"The ongoing brain drain and lack of financing is not the only reason Russian science has suffered in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union. The increase in pseudoscience has been so strong that the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) has formed a body to deal with the influx, the Commission on Pseudoscience and Research Fraud.
"The Moscow Times spoke with the chairman of the commission, Yevgeny Alexandrov, who is also the head of a laboratory at the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, one of Russia’s largest institutions for research in physics and technology.
"Q: Does Russian science really need to be protected?
"A: I wouldn’t say we protect science. Our main goal is to protect the Russian state budget from plunder. Very often, under the guise of costly pseudoscience projects, millions of dollars go nowhere. We inform the state that it’s being cheated.
"Q: What is pseudoscience?
"A: Our commission defines pseudoscience as statements that contradict the fundamental laws of nature such as the law of conservation of energy or angular momentum. … We monitor pseudoscientific reports or claims that are usually followed by attempts to get state funding under the mask of “scientific breakthroughs.”
"Fraud is committed mainly in the spheres of medicine and weaponry. Twice a year we release our own bulletin in which we report on all suspicious cases.
"Q: What kind of cases do you deal with?
"A: Almost on a daily basis we get requests to approve yet another “quantum bio-regulator” or “aura corrector.” Recently we got a project that declared the invention of a “gravity gun” weapon.
"In a recent bulletin we reported on Anaferon tablets. In an intense online ad campaign, it was described as an “immunity modulator” that allegedly cures flu. But it’s a typical homeopathic fake.
"In the medicine’s accompanying notes, it’s written that it contains 10-15 nanograms of the active ingredient per gram. For a scientist, that number means there is no more than just a molecule of the active ingredient in 100 million Anaferon pills.
"Q: Besides writing the commission’s opinion on Anaferon in the bulletin, did you make any other attempts to stop its distribution?
"A: Once a doctor prescribed Anaferon to me. I went to the head of the hospital and showed her a Wikipedia article about it, as well as the notes that come with it. All she could do was to exclaim: “Oh no, they cheated us!” Then I wrote a letter to the editor-in-chief of the media where it was advertised [Ekho Moskvy radio station], saying it’s not good to promote medicine that has zero effect. I never got a reply, and the advertising continued.
"Q: Do you ever go to trial to expose such cases?
"A: No, we just write letters back to pseudoscientists with our conclusions about their product. We also write to media, officials and scientific institutes.
"In contrast, pseudoscientists file suits against us in court. Our biggest recent battle was against Viktor Petrik — the greatest pseudoscientist of our time. He demanded 6 billion rubles from us [in 2010] in [a St. Petersburg] court to compensate for “losses to his reputation.”
"In the 1980s, Petrik was sentenced to 11 years for burglary, robbery and extortion. Since being released, he has somehow proclaimed himself an academic of seven made-up academies, and in the 2000s he became very close to the Russian ruling elite, in particular to [former] State Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov.
"All of his 100 patents are just repetitions of physical and chemical phenomena discovered long ago.
"We consider Petrik and Gryzlov’s “Clean Water” [project, in which the men claimed to be able to turn radioactive waste into drinking water] to be pseudoscientific, and tried to prevent the State Duma from approving funding for it. They wanted to produce and install “nanocarbon sorbent” water filters all over Russia. The filters were called “Shoigu” [after the current Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu] and labeled with [ruling party] United Russia stickers…."
