New knowledge advances science

In 1992, two colleagues and I visited Ukraine and Russia to tour ex-Soviet research laboratories in search of interesting technologies that had been developed by their scientists and engineers. The company I worked for hoped that we’d be able to bring something valuable back to Canada, and also hoped that we could justify enough in the way of licensing fees and direct investment to help keep the scientific and engineering expertise of at least one Ukrainian or Russian lab together.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia could afford to pay their scientists. Professionals with the expertise to develop world-changing technologies were leaving their laboratory jobs to drive cabs and translate for English- or German-speaking tourists.

After a month of visiting almost 30 laboratories – some small, some on the scale of the U.S. Oak Ridge or Argonne National Lab – we hadn’t found anything we could ask our board of directors to spend two or three million dollars on.

It was not because the Soviets weren’t good scientists. They were exceptional. The Soviet government often wouldn’t allocate resources to lab equipment, so Soviet researchers had to develop early stage theoretical concepts purely on paper, without testing and feedback. If you think that’s not hard, try it.

There was something else the Soviet government had done, though, that was even more important. It had censored Western magazines.

In Kyiv I met a man who had recently invented something he was sure we’d be interested in licensing. He said it was one of the most important technologies that could possibly be developed in the energy field; that it would reduce energy consumption of buildings substantially; that our company, from Edmonton, a particularly cold location in Canada, would be excited the instant he explained it.

He was almost right. He had invented metal oxide-coated window glass. Unfortunately for him, for the lab he worked for, and for my company’s goal of licensing innovative Soviet technologies, this concept had been in use in the Western world so long the patents had already expired.

Zinc oxide-coated windows are a distinctive blue color. They are indeed widely used in high-rise curtainwall, especially in cold climates. The tallest building in Edmonton, and many others in many other places, already used them. If he had been allowed to see a photograph of a Western high-rise building, he would have realized he was working on something that already existed. (He also would have realized, to the probable detriment of Soviet authority, that Western countries weren’t poor technological backwaters.)

Human genius is the most important resource available to humanity, and he had it, but he hadn’t been allowed to use it. Not really.

Another project that lab was working on was hydrogen fuel cells, a technology that has significant potential to be an improvement over existing electric generation and energy storage systems. Where would all of humanity be today, if brilliant individuals like him – and thousands of others – had been allowed to do their jobs? If their work had proceeded towards something new, not towards something that was only “new” because not allowing researchers to know what was actually new kept Soviet leaders from being embarrassed?

Freedom matters. When countries are run by tyrants, the paranoia and fear the tyrants create destroys human potential and sets all of civilization back.