects and

their own private ventures. And it was also difficult. You know, It's one thing to say or we can bring all the best minds together, but even in communist Russia, even in the Soviet Union, is difficult to lure everyone to Siberia. So many were turned off by the harsh climate, or they're unwilling to leave their own institutes where they already had their own ventures. You know, up and running perhaps too, you know, to the degree that they were perfectly happy

with um. Also money, despite the idea of unlimited funds for science stificate achievement, here there were money problems. So you had Moscow the politicians essentially holding the purse strings here, and so they're scrutinizing everything. So the the hot and cold running science funds tap definitely had some eyes on it, and this became a major problem for this area, both in the seventies and then again in the early nineties

with the collapse of the U s SR. So you can run, you can distance yourself from the political head, from from the politicians, from the those who who who who guard the purse strings, but you're not going to escape them completely, especially if you're sucking this kind of money down. Also the problem of two worlds here, so you had science over humanities. You had complex specialization rather than the sort of free form idea jazz that one

might dream of at least in every situation. I mean example we mentioned earlier, that's an example of things working more or less the way they should, but you're not always going to get that. Yeah, that definitely seemed to be like my take on it when I was reading about the history, was that, you know, other than these like traveling bards and you know, poets and writers and uh occasional filmmakers. Andre Tarkovsky. Yeah is that am I

saying his name right? I believe that's right. Yeah, he he went through there as well and give a talk. But um, other than those folks didn't really have any liberal arts, right like, whereas like you know, my familiarity with places like Georgia Tech which is down the street from US or m I T they do have at least like some small programs that offer liberal arts. So

there's a little bit of a balance. And it's not all empirical, yeah, I mean, like even in Georgia Tech here, there are definitely areas of their their their technological involvement that spill over into liberal arts their music and technology. Yeah, absolutely. Um. And finally, uh, the practical applications of findings still trumped

and perhaps still trump the purity of scientific inquiry. So there were clashes that were altered between Moscow and it's party ideals as well as the the individualism and elitism at Acadam Gora Docks. So you would have these individuals that definitely had their pet projects, perhaps such as genetics, you know, something that is not as accepted. But meanwhile, the voices from Moscow are saying, all right, that's well and good, but this, this is the thing we need, right,

this is why we brought everyone together. They probably wanted them to be focusing on things like UH. I would imagine like militaristic endeavors or space program stuff, things like that. Um. In fact, I believe it was originally meant for military defense projects, and the founders were they the founders were able to convince the government to give non military research

the highest priority. Even more surprising that we didn't hear about this when we researched projects in Maya because it seems like it's like a perfect fit for what they're doing. UM so yeah, so this like what Robert's talking about with this UH. Clash between Moscow's ideals and the individualism rising up in academic Rodoc resulted in a period of time there that is referred to now as the brain dream,

and this was in the nineteen seventies. The Bresh era of Russia curtailed the freedoms of these scientists and then turned the science there more towards working on the military and the economy. All right, so this is where kind of the sad. Yeah, what happened was there's a group of scientists who, you know, let's imagine that they are in our television show. This group of scientists hangs out

the coffeehouse. They watched the Traveling Bards coming through, They listened to their big ideas, they talk about them amongst themselves, and then they said, you know what, we don't like the fact that there's a secret political trials held here in the Soviet Union. Let's write something called the letter of forty six. And I think that meant it was forty six of these scientists. Uh. They basically wrote it to the Communist Party in Moscow and said that they're

standing against this stuff and they didn't like it. So that didn't go over too well, and the Communist Party turned around and both had a campaign to re educate the staff there. Uh. And this basically ended the period of time that was referred to as the Thaw, which was sort of like the cold we I think that comes from us, probably more from them, but the thaw being that it was like less of a cold, frigid communist uh. You know, cold war type environment. Right, alright,

so no more jazz, you're playing classical music. I think the Bard's got bumped out. Yeah. Uh. And they were informed specifically that one they were not an island of freedom, and two they were forced to publicly recant the letter. So if they wanted to keep their jobs or they didn't want to get like, you know, sent off to their own secret trial, they had to basically stand up and say, oh, it was wrong. I shouldn't have done that.

I'm going to go back to my research. Then jump forward twenty years, right, so there's like the steady decline h during the brain drain, where more and more scientists start leaving academic garadoc over this time. Right, They're just like there, all all the utopian ideas that were presented to them didn't come through. Right. So you put this huge sort of industrial science town that's got like the best equipment. Uh, it's designed for the best people, but

the people are leaving in droves. Uh. And so what ends up happening we get to the nineteen nineties is practically abandoned by then anyways, and then the Soviet Union collapsed and pretty much everybody who is there left uh and and went back to the West. Now there's a particular example of this that we're going to talk about when we get into the science there, and it's the

fox is one that I want to focus on. Uh. It's a really kind of heart wrenching story about like the research, all the work that went into the research there, and then how it sort of faded out and the repercussions that it had for the people, but also for like the test subjects, which were like all these foxes that they were working with. Anyways, But I think before we get into that study, let's let's finish off the history. Let's get to present day. What is going on there now?

So Vladimir Putin comes along. He goes to India ten years ago so I think it was two thousand five, so eleven years ago, and he sees how tech savvy India is, and he says, well, Russia's got to have this too. How about he comes back and he says, how about we mix federal and private money together and we pump it back into academ goadoc uh, and this will be like our new cradle of innovation. Okay, And it's not the only one, Like I don't want to make this sound like this is the only place in

Russia where like innovation is going on. From from my understanding, there's at least three other major science tech complex centers that Putin has given funding to around Russia, but this one is the one with the like the big long history. It's kind of a point of pride, right m hm. So much so that there's actually road signs as you enter going into the science park. Now that's say the brain drain is prohibited. I think we should have that

sign everywhere. That's just a good indicator that you know, nobody's gonna be squashing your ideas and there are no elithids around to um your mind mind flares better known as mind flares there. They will just totally destroy a scientific TLEs right up your nose and suck your brains out. Yeah, that's what the brain drain is all about. Uh, the secret history of academic Garadoc. Now we're just going off on a D and D tangent. Okay, the fiction and

the creepy postive basically rights. Yeah it does. Um so yeah, so so Putin puts more and more money into this place. Uh oh, this is where I got the one billion from I'm sorry, So the one billion I was talking about earlier, that's present day, Like it's received up to a billion dollars in the last ten years. Uh. And today Mikhail Lavrentiev's Ranson actually works there and oversees the

repurposing of the whole place. Uh. And the interesting thing is there's an interview with him and he says that he thinks that his grandfather would appreciate the new academ Gueradoc and he would quote want business to pay for

using our brains. So this is fascinating like Russian ideological shift that you can just trace throughout the history of this one town, right, like from communist ideals to sort of uh, like this countercultural sixties vibe, to back into like an economic depression, and then now it's bouncing out and it's like embracing capitalism and it's like, oh, yeah, we're smart, but you gotta pay us to be smart.

So now it's based around these buildings that Robert and I were talking talking about, the translates into technology park, but his academ park. Uh, it's this fourteen story basically it's a monument. It's he's conjoining twin towers and they they stand up. Yeah, like you said, it's like an upside down w kind of right, like like they stand up at a tilt and come together, and then there's like walkways at the very top between them that are

also at like an angle. It's really interesting, definitely, Like do Google in image search for academic Garadoc and that that will be like the first thing that comes up. This this building. Apparently it was designed by architects that are from novis a beersk and uh. The the whole idea is basically this association of major companies that established themselves in the area, sort of like your local chamber

of commerce. I guess they called themselves the CIG Academic Innovation. Well, on the occasion of Putin visiting in two thousand five for this sort of startup venture, they said, well, here's our here's our new wonderful building, and it has four clusters of studies that go on there. There's instrument engineering, information technologies, biomedical studies, nanotechnology and then oh sorry, and

then nanotechnologies and new materials. That's that's one uh. As often there was a total of two hundred and sixty three companies there. That's in academ Park. That's not Academic Garadoc itself, which still has these institutes running. But there's so you've got this mix now. It's sort of it reminds me actually of the building that we work in, right, Like, so we work in this building. Yeah, I couldn't help but think about old PCM Pont City Market a little bit.

Reading about this for those of you out there who are unfamiliar how stuff works. Our studios are in a building in Atlantic called Pont City Market that. Uh, this used to be like a Sears factory, uh in Atlanta, like way back in the day, like what sixty seventy years ago, Yeah, like a Sears like mega center. Yeah, and they would basically like there was a railroad line that came up to our building and they would transfer

goods in and out of the building. Uh. And then over time it was taken over by the City of Atlanta. It was like a part of City Hall for a long time. Yeah, Like city Hall occupied a portion of it and then the rest was just like empty waste land, you know. Building it was kind of just a big industrial shell. And that's what it was when I first moved here, just this huge monument of kind of just

like public falling apart. Uh And and then in the last what three or four years, it was bought by developers and repurposed into this like mixed use office slash retail space that's also got this kind of like vibe of like there's a lot of of like tech companies here, like yeah, ourselves, twitters here, uh, male Chimp. You know,

love love big name companies. I mean, it's one about making money, yeah, but you end up bringing in all these various companies and it kind of becomes an incubation center. That was maybe like the part that I was able to sort of like empathize the most most with reading about Academic guardoc was one of the key features of Atlanta. I feel like is Atlanta does a really good job of repurposing things from its past h to try to like make new use out of them for like its

present day identity. Um, whether it's like old houses that get turned into like hip new restaurants or like art galleries like I drum like places like that. Um, Atlanta is just full of stuff like that. So reading about this, it kind of made me think, Oh, they're sort of operating into that same theory. Right, yeah, yeah, definitely. All right, we're gonna take a break and when we come back, we're gonna talk about some of the scientific research that's

taken place at Akata and Goredoc over the years. So, uh, even before Academic GUARDAC was founded, like I said, like it, you know, novas a Beers had this reputation for um physicists in particular, but it had a lot of educational facilities. It also attracted weird scientists. And the example that we're gonna give today, it's a guy named Yuri Kondratyuk. I think that's how you pronounced his name. Now, Uri was only in town for a couple of years. But this story,

oh it's good, it's good, so it's worth putting in here. Uh. He only was there for a couple of years, basically because he had previously attempted to escape Russia. He didn't want to have anything to do with with communist Russia, but he couldn't get out. Uh, And so he found a student who had died of tuberculosis and he appropriated his name. He's putting on a Don Draper here or

talented Mr Ripley. Yeah. Uh, and so he's taken on this new name, and he moves to Nova Sabirsk, and he just so happened to have also published his own book. He had already written this book years before, but he published it when he got to Neva Sabirsk. It's called and this is a good title for a book, man, the Conquest of Interplanetary Space. And basically he proposed groundbreaking

ideas that were later put into scientific practice. Here, so things like space stations, oxygen hydrogen, mixed fuel, using solar energy, shielding space vehicles, and then in particular using gravity to map out spacecraft trajectories. All of this stuff was just in his this this this random guy's book. Uh. And he also, you know, this isn't just like some some crazy guy who had ramblings in a book, like he actually was had practical applications for the science he was

talking about. I wonder which of the if he fell into one of the three categories we mentioned with he like a big idea guy was like, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna have solar power, we're gonna have oxygen, hydrogen fuel. But then didn't like you figure it out, You figure the details out and get let's do it tomorrow. That's what it seemed like from reading about the book. But then this project of his struck me as like, oh,

this guy actually got a thing done. Uh. He designed a thirteen thousand ton wooden grain silo that he called the Mastodon. Yeah, we've got like so many awesome metal band names popping up in this episode, right, the Mastodon is already a band, but like academ Garadoc would be a great like the Key Oh yeah, we're a metal ba and up. What does that mean Academy Town, Well,

you may. I'm wondering if there's not one already out there, because in the past when we said this would be a great metal band, there has been a metal band. Like it is a metal band and it's pretty good. Recommend everyone to check him out. So this masted on thing that he built, the thing about it that's pretty fascinating. He didn't use a single nail for it. The whole thing was like, you know, it was one of these

structures that locked together. Uh. And so subsequently he was later arrested and convicted be Subsequently, he was later arrested and convicted of counter revolutionary activities because there were no nails in the silo. They thought that he was purposely trying to sabotage the structure so that it would fall apart. And he had just come up with like this unique new way. And the reason why it was because nails were hard to come by at the time, Like they

didn't you know do out in Siberia. Wasn't that easy to get a hold. You're limiting the need for for iron and metals a construction of a building. It makes sense. So when he was trying to conserve and bring about new ideas, they saw it as counter revolutionary. So, hey, this guy, you know, he was trying to get out of there anyways, and no matter what he could do,

he was he was destined to get into trouble. Uh. But you know, basically even before uh you know, all the stuff that we're about to talk about, academic Gordoc was set up to work on everything from nuclear physics, the theoretical genetics, and like we said, the space program and weapons platforms. Uh. So we're gonna go through we'll talk about some of the institutes. Uh and you know

some of them are sexier than others. Uh, So we won't you know, I'm I don't think it like necessarily we need to go through every single study that came out of them. But my favorite study is the fox one that came out of the Cytology and Genetics Institute where they bred foxes for fifty generations to be more like dogs. Oh yes, yes, this is a famous study. Yeah. And if you if you look this up. The young woman who at least in two thousand twelve, she was

sort of like the poster child for this research. Her name is Arena. Oh man, I'm gonna get this name wrong, Arena Mukhema the Sina she uh is you know, basically like trying to train these foxes so that they will respond to commands, obedience commands and wow, Like she was really popular with European and even Japanese media for a

while because she's very photogenic. She's this very beautiful young Russian woman with long, curly red hair, and she's it's it's everything like you would imagine when you're thinking about like, oh, like a female Russian scientist working with foxes, right, Like she's got like red hair that matches the coats of the foxes that she's working with, and there's all these pictures of her like playing with the foxes in the snow, or cuddling up with the foxes or whatever, like working

with them on their sitting posture. That's interesting because I cannot I can't help but imagine it also plays into Asian supernatural fox motifs, both in Japan but also in the more Asian portions of Russia. But yeah, I mean to your point, Like, apparently every article I read about this uh said that there was a Japanese media company that flew out to Nova Sabirsk and filmed with her for sile days. So like, clearly this was a story that caught like the imagination and attention of a lot

of people, including myself. Now, the origin story behind these foxes goes like this. There's a biologist named Dmitri Billejev, and he gathered a hundred and thirty foxes from fur farms all around the academ Gara doc Nova Sabirsk area in the early sixties, and he bred them using only the least aggressive ones from each generation, basically trying to

recreate the process within which how wolves became dogs. Now, by doing so, he professed to compress thousands of years of process into just a few decades now that the idea here was he didn't want them to be pets. Okay, he was hoping to test a theory that and this is interesting, I've never heard of this before, that domesticated animals are actually physically altered over the course of their domestication through their contact with human beings, and they undergo

biological changes to be more appealing to us. So in the example that he gave with wolves to dogs, floppy ears and curlier tales. Now in the case of the foxes, Uh, my understanding was that like yesday, like I've adopted things like wagging their tails. Uh. And they also they lick hands. Uh. And they apparently this this breed of foxes that she's working with today have like white patches on their heads and that's not necessarily like normal for this particular species

of fox. So the idea here is what's called domestication phenotype, making animals more appealing to man. Now, remember what I said about genetics, right, Like, this was like a big no no with the Soviets, So he hid what he was doing from the authorities because they would have disapproved of it. Uh. And the foxes did physically change. They found that they had less cortisol, which is a stress hormone in their blood, and they didn't feel discomfort when

they were with people. Right, Like if I just walked up to a fox in the forest, now, well, first of all, it would run away from me or bite me, right, but like I couldn't just like cuddle with it, like pick it up and hold it like my dog, and it would be you know, it would love being pet or anything like that. They had bred all of that out of these foxes, but these foxes were just kind

of sitting there, especially since the brain drain. So we get to the nineteen nineties when pretty much everyone has left this area, right, and there's concerned they don't have any money. How are they going to feed all these foxes that they've got. So they actually started selling some of them. They sold a few of them to fur breeders.

But they pressured them and they said, look, please don't make them suffer the stress of captivity, because these particular foxes, you know, they don't that we've read them in such a way that they don't have like the defense mechanisms of psychological mechanisms to deal with this. Go easy on them, now, who knows if that actually happened or not. But they also sold a couple of them as pets around the area, So some people in this area have foxes as pets.

Along comes Arena And she's twenty two years old in two thousand twelves, so she's probably twenty six now, uh, and she's training these foxes to be obedient. She got the idea when she noticed that this special breed was seeking human attention, the ones that were left. So she had actually trained dogs all through her teens and she had been doing it professionally, but she was a student there and she said, you know what I want to

I want to take a go of this. So her advisor said, all right, take these two young baby foxes, and she named them Anna and Elma, and she trained them the way that you would train dogs. So she started with food motivation to get them to respond to basic commands. Then she changed that up once she got them there, to game motivation to connect with their other instincts. Uh. As the story goes, she can make her foxes stand up, sit, lie down, they recognize their names, they come when they're called,

things like that. Uh. But she stated afterwards, she was like, I made a couple of mistakes, like, they're not they're not dogs, So I made some mistakes by doing it the way that you would with dogs because their psychology is totally different. So she says that she's going to do it again. She changed her training tactics, but she did. Sorry, it wasn't her. Her advisor described these foxes as quote

as devoted as dogs, but as independent as cats. So they have a different psychology, but apparently they are able to be like domesticated sort of partners to man. Interesting. All right, so that's one of the more noteworthy examples hero. But what are some of the other UH institutes. Well, they had an institute, well they still do, of thermal physics that was founded with the rest of the area UM and yeah, it was one of the first institutes

that specialized in the subject. Today, you know, it studies things like heat exchange and physical hydro and gas dynamics. UH. They're known, ironically because of the shock wave logo. They're known for their shock wave propagation effects studies in gases UH and also focused on ecologically clean power. There's the Boodker Institute of Nuclear Physics. This is uh an an institute that's particularly um good at working on particle accelerators.

In fact, they contributed toward the construction of CERN's large hadron collider and provided equipment to it. They also had a tool I love the name of this, called the Siberian Snake, that they used to avoid depolarization of beams of spinning electrons or protons. I don't know what that means,

but I like the Siberian's nickname. There's so the Institute of Automation and Electrometry, UH, the Institute of Geology and Geophysics that I mentioned earlier, which you know sort of made a name for themselves by discovering major oil and gas rich areas. UH. There's an Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mathematics, and they in particular focus on like aero dynamic flows, and they have like an experimental facility where

they can test these parameters on aircraft models. UH. And then they have institutes that are also dedicated to semiconductor physics, laser physics, chemical kinetics, combustion, as well as the two that are named after Mikhail Kavrentiev, which is their Institute of Hydrodynamics which you mentioned earlier, and their School of physics and mathematics, so they've got something for everybody there.

It seems like except for the bards, there's there's there'sn't there'sn't a lot of poetry there anymore, I would imagine. So nowadays we've got Putin's Initiative in there, there's a lot of entrepreneurs moving in. There's around three hundred companies working on tech and science in the area, and it's set up in particular to provide infrastructure so these companies don't have to buy their own equipment, right, so it's like, uh,

sort of like a cooperative. They they provide the equipment, you know, they provide the facilities, and they make it attractive for these companies to come in and start up and and uh work on science and tech. And these companies specialize in things like I T pharmaceuticals, metallurgy, fossil fuels.

One of the like interesting kind of factoids that came out of a bunch of the magazines was that the the I T company that works on Oprah Winfrey's web portal is based out of there, uh and apparently like they didn't even know who Oprah Winfrey was when they were working on it. And then they said, but we do now. So that's my that's my Russian impersonation for

the episode. So yeah, Russia's got two hundred thousand science and tech specialists who are graduating every year, and this is like a very nice new option for these young professionals. And for a lot of the same reasons that we heard about back in the late fifties early sixties. Right, it's cheap. Everything is supposedly one fifth of the cost of Western prices. It's easy to focus in one person, they asked that. He said, yeah, because it's so cold,

there's literally nothing for us to do but work. So yeah, so we've got this big place now that it's contributing to the science and tech sort of high mind of the world right now. And it has you know, even like a version of Starbucks. It's called Travelers Coffee. It's their their Russian version of Starbucks. Because the cold and harsh environmental not enough to make you work. You need

a little caffeine. Uh. And it has been officially inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records as the smartest street in the world. The academician Lavrentiev prospect as a two point five kilometer stretch that has more than twenty scientific research institutes there. So academ Garadac your new destination, uh for vacation. From my understanding is you probably don't want to go in the winter though. Yeah, yeah, definitely not.

And hey, if you do happen to go there. There is one really interesting monument in the area and it is the Monument of Laboratory Laboratory Mice. And it's actually it's it's it's really quite cute. Um. I love the statue. It's like a little mouse man with he's wearing spectacles and he has like a cloak and he's it looks like he's sewing, but what he's sewing as a DNA. He licks knitting it together and with his knitting needles.

And according to exactly how those mice contributed, Yeah, they didn't. They didn't just get sprayed in the eyes of chemicals grown in the dustbin. Yeah, it's very much. You know, there's some a certain amount of artistic liberty techn place here. And the the artist in question, Andrew Cobrech, this is his statement on it, uh. Quote. It combines the images of the laboratory mouse and a scientist because they are related to each other and serve as one case mouse

is captured in a moment of scientific to discovery. If you look into her eyes, you can see that this little mouse has come up with something. But the whole symphony of scientific discovery, joy Eureka has not yet begun to sound. So even more reason to visit. I think, uh, and we hope we presented to you this sort of fascinating little niche area. I I thought it was really worth digging into, and I'm glad we found out more

about it, especially because the whole Fox program. Oh yeah, but hey out there, if you've got more about this that you know about, like maybe you've visited already, or or maybe you speak Russian and you want to correct us on our pronunciations, let us know. Uh. There's plenty of ways to reach out to us. You can talk to us on Facebook, you can talk to us on Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram. We're on all of those as Blow the Mind. We've also got our home base, right Robert, that's right Acceptable

your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find all the podcast episodes. You'll find videos, blog post links out to those social media accounts and more. And if you want to write to us directly. You want to tell us how badly you want to move to academ Garrido and start AMC's new TV show set in sixties all around their science Park. Hit us up at Blow the Mind at how stuff Works dot com. Well more on this in thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com