Gordon Reid
Department of Animal Physiology and Biophysics Faculty of Biology, University of Bucharest

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.51.30

The Bucharest ‘Centre of Excellence’, supported by the Physiological Society under its Eastern European and Third World grants scheme, is centred around my group of three postdocs and myself. We work on transduction in primary somatosensory neurones, in particular the ion channels that detect cold and noxious heat. The cold- and menthol-activated ion channel in thermoreceptors was first described by us (Reid & Flonta, 2001) and continues to be a major focus of our work (Reid et al. 2002). Methods in use are patch clamping and Ca2+ imaging in cultured dorsal root ganglion neurones, and patch­clamp studies on the cloned thermosensitive ion channels TRPV1 (the capsaicin receptor, aka VR1) and TRPM8 (the cold and menthol receptor, aka CMR1). In addition, a number of students and workers from other institutes are working in a multi-user research centre in our department that makes these methods available to outside users.

The three original members of my group, Alex Babes, Florentina Pluteanu and Violeta Ristoiu, did the majority of their PhD work with me and have continued to work on related projects. All played an essential role in setting up our present lab and the multi-user centre, which is now run by Florentina. Both Alex and Florentina are supported by Physiological Society fellowships, sponsored by Peter McNaughton (Cambridge) and Sally Lawson (Bristol) respectively. The standard of equipment we have, and the facilities we have created, are equal to or better than those found in comparable Western labs. But it wasn’t always this way, as you will see below.

Whenever I meet someone new at a scientific meeting I generally get asked the same two questions: how did I end up in Romania? and what’s it like doing science here? The first question is simple to answer, but the answer to the second could easily fill a book. I’ll try to give a flavour of what it’s like in the short space of this article.

So how did I end up here? Six years ago, when I was a postdoc in Jürgen Schwarz’s lab in Hamburg, he asked me if I’d like to spend a week in Bucharest setting up a patch clamp rig. He told me they’d got the basic parts – microscope, micromanipulator, amplifier, puller, and oscilloscope. I asked him what else I could expect to find there ­other groups working in the department who could lend us odd bits of equipment, cables, tubing, and so on – and he said, to impress on me the hopelessness of the task, ‘They’ve got nothing there. Nothing at all’. So I took all the bits and pieces with me that I could think of, and as an afterthought I put a flask of GH3 cells in my pocket. Jürgen turned out to have been largely right, as I was to discover again and again in the succeeding months. We really were starting right from the beginning.

For instance, we had to fix the manipulator very firmly onto the microscope (an essential for stable patch clamping!). So on my first day in Bucharest I asked ‘Is there a workshop? Could they make a clamp for us?’ – the reply was ‘Maybe, but… you’d better come downstairs’. We went down to a dim, damp basement room containing some fish tanks, a gloomy mechanic smoking and reading a newspaper, and a huge, ancient upright drill. We explained the idea. The mechanic put down his cigarette, pointed to a broken radio and a pile of wood and metal junk in the corner, and told me sadly, ‘These are the materials we have. What can I make with these?’ Clearly another approach was going to be needed.

In the boiler room we found some broken chairs. We borrowed a saw and scrounged some screws, and put together a wooden clamp to hold the manipulator – it didn’t look elegant, but it worked. Using a stone slab and some tennis balls as an anti-vibration system, we made Romania’s first whole-cell recording, a potassium current in a GH3 cell, and held the recording just long enough for someone to make some pictures. I had an uneasy feeling that getting the patch clamp set-up to work was going to be the easy bit.

The fact that I’m still in Bucharest six years later is largely due to my wife, who I met during that first visit. But it’s also because there was a lot still to be done. All over Eastern Europe, university departments had been dedicated to teaching for the whole of the Communist period, and research had been done in institutes of the Academies of Sciences. This system is being dumped as fast as possible, because experience showed that a split between research and teaching is not good for either. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) gave a $15 million loan to build up university science in Romania, which was awarded as research grants starting in 1998.

My head of department, Maria-Luiza Flonta, and I got a total of about $200,000 from this source for our own research, and in addition our department was awarded $400,000 to set up the multi-user research centre I mentioned above. This has been the core funding that allowed serious research to begin here. The first equipment we bought was a Milli-Q water system and a Sartorius analytical balance – before that, we simply didn’t have reliable clean water or a good balance in the department. This money also allowed us to start throwing away pipette tips after use instead of washing them! However, $200,000 of grant income over five years is a tiny amount by Western standards, and having funding and equipment is only part of the story. To do competitive research requires fast access to consumables and literature, and at the beginning we had neither.

Let’s consider reagents – in the UK, next-day delivery is commonplace; in Bucharest, the delivery delay is one to three months! Imagine: you do an experiment that gives an intriguing and unexpected result; to follow it up, you need a reagent that you haven’t got, so you place the order and wait, and three months later the substance arrives (and you can’t go and ask a colleague in the department, because yours is the only patch clamp group in the country!). If we stuck to the conventional approach, we could give up the idea of doing world-class science here, and we would have to resign ourselves to reading about it in articles from our Western colleagues and competitors.

We had to find another way: we needed money deposited in another country that could be used to order what we needed for next-day delivery, and a fast transport route to get it to us. Initially using my own money and leftover travel expenses, and later grants from the Physiological Society, we deposited money for this purpose outside Romania. To begin with we got substances delivered by post; this got us involved with Customs, and our Customs problems (and unorthodox solutions) will be familiar to readers all over Eastern Europe and in many other parts of the world.

Any parcel, however small, that comes from outside the country is not delivered to the recipient; instead, the recipient is invited to come to the Customs office, where the package is opened and inspected. Personal items are allowed through, although experience shows that sometimes the more desirable items, like miniatures of whisky, are unexpectedly classified as ‘forbidden’ and liable to ‘confiscation’. Lab reagents are immediately pounced on and treated with the greatest suspicion; they are sent to another Customs office, and we have to start obtaining the necessary official papers to get them into the country. Some of these papers are standard but additional papers are usually requested, different ones each time, which causes delay and requires multiple trips to Customs for each item. These complications largely stem from the scope for bribery that exists: individual Customs officers can make an already cumbersome system unworkable, or they can make it run very smoothly if they want to, and they frequently use this power to extract bribes. Bribery is so well established that even a major courier company once asked us for money to pay a bribe to Customs! My policy is that we stay clean and don’t pay bribes. Instead we avoid Customs where we can. I’ll leave the methods to your imagination.

Our reliance on money held outside the country has been compounded by another problem that is virtually unknown in the West: even after being awarded a grant, we have occasionally found that money had disappeared from our account and been spent by another grant holder instead! We no longer have this problem, because our core funding (at present from the Volkswagen Foundation) is now all held and administered outside Romania.

The problem of access to literature is now almost completely solved, although it was serious at the beginning. The only scientific journals our University library subscribes to are Nature and Science, and originally we made heavy use of reprint requests, a very slow and erratic system. The advent of online publishing has changed this beyond recognition. I immediately subscribed to the most important online journals that we could get for a reasonable price. This costs us about $2000 per year, but is money well spent as we have immediate access to over half of the new articles relevant to our work. The rest are supplied by a network of friends around the world from their libraries’ online subscriptions. We have recently registered for HINARI (http://www.healthinternetwork.org) which will give us access to all the major scientific journals (2100 journals in total) for $1000 per year. With that, and our NATO-funded Internet access, our access to literature is as good as we could have anywhere in the West.

Future prospects for science in Romania could be bright, but I am still concerned – as I have been since arriving here six years ago – by the fact that we manage to keep our work going only by finding creative but irregular solutions to problems. We have constantly needed to bend the rules in the interests of our work, for instance paying a company for non-existent consumables (to be supplied later, free of charge), so that the money would be protected from our University administration and could not be spent by someone else. Sticking to the rules (especially concerning supplies of lab materials) would make our work impossible, and all the time it is at risk: a slight tightening of Customs controls, for instance, could close off our rapid supply of consumables completely.
There are other, less obvious problems.

Meritocracy vs mediocrity

Our universities and research councils are split between those who are producing good work and would succeed on merit anywhere in the world, and those who were appointed for reasons other than merit (often pre-1989) and are thus threatened by excellence in others. Unfortunately (in contrast to East Germany) these people were not removed after 1989. My head of department and a few very good colleagues are thus constantly having to fight in committees to promote quality. For example, our research assessment system is biased towards mediocrity: a publication in an international, ISI­listed journal gets 30 points, and one in an unlisted journal 20 points. Moves to make this fairer (e.g. a score based on journal impact factor) are staunchly resisted by those who have rarely, if ever, published in a journal that has an impact factor.

Too much teaching, not enough learning or training

Perhaps because universities have been primarily teaching institutions for so long, a typical student’s timetable is about twice as full as a comparable student’s in the UK. Any move to reduce teaching hours to a more sensible level raises fears of teaching posts being cut. We are still primarily paid to teach and not to do research: officially we’re supposed to be doing research one day per week! The heavy teaching load holds back our research efforts and also makes it difficult for those students who want to come into the lab to learn, because they can’t find the spare time. More subtly, there is heavy emphasis on memorizing at the expense of thinking and doing. Paradoxically, given the excessive teaching hours, little attention is paid to practical training. As an example, some of the students who came into the lab when I first arrived (students who had emerged from a Masters degree course in neurobiology) didn’t know how to do basic things like make up a solution of a given molarity, or had no idea of how to use a pH meter accurately. It is not always easy to remedy this when students begin to work in the lab, because the low importance given to practical training during their early education can give them the impression that important tasks, needing rigour and care, are trivial or menial.

The brain drain

I have not yet mentioned the problem that is perhaps most serious of all, the ‘brain drain’ of young and talented researchers towards Western countries. This topic is much discussed, not least in articles by talented Romanian researchers who have left the country! They tend to propose solutions at the level of national science policy, and discuss how to attract young Romanian scientists to return home – but always, it seems, how to attract other young Romanian scientists to return. The question that comes to my mind when I read one of these thoughtful articles is usually ‘so why don’t you come back home to work here?’ Sometimes, the dismal salaries are mentioned (we all, including myself, earn less than $200 per month). But I don’t think this is the main reason why good scientists leave the country and stay away. More important is the widespread perception that it is impossible to do good science in Romania.

We, and a few other active and talented research groups, have shown that this perception is wrong. I am fortunate to have a group who have all made the decision to stay here in Romania, and to make good science happen here. Over the last six years, we have shown that world-class science is possible in Romania. It’s not easy. In the West, good results can be produced in science with a moderate degree of commitment, but here an extraordinary level of dedication and hard work is needed. For those who have that commitment, and are absolutely determined to get something done, our experience shows that nothing is impossible.

References

Reid G & Flonta M.-L (2001). Cold current in thermoreceptive neurons. Nature 413, 480.

Reid G, Babes A & Pluteanu, F (2002). A cold- and menthol­activated current in rat dorsal root ganglion neurones: properties and role in cold transduction. J Physiol 545, 595-614.