Convergence as a premonition. Mikhail Valentinovich Kovalchuk Are there already such convergent specialists?

Pravdinform

In September, an interesting discussion of purely conspiracy issues took place in the Federation Council, which was made public only recently on February 08, 2016. The release of this kind of information into the public political field in the Federation Council is something amazing. This event will probably be followed by something even more amazing and large-scale. What?

Federation Council meeting room.
September 30, 2015. 10 hours.
Chairman of the Federation Council V.I. Matvienko presides

Transcript

Valentina Matvienko.... "Expert time".

Today, as part of this column, we invited the director of the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute" Mikhail Valentinovich Kovalchuk to speak.

Mikhail Valentinovich is a graduate of the Physics Faculty of Leningrad State University, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, professor, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, leading scientist in the field of X-ray physics, crystallography, nanodiagnostics, one of the ideologists and organizers of the development of nanotechnology in Russia. Mikhail Valentinovich teaches at a number of leading universities and institutes in our country, is the editor-in-chief of the journal “Crystallography” of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and is a long-time author and host of the popular science television program “Stories from the Future” with Mikhail Kovalchuk. Mikhail Valentinovich is a member of the Presidential Council of the Russian Federation for Science and Education, he was awarded the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, III and IV degrees, and is a laureate of awards from the Government of the Russian Federation in the field of science, technology and education. After the appointment of Mikhail Valentinovich as director of the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute", this very important, significant, well-known institution in our country received a completely new breath, new development. During the leadership of this institute, Mikhail Valentinovich managed to do a lot.

I want to thank you, dear Mikhail Valentinovich, for responding to our invitation, and I give you the floor. Please come to the podium.

The floor goes to Mikhail Valentinovich Kovalchuk. Please.

Director of the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute".

Good afternoon, dear colleagues!

Valentina Ivanovna, first of all, I want to thank you and my colleagues for the opportunity to speak in such an important, iconic and significant audience.

I thought for a long time about what to devote my report to, and decided to talk in a certain sense about the future. This thought of mine is supported by the speech of the President of our country at the United Nations the day before yesterday, where he explicitly spoke about certain nature-like technologies, so I want to devote the report to this. (Please, first slide.)

You know, we live in a situation where in recent years we have only heard about crises: the mortgage crisis, the economic crisis, the banking crisis. And few people think that in fact this is only the outer shell of what is happening somewhere in the depths. In fact, civilization is experiencing a deep, perhaps the most difficult crisis in the entire history of its existence. The point is due to the fact that we live in a high-tech world; our entire life and civilization are based on high technology. And the crisis of that civilizational base, that is, in fact, science, determines what we see and discuss. I'll try to explain this.

When I was a teenager (this was many years ago), I came across a book by a certain French writer Vercors, called “The Silence of the Sea.” Maybe you've seen a French film about it. The book is generally about love, but this novel was so interesting that I looked to see if this writer had anything else. This Vercors has a book called "Quota, or the Advocates of Abundance." This book, almost 60 years ago, said that after World War II, humanity launched a new economic system called “expanded reproduction”: consume, throw away, buy new. In fact, the machine for the destruction of natural resources was turned on. And if this machine serves only the countries of the “golden billion,” the world’s resources will last for an infinitely long period. (This was said 60 years ago.) And as soon as one country like India reaches a level of energy consumption equal to the level of energy consumption of the United States 60 years ago, the world will enter an economic, energy collapse.

This is what we see today, and we must clearly understand that this is precisely the problem. And in fact, if we live in the paradigm in which we find ourselves today, then after a certain period of time civilization should, having retained, I don’t know, the wheel, fire, cattle breeding, return to primitive existence.

I will explain this in more detail. Look, the global challenges of the 21st century. Today, what is called sustainable development is associated with virtually sufficient and practically unlimited consumption of energy and resources. The global involvement in technological development of more and more countries and regions in the global world leads to increasingly intensive consumption, and in fact to the destruction of natural resources. Before our eyes, the “golden billion” was supplemented by China and India; half the world’s population switched from bicycles to cars. In fact, a resource collapse has occurred. The question is whether it will happen tomorrow or with some, so to speak, temporary shift - this is the second question. But the struggle for dwindling resources has become the dominant feature of world politics. You and I see this very well.

I would like to emphasize two very important things.

First. Leadership today is ensured by technological superiority; in fact, military colonization has been replaced by technological enslavement. And, what is extremely important, developed countries fall under this colonization in the first place.

What is the cause of this crisis, why did this happen? Look, our nature has existed for billions of years in an absolutely harmonious, self-consistent form: the sun is shining, its energy is converted through photosynthesis into chemical energy, and the entire system - bio-, geo - has been living harmoniously for billions of years, absolutely self-sufficient, without resource deficit. You and I have built the technosphere, which is the basis of our civilization over the last 150–200 years. And what happened? There is one figure: the total amount of oxygen that was consumed by the entire civilization until our time is 200 billion tons. We have destroyed the same amount of oxygen in 50 years.

The question is this. Imagine, before we invented the steam engine, we were, our technological life, civilization was part of the general technosphere, muscular power plus the power of wind and water. We did not upset the balance of nature. Then we came up with the steam engine, then electricity and built a technosphere that is completely antagonistic to nature. This means that, in fact, the cause of the crisis is the contradiction, antagonism between nature and the man-made technosphere. And this has actually happened over the last decade. This is the cause of the crisis.

Therefore, now I can tell you: humanity is in a very difficult situation, facing a choice. In fact, we are faced with a problem about what will happen to humanity next, and it is very deep. Therefore, choosing priorities today for civilization as a whole and for each specific sovereign country is the most important matter. All priorities can be roughly divided into two parts. There are tactical priorities that allow us to live today. If we do not produce medicine or food or modernize the army, we will lose everything today and will not be able to survive. But if we don't think about strategic challenges, then tomorrow we will disappear. I will explain this with a very simple example.

We recently celebrated the 70th anniversary of our Great Victory in World War II. Imagine, the Soviet Union was the winner on May 9, 1945. We had the most powerful, most technologically equipped, most combat-ready army in the world, we were the rulers of the world. But in August of the same year, after the explosion of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, if we had not been involved in the atomic project, our victory would have been devalued, we would have simply disappeared as a state. Therefore, while solving the problems of creating weapons and winning the war, our state made profound decisions to implement a strategic priority in the most difficult conditions of war, which today has given us the opportunity to survive as a sovereign state. And you and I must understand that it is only thanks to this that today we live in a sovereign state, thanks to the fact that atomic weapons, submarines and missiles - the means of their delivery - were created. (Please look at this picture, the atomic project.) Moreover, what was important - in the most difficult conditions of the war, no one discussed anything. Atomic weapons were created. Nobody talked about innovation, about economic benefits. Atomic weapons and bombs were made in order to survive. But when you respond to a strategically important challenge, you blow up civilization for many decades, changing its appearance and face and creating a fundamentally new technological structure.

Look, nuclear energy first emerged from this bomb. In 1954, Kurchatov turned the bomb and created the world's first nuclear power plant (this is the date of birth of nuclear energy in the world), the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant. Then the logic of the development of nuclear energy led us to thermonuclear fusion. And today the whole world, having accumulated 10 billion in the south of France, is implementing our idea, which was first implemented in 1954 at the Kurchatov Institute, a tokamak is being created. Even the word is Russian. This is a future source of energy based on thermonuclear fusion, not fission, as is the case today.

This bomb was then turned into a nuclear power device, and in 1958 our first submarine was created, and a year later - the world's first nuclear icebreaker. And today we are unrivaled at high latitudes on the shelf, in the Arctic. At the same time, factories that build nuclear submarines have no alternative to creating platforms for oil and gas production on the shelf. And the first such platform, Prirazlomnaya, was created.

And now I want to draw your attention... I’m not even talking about space, that further movement into space is connected with nuclear energy to a significant extent. I will draw your attention to a simple thing. Look, we all use computers. And no one thought that, in general, computers and computational mathematics arose only because it was necessary to calculate the thermophysical characteristics of neutron reactors and the trajectory of going into space. Therefore, computational mathematics and computers arose. And today's supercomputers, which form the basis of our developments, arose in response to the ban on nuclear weapons testing. We came to an agreement with the Americans. We stopped doing it in Semipalatinsk, they stopped doing it in Nevada. But this test moved to a supercomputer, which was created only because of this.

I, finishing this story, want to tell you that if you solve a strategic problem, it explodes civilization, it turned the Soviet Union into a superpower and today has preserved our sovereignty, but at the same time it gave birth to a new high-tech economy. Today, for example, we are practically the only country that has a complete atomic cycle. One country is us. And we have actually created dozens of industries... If you evaluate these markets, they are the dominant, high-tech markets in the world, and we play key roles in them.

Therefore, the choice of strategic priority is a key issue for the development prospects of any state, especially one like ours.

And today we are faced with this crisis. There are two ways out of it. The first way out is to move as is, through a series of bloody wars for redistribution and access to resources, which is already underway. We will actually come to a primitive state. Or the second option is to create a fundamentally new technological base of nature-like technologies, that is, to actually include technologies in the chain of closed resource circulation, self-sufficient, that exists in nature.

Show me the next slide.

Look at this picture. In fact (I have already said this), the Sun is a thermonuclear source. Its energy in a minimal part (tenths, hundredths of a percent) is processed through photosynthesis into other types of energy, and then all this ensures the life of the entire complex, the Earth.

I want to draw your attention: the highest achievement, natural, is our human brain. At the same time, our brain consumes an average of 10 watts, during peak minutes – 30 watts. It's like a light bulb in the toilet of a communal apartment. And the supercomputers that we, for example, make and use... today at the Kurchatov Institute one of the most powerful supercomputers consumes tens of megawatts. But just last year the power of all the computers in the world equaled the power of one person’s brain. This is direct proof of the incorrectness of our technological movements.

I want to say that it is very easy for me to speak today, because the President of our country, speaking... Here is the quote. When he had already finished discussing the current political situation (Syria, Ukraine), he returned to emissions and said that we need to look at the problem more broadly: set quotas for harmful emissions, use other tactical measures.

“We may, for some time, relieve the severity of the problem, but, of course, we will not fundamentally solve it. And we need qualitatively different approaches. We should be talking about the introduction of fundamentally new nature-like technologies that do not cause damage to the environment, but exist with it in complete harmony and will allow us to restore the balance between the biosphere and the technosphere, which has been disturbed by man. This is truly a challenge on a planetary scale.” End of quote.

Please, next slide.

Now I want to say that this very succinct quote from the President’s speech at the United Nations has a very deep, long-developing basis for the development of science itself. Look, if we look at the natural course of development of science, what happened: a shift in emphasis to the “living”. If a certain number of years ago 90 percent of publications were devoted to semiconductors, then today almost the lion's share of scientific publications is devoted to the science of “living” - bioorganics. This is the first one. That is, a transfer of interest to the “living”, to biology.

Second. Connections have appeared in science. They appeared a long time ago, and now there are a huge number of them - biophysics, geophysics, biochemistry, even neuroeconomics and neurophysiology. What does this mean? The scientific community was pregnant with this interdisciplinarity. She lacked these narrow disciplines, and she began to create such transitions, interfaces, connecting sciences. And, what is also very important, the emergence of interdisciplinary research in technology. Here's a look at how technology works today. Very simple. You take, a simple example, a log, cut off the branches. You have a log, you can build a frame. We processed further - timber, even further - lining, and so on. Next, what do we do with the metal? We mine ore, smelt the ingot, put it on the machine, cut off the excess, and make the part. Up to 90 percent of material resources and energy goes towards creating waste and polluting the environment. This is how technology works today.

And new additive technologies have already appeared, they are widely known, I think you have heard about it, when you now create parts naturally, by actually growing them. You can grow, you can do biological things first. For example, dentures are made, bone replacement. You grow parts of the human body. This starts from 3D printing, and, in essence, this is additive technology. And today you can create parts for any purpose using this additive method, not by cutting off the excess, but by building it up. And these are nature-like technologies.

Hence the conclusion. Today, we have no other way out of the strategic goal, which is nature-likeness - a transition to a strategic priority. The new strategic priority of scientific and technological development is the integration, fusion of sciences and technological development of the results of interdisciplinary research. And the basis for this is the rapid development of fundamentally new interdisciplinary convergent fundamental research and interdisciplinary education.

But I would like to devote the remaining time to telling a story or talking about threats. You see, we live in a complex, rapidly changing world. And what to do is completely obvious, understandable, and we are ready for this, I will say more about this later. But we need to pay attention to the threats and global challenges that nature-like technologies conceal.

Look: on the one hand, we are moving to the technological reproduction of living nature. And this is clear. This will enable us to create technologies that will be part of the natural cycle without disturbing it. And in this sense, we will restore, as the President said, the natural metabolism in nature. But the possibility of targeted intervention in human life, even in the process of evolution, arises.

These threats associated with intervention can be clearly divided into two blocks. The first is biogenetic based on nanobiotechnology. That is, you can create artificial living systems with specified properties, including those that do not exist in nature.

I'll give you a simple example. Here we are creating, for example, an artificial cell. This artificial cell, on the one hand, is medically important. She can be a diagnostician, she can be a targeted drug deliverer. But, on the other hand, it can also be harmful, right? And then, in fact, one cell, which has a genetic code and develops itself, is a weapon of mass destruction. At the same time, thanks to the achievements of modern genetics, you can create this cell, ethnogenetically oriented to a specific ethnic group. This can be safe for one ethnic group and harmful and fatal for another. This is the first obvious type of danger when a fundamentally new weapon of mass destruction appears.

And the second thing. We are developing cognitive research, this is research into the study of the brain and consciousness. This means that the opportunity actually opens up to influence the psychophysiological sphere of a person, and it is very easy and simple. I can talk about this at length and in detail, but I will tell you only one thing. In fact, on the one hand, this is very important for medicine, for everything else, because you can make bioprostheses, you can create an eye control system for paralyzed people, and so on. But, on the other hand, there is feedback from brain-machine interfaces or brain interfaces, when you can create a false picture of reality inside a person, like a soldier, an operator, and so on. That is, this is a very subtle and complex thing - managing individual and mass consciousness. And you and I see what is happening at the level of mass consciousness, say, with the help of the Internet.

Now I would like to summarize what I have said and emphasize the following. When I talked about nuclear energy, there is a dual nature of technology: there is a military application, there is a civilian one. And you know for sure: this nuclear power plant produces heat and electricity, but weapons-grade plutonium is produced here. Moreover, from a distance, by measuring the neutrino flux, I can monitor the state of the reactor and accurately say whether weapons-grade plutonium is being produced or not.

Further. What do you have from a nuclear explosion? Temperature, shock wave, plus radiation. We control all this today. Therefore, there is complete control over the non-proliferation of technologies of mass destruction. And here, in nature-likeness, the dual nature of technology is inherent. The boundaries between civilian and military use are blurred, and as a result, existing control methods are completely ineffective. I'm telling you: every development is of a medical nature. Why is there a surge in medicine today? Because medicine today is the correct civilian application, but automatically there is a second one, and they are almost indistinguishable.

The second danger is accessibility and relative cheapness compared to nuclear technologies, the possibility of creating weapons of destruction even in makeshift conditions and the absence of the need for delivery vehicles. Just imagine, the atomic bomb was created 60–70 years ago. Since then (although everything is written in the textbook) no one has made atomic weapons. Everyone who has it was given it either by the Americans or the Soviet Union. Nobody did. Why? Ask yourself a question. But because for this you need to have colossal science, deep traditions, colossal industry, and economic power. No state can do this. And therefore (although everything is written in the textbook) they took two pieces of uranium-235, created a critical mass - here you have a bomb. And everything is known. But no one did. But with these technologies, this can be done in the kitchen: you need to get a cell and control it, that is, it is very simple. And from here you have two things: you must think about a fundamentally new system of international security, because there is another important thing - you cannot predict the consequences of the release of artificially created living systems into the environment, how they will disrupt the evolutionary process.

Further. I won't go into details. Here are examples of the work the American agency DARPA is doing, for example, in this area - on consciousness control, on the creation of ethnogenetic systems. If you read only the names, it is enough to understand the scale of this activity.

And I want to very briefly, without going into details, remind you that we began to prepare responses to these challenges in accordance with the presidential initiative on the nanoindustry development strategy back in 2007. I leave aside the stages, so to speak, the innovation part. Regarding the commercial development of nanotechnologies, I would like to say that over the years a fundamentally new research base has been created, a network structure across the country, and we have approached the implementation of the task of the third stage, announced in 2007, which should lead to the creation in the Russian Federation of a fundamentally new technological basis for the economy based on base of nanobiotechnology and nature-like products.

Next slide.

I just want to show you... I invite you all, Valentina Ivanovna, perhaps to hold some meeting at the Kurchatov Institute to see what, in accordance with the instructions of the President, has been created at the Kurchatov Institute over the past five to seven years. We have created a Center for Convergent Sciences and Technologies, which has no analogues in the world, based on mega-installations, the only source of synchrotron radiation in the post-Soviet space, a neutron research reactor and a powerful complex, a supercomputer, biogenetic technologies, neurocognitive research, and so on. This is all there, it works. The average age of the hundreds of people working there is 35 years. A personnel training system has been created. The world's first faculty of NBIC technologies was created at the Physics and Technology Institute on the basis of the Kurchatov Institute. That is, the personnel “pump” is turned on. And it all works.

Further. I would now like to use the remaining time to talk about what is happening in the world with science and technology. Here is science and technology in the system of factors for the development of civilization. Look what is happening today, even if you look at it from a layman’s perspective.

First. We hear cries all the time, and this is happening, about the creation of an absolutely transparent scientific and educational sphere, this is the first thing, and unlimited mobility of human resources.

Now what does this mean? Here you have foundations (our foundations, for example) that give money for scientific research, but after that everything is in the public domain. This means that all information about the results, performers, personnel reserve, created and prepared at the expense of the national budgets of various states, is in the public domain and can be easily monitored, and therefore, so to speak, managed. This makes it possible, first of all, and only today, for the United States, at the expense of resources from the outside world, to use the results of R&D or R&D, attract performers and recruit the most capable young personnel. In fact, today Americans are creating a global distributed scientific and educational environment, which is financed by national budgets and serves the interests of the United States. This is the real thing.

Next, the next step. Now, if you look at us, what is happening to us in the light of what I just said, the following is happening: the country is purposefully deprived of strategic goals and concentrated on tactical tasks. Until today... we have no strategic national interest in scientific and technological development. We solve tactical problems, like during a war: we can make tanks, guns, win the war, but lose the future. Today we are concentrated - until recently, the latest decisions of the President - on solving tactical problems.

The second is the clustering of the scientific sphere. It happened at a time of survival, when everything was bad for us, there was no money. The great sphere, the great scientific sphere of the Soviet Union has broken up into clusters, because you cannot get out of the encirclement either as a division, or as a battalion, or even as a platoon - one by one. That's why it clustered. And today this clustering with the help of the grant system is fixed and frozen in order to... in this case it is easily managed.

I'll give you an example. For 15 years I was the director of one of the largest academic institutes - our Institute of Crystallography on Leninsky Prospekt. 250 scientific workers and 50 grants, very small, from the scientific fund - 500 thousand rubles each. The entire potential of the institute is divided into 50 groups. 50 groups of five people live perfectly well on these 500 thousand, having no responsibility, nothing else, work, travel abroad, have graduate students, apply for the next grant and live luxuriously. And the results of this activity, which are obtained with our money, are very easy to take advantage of only through monitoring, even electronic monitoring, of reports on these works. All. And this actually creates a system that is completely controlled, and you serve for your budget, for example, in Germany... I can explain to you in detail. American Colony. They have no strategic goals, but they serve America's global interests for their budget.

I want to tell you another very important thing. An assessment system, for example, scientometric, of scientific activity in the country also actually leads, for example, to the destruction of national scientific periodicals and so on. These are very subtle things. In fact, we are witnessing an attempt to form a system in which scientific and technical global goals are understandable only to the United States and are formulated by them, and Russia should become a supplier of intellectual resources, a performer of tactical tasks necessary for the United States to achieve a strategic result.

This, fortunately, did not happen, but nevertheless we are still in the zone of this danger. This all happens at the expense of the budget of the Russian Federation.

I’ll explain to you, I’ll give a very important example of how Americans participate in international projects. Look: there are a huge number of international projects in Europe. The Americans are not involved in any project financially or organizationally - neither in CERN, nor in the X-ray laser, anywhere, but their representatives sit on all the management committees, and not only them, but also Poles and Slovaks with American passports. They, firstly, carry out full monitoring, secondly, they try to push through those decisions that are important to them, and so on. I can give you specific examples. This means that they actually influence decision-making informally and then take full advantage of these results. I'll give you an example. A European neutron source was created. We decided to do it many years ago, 10 years. They created teams of people. They created a road map of what will be done. They look further. The Americans say: “Good material, but it still needs to be improved.” A new group, lists of people, addresses, appearances, a new, second book, a “White Book” are created. They look and say: “It’s already decent, but we still need to improve it a little, bring more people from here and there.” And after that, the Americans don’t ask anyone, allocate $1.5 billion from the budget to their national laboratory, take all this material and these people from Europe and build this accelerator. In Europe, this work has not yet begun (10 years have passed), but in America it has been working for four years. That's the whole answer. In fact, everything is used for preparatory work for the money of European countries, but it is used in this way.

We, Russia, today participate in key roles, financially and intellectually, in major projects. We contribute more than 2 billion dollars to European projects - ITER, CERN, which is on everyone’s lips, the free electron laser and the heavy ion accelerator. Germany alone has a billion dollars. And I must say that today we have returned to the creation of megaprojects on the territory of the Russian Federation, we have the PIK reactor. Sergei Evgenievich Naryshkin visited our site in Gatchina, saw this reactor, we were there the day before yesterday, on Monday. This is one of the most powerful, the most powerful reactor in the world, which, having passed the energy path, will go into operation and will be the largest installation in the world. Then we are creating the Russian-Italian project “Ignitor”, a new tokamak, the third is an accelerator in Dubna, and the fourth is a synchrotron. This means that we have projects on our territory. But we must be very careful, understand that international cooperation, say, by the same Americans, is also used to actually weaken Europe in the first place, and they are trying to drag us into this story to strengthen their own positions.

I'll skip the conclusions, they're not important I think here. You know, the conclusions are clear. I wanted to draw you some futuristic pictures. I thought for a long time whether to say this or not. I think this is advisable. Just imagine, this may seem like such an ominous, strange future, but you must understand that, unfortunately, this is reality. Let's take a rough look at the world, how the world works. The structure of the world was very simple: a certain elite always tried to put the rest of the world at its service. First there was a slave system, then there was a feudal system, then there was capitalism in one form or another in fact. But each time it ended in a change of formation. Why? Because the people whom the elite tried to turn into servants did not want this for two reasons. They, firstly, were biologically the same people as those who wanted to turn them into servants, and secondly, their self-awareness grew as they developed, and they themselves wanted to become an elite. And this whole cycle happened.

And now the following happens. Today, a real technological opportunity has arisen in the process of human evolution and the goal is to create a fundamentally new subspecies of homo sapiens “service” man. If you watched the movie "Dead Season", you remember well, but then there were some kind of reasoning, but today it is becoming biologically possible to do this. The property of the population of “service” people is very simple - limited self-awareness, and this is cognitively regulated in an elementary way, we see that this is already happening. The second thing is breeding management. And the third thing is cheap food, these are genetically modified products. This is also all ready.

This means that, in fact, today a real technological possibility has arisen to breed a “service” subspecies of people, and no one can stop this, this is the development of science, but this is actually happening. And you and I must understand what place we can take in this civilization.

I’ll read it to you, just read it, it’s not just like that. Can I come over?

Valentina Matvienko. Yes, sure.

Mikhail Kovalchuk.(Speaks not into the microphone.) In 1948, the President of the World Health Organization... Can you hear that? No?

Valentina Matvienko. And we have it on the screens of all the senators.

Mikhail Kovalchuk.(Speaks not into the microphone.) Skim your eyes, it says everything exactly there. Back in 1948...

Valentina Matvienko. Show this slide again.

And you have…

Mikhail Kovalchuk....announced what must be done.

Valentina Matvienko. Mikhail Valentinovich, there is also a slide opposite you.

Mikhail Kovalchuk. Unfortunately, it's blurry and I can't see it.

Valentina Matvienko. It's clear. We can see it very clearly.

Mikhail Kovalchuk. I want to say, it definitely says that step by step, firstly, we need to change our self-awareness, as if to teach people that there is no need to reproduce and continue the race, and so on, to remove national characteristics. This is what was said first by the President of the World Health Organization, Rockefeller’s right-hand man, and then in the US National Security Memorandum No. 200 of 1974, which says that this must be done in such a way that countries do not understand that this has begun to happen.

Then a very important circumstance (the President spoke about this in his speech) – the absolutization of individual freedom. Pay attention, today they tell you from all sides (and some of our radio stations) that the child is more important than the parents. This happens at all levels - from family to state. Absolutization of personal freedom: the individual is above the sovereign state, children are above parents, and so on. What does this lead to? This is actually a slogan for the destruction of the sovereign state, the sovereignty of the state, which is the only instrument for protecting society and values ​​and maintaining a balance between human rights and freedoms. And we are seeing this today. The absolutization of the slogan of individual freedom leads to the destruction of sovereign states.
And then - you have no protection, you have crowds of people who fight each other and are easily controlled from the outside. And this is a most powerful tool.

And another very important thing is actually the replacement of this organized community of people interacting and protected by the state with a totality, simply a population of controlled individuals. That's what we're talking about.

And the next thing is the actual reduction of the birth rate through the introduction into the mass consciousness of ideas that contradict natural ones. We are talking about LGBT people, families without children and everything else.

In fact, today we have this in the humanitarian sphere, but it is based on the technological basis of creating a “service” person.

That, in fact, is probably all I wanted to tell you. (Applause.)

Valentina Matvienko. Mikhail Valentinovich, I sincerely thank you for such a meaningful and interesting report. And the applause of my colleagues confirms that they listened to him with great interest. I think you have given us serious food for thought, including in our future legislation.

By the decision of the Federation Council you were awarded our commemorative medal “Federation Council. 20 years”. Let me, on behalf of my colleagues, present you with this medal. (The presiding officer presents the award. Applause.)

Mikhail Kovalchuk. Unexpected and pleasant. Thank you.

Speaker information

Mikhail Valentinovich Kovalchuk was born on September 21, 1946 in Leningrad.
Graduate of the Faculty of Physics of Leningrad State University (1970), Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (1988), Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2000), professor.
Since 1998 - Director of the Institute of Crystallography named after A. V. Shubnikov RAS.
Since 2005 - director of the Kurchatov Institute.
M. V. Kovalchuk is a leading scientist in the field of X-ray physics, crystallography and nanodiagnostics, one of the ideologists and organizers of the development of nanotechnology in Russia. He made a significant contribution to the development of government programs that determine the development of the nanoindustry in the Russian Federation.
Since 2010 - member of the Skolkovo Foundation Board.

Other positions
M. V. Kovalchuk - Scientific Secretary of the Council under the President of the Russian Federation for Science, Technology and Education; member of the Commission under the President of the Russian Federation for modernization and technological development of the Russian economy; member of the government commission on high technologies and innovations; member of the council of general and chief designers, leading scientists and specialists in the field of high-tech sectors of the economy; Member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation.
Mikhail Valentinovich is also the dean of the faculty of nano-, bio-, information and cognitive technologies at MIPT; Head of the Department of Physics of Nanosystems, Faculty of Physics, Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov; editor-in-chief of the journal “Crystallography” of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Chairman of the National Committee of Crystallographers of Russia.
M. V. Kovalchuk - Chairman of the National Conference on the Application of X-rays, Synchrotron Radiation, Neutrons and Electrons for Materials Research (RSNE); Chairman of the National Crystal Growth Conference (NCGG). He is the author and host of the popular science television program “Stories from the Future with Mikhail Kovalchuk.”
M. V. Kovalchuk is a full member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in the “Physics” section.

Family
Father - historian, specialist in the siege of Leningrad, Valentin Mikhailovich Kovalchuk.
Brother - Kovalchuk, Yuri Valentinovich, a major businessman, chairman of the board of directors of Rossiya Bank. Known as a person close to Vladimir Putin.

Awards
Order of Merit for the Fatherland, III degree (2011) - for great contribution to the development of science and many years of fruitful activity
Prize named after E. S. Fedorov of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences for 2009.
Certificate of Honor from the Government of the Russian Federation (2006) - for many years of fruitful scientific and social activity
Order of Merit for the Fatherland, IV degree (2006) - for great contribution to the development of domestic science and many years of scientific activity
Prize of the Government of the Russian Federation in the field of science and technology (2006) - for the creation of a scientific and technical complex based on specialized synchrotron radiation sources "Siberia" at the Russian Scientific Center "Kurchatov Institute"

Books
M.V.Kovalchuk. Science and life: My convergence: Vol. 1: Autobiographical sketches: Popular science and conceptual articles. - M.: Akademkniga, 2011. - 304 pp., ill., 1,000 copies, ISBN 978-5-94628-356-4

Summary of the report by M.V. Kovalchuk

– The crisis of technogenic civilization (Vercors, Coronel: “Quota, or “Supporters of Abundance”) - the launch of a machine of expanded reproduction and consumption. Energy collapse. Destruction of natural resources. The struggle for dwindling resources is a dominant feature of world politics. Leadership today is ensured by technological superiority in exchange for military enslavement. Developed countries fall under this colonization in the first place (lack of strategic planning at the state level, fragmentation of scientific activity, external management with the help of grants, analysis and appropriation of the results and scientific personnel). The cause of the crisis is the antagonism between the technosphere and nature.

– Tactical and strategic tasks. Solving tactical problems meets today's needs (the production of tanks and aircraft during the Second World War ensured victory in the war, but Hiroshima devalued the achieved superiority). Solving strategic problems ensures the sovereignty and development of the state and society in the long term (the nuclear project ensured today's sovereignty of Russia). The choice of strategic priority is key for the state.

– The way out of the crisis is the creation of a fundamentally new technological base of nature-like technologies (inclusion of technologies in the chain of closed, self-sufficient resource circulation existing in nature). Through interdisciplinarity to nature-likeness. Nature-like technologies – shifting the focus of research to living things (biotechnologies). Connecting sciences and the emergence of interdisciplinary sciences in technology. Modern technologies - up to 90% of resources and energy go to waste and pollute the environment. Additive technologies are the creation of a product naturally, by “growing” it.

– The strategic goal is similarity to nature. The strategic priority of scientific and technological development is the integration of sciences and technological development of the results of interdisciplinary research. The basis for this is the rapid development of fundamentally new interdisciplinary convergent fundamental research and interdisciplinary education.

– Nature-like technologies – threats and challenges. The transition to technological reproduction of living nature carries the threat of targeted interference in human life, even in the process of evolution. Two blocks of threats. The first is biogenetic. Creation of artificial living systems with specified properties (for example, the creation of a living cell for diagnosis or drug delivery, or a weapon of destruction of a certain species, race, or ethnic group). The second is cognitive research (the study of the brain and consciousness). An opportunity opens up to influence the psychophysiological sphere of a person. Management of individual and mass consciousness.

The danger of dual use and the inability to control malicious use.

Availability and relative cheapness of creating weapons of destruction based on these technologies and the absence of the need for special means of delivery to the enemy.

It is impossible to predict the consequences of the release of artificially created biological objects into the environment.

The danger of unilateral ownership of these technologies.

– Science and technology in the system of factors for the development of civilization.

Creation of an absolutely transparent scientific and educational sphere. Unlimited mobility of human resources. All information about the results, performers and personnel reserve created and prepared at the expense of the national budgets of various states is in the public domain and can be easily monitored, and therefore managed. This allows today, first and foremost, and only the United States, at the expense of the resources of the outside world, to use the results of research and development, attract performers and recruit the most capable young personnel. In fact, Americans today are creating a global distributed scientific and educational environment, which is financed by national budgets and serves the interests of the United States. Global goals are understandable only to them, and are formulated by them. The rest of the countries are suppliers of intellectual resources, performers of tactical tasks necessary for the United States to achieve a strategic result.

What's happening to us? 1. deliberately depriving the country of strategic goals and concentrating on tactical tasks. We lack a strategic national interest in scientific and technological development. 2. Clustering of the scientific sphere. Today it is fixed and frozen using the grant system. In this case, it is easily manageable. 3. The scientometric assessment system in the country leads, among other things, to the destruction of national scientific periodicals.

Exactly three years ago, at the beginning of February 2013, I stood at the entrance to the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, ITEP, on Bolshaya Cheremushinskaya Street. The guard carefully examined my passport and checked the data with the ordered pass - on the other side of the metal “turntable” there is a nuclear facility.

However, in 2012, ITEP became a little less nuclear - the main experimental facility at the institute, the ITEP-TVN accelerator, built back in the 1950s, burned down. During the year between the fire and my visit to ITEP, repairs had not even begun, but this was far from the biggest trouble that ITEP employees wrote about on the Save ITEP website - “Save ITEP”. I discovered this site, was horrified and went to Bolshaya Cheryomushkinskaya to find out what was happening with the institute.

Almost simultaneously with the fire at the accelerator, ITEP formally completed the transition from the jurisdiction of Rosatom to the structure of the Kurchatov Institute Research Center. “We had a hard time at Rosatom,” one of the interlocutors tells me, “we were in an incomprehensible situation there. They became a commercial organization that simply could not finance basic science - they simply did not have the legal forms for this.” The research carried out at ITEP was not particularly interesting to the state corporation, while at the same time the Rosatom management had views of the institute’s territory, the former Cheryomushki-Znamenskoye estate with a vast park and pond, which once belonged to the Menshikovs, Golitsyns and Yakunchikovs. In 2007, Rosatom spokesman Denis Kozyrev announced that the corporation's headquarters would be built here, a 150-meter skyscraper with extensive underground parking, steeper than Gazprom's and much closer to the center of Moscow.

At that time, the transition from Rosatom to the National Research Center created on the basis of the Kurchatov Institute seemed like a salvation to many. “The motivation was certainly justified,” one of the ITEP employees explained to me, “Kovalchuk, director of the Kurchatov Institute, wrote completely reasonable letters to President Medvedev about how science should be supported as a science, and not as an appendage of industry.” But something went wrong. In 2010, ITEP received a new director, Yuri Kozlov. A graduate of the Faculty of Physics and Chemistry of the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology, Doctor of Technical Sciences (that is, not even a physicist!), Kozlov held various administrative positions almost all his life - first at the Research Institute of Materials Science, then in one of the departments of the Federal Agency for Science and Innovation, then at the Kurchatov Institute, where Kozlov came as deputy director of Mikhail Kovalchuk. From there, a person unknown to anyone in the scientific community was sent to head one of the strongest fundamental physics institutes in the country, ITEP.

My interlocutors speak about Kozlov almost with contempt. “The new director spent the first year without leaving his office,” recalls one of them. “Our theorists even joked that he didn’t go to the toilet, because if he did, he would at least have thought to fix it.” Now he has finally begun to enter the territory. I was horrified: “How don’t you respect yourself, you have such territory!” After this, several asphalt paths were laid. But in general, it’s clear that he’s not very interested in all this, he doesn’t like it with us, he suffers with us.” Having no ambitions to build a skyscraper, Kozlov turned the institute into a quiet bureaucratic fairy tale. He inflated the administrative staff, and instead of purchasing new equipment, he returned the 120 million rubles allocated for this to the budget (sic!). He strengthened the access regime so much that it became almost impossible for foreign scientists, even from the CIS countries, to get into ITEP. Kozlov was not happy with young researchers and did not give them wages, and at the same time adopted a new salary schedule, which hit the pockets of researchers. This did not happen even in Rosatom - for the first time in the entire history of the institute, scientists found themselves on the sidelines. Now physicists no longer liked ITEP, they suffered and began to slowly leave - some abroad, some to other Moscow institutes.

It is noteworthy that when I asked about the role of Mikhail Kovalchuk in what was happening, my interlocutors, who were ready to openly mock Kozlov, expressed themselves cautiously and even with some hope. “Kovalchuk knows about this situation and, I think, will look for a solution,” said one. “Kovalchuk made a big personnel mistake and should find Kozlov another job that is more befitting of his talents,” another noted. “Kovalchuk, in any case, is really interested in science,” said a third.

When, a few days later, my report from ITEP was ready for publication, one of its heroes, the most authoritative and respected, called me.

Sergey,” he said, “forgive me, but we decided to ask you not to publish anything.

But why? - I was surprised.

We hope that we can convey our vision of the situation to senior management and sort everything out on our own.

Today, three years later, none of the four heroes of my report are no longer full-time employees of the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics. Formally, some of them left of their own free will, but in fact all of them were fired - both for the Save ITEP website and for freethinking in general. It would be naive to assume that if they had not refused to go out with their story in the media, everything could have turned out differently. But it is significant that then, at the beginning of 2013, scientists were still ready to see in Kovalchuk a possible savior, a good king with bad boyars. A few months later, there are few people left in Russian science who harbor such illusions.

Wrong Academy

Mikhail Kovalchuk is the older brother of Yuri Kovalchuk, a member of the Ozero cooperative, chairman of the board of Rossiya Bank and, as they say, one of Vladimir Putin’s closest friends. Both brothers graduated from the physics department of Leningrad University (the eldest in 1970, the younger in 1974), but if Yuri left the academic path in 1991 and went into commerce, Mikhail devoted his life to science, or more precisely, to a scientific career administrator.

In 1988, Kovalchuk Sr. defended his doctoral dissertation (a review of it by Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Alexander Afanasyev was recently discovered, claiming that its results “are either erroneous or largely repeat the results of other authors without appropriate reference to these works”), and ten years later, in 1998, he headed the Institute of Crystallography of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2005, Mikhail Kovalchuk added another institute to the collection - he was also appointed general director of the Kurchatov Institute Research Center, an organization that is not part of the structure of the academy and since 2009 reports directly to the government of the Russian Federation. It was as the head of Kurchatnik, as the Kurchatov Institute is often called, that Kovalchuk became one of the most prominent figures in the Russian scientific bureaucracy and soon entered into a long-term undeclared war of officials against the Academy of Sciences - of course, on the side of the former.

Kovalchuk was elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Department of General Physics and Astronomy back in 2000, and then it seemed that this was only the beginning of his victorious march through the academy. In 2007, RAS President Yuri Osipov appointed Mikhail Kovalchuk as acting vice-president of the Academy. According to the charter, the position of vice president can only be held by a full member, so the appointment with the crafty prefix “acting.” was a kind of advance, and many were sure that Osipov saw Kovalchuk not only as an academician, but also as his successor as president. However, on May 28, 2008, the General Meeting of the Academy of Sciences gave Kovalchuk a ride: 204 members of the general meeting voted for his election as valid, with a passing minimum of 248 votes. Osipov was surprised and called the academicians’ decision a mistake, and called his protégé “not only an outstanding organizer of science, but also a scientist worthy of being elected a full member of the RAS.” But what happened even more upset Mikhail Kovalchuk himself.

Over the next five years, Kovalchuk concentrated on Kurchatnik: the Research Center took over three scientific institutes - ITEP, the Institute of High Energy Physics from Protvino near Moscow and the St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. If the first two went to Kovalchuk from Rosatom, then the last one, PNPI, was specially removed from the RAS structure for this purpose. Mikhail Kovalchuk himself collected not only controlled institutions, but also magnificent positions: today he is a member of the presidium of the Council under the President of the Russian Federation for Science and Education; member of the Commission under the President of the Russian Federation for modernization and technological development of the Russian economy; member of the government commission on high technologies and innovations; member of the board of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation and this is not a complete list. However, all these trinkets only emphasized that the universally honored Kovalchuk is still not even an academician!

Building of the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute"Photo: Grigory Sysoev/TASS

In May 2013, big elections were held at the Academy of Sciences; the general meeting was supposed to elect a new president. At the same time, members of the Division of Physical Sciences elected the director of the Institute of Crystallography, a position Mikhail Kovalchuk held for 15 years. On May 27, 57 people voted in favor of leaving Kovalchuk in this post for another term, out of the required 67. The Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, then still headed by Osipov, recommended that the department reconsider its decision, but three days later, at a repeat vote, Kovalchuk was given a ride again, - he received 66 votes with the required 73. The director of the Kurchatov Institute lost his last prominent position in the structure of the Russian Academy of Sciences. One of the founders of the Dissernet community, physicist Andrei Zayakin, recalls

“If the Academy doesn’t need me, then we don’t need this Academy.”

that his teacher, academician Dmitry Shirkov, told him the words Kovalchuk said on the sidelines of this meeting: “If the Academy doesn’t need me, then we don’t need this Academy.”

Two days later, on June 1, 2013, Mikhail Kovalchuk gave a vivid (both in meaning and as an example of speech style) interview with Ekho Moskvy about the academy and academicians: “It’s difficult. I want to say that, you know, there is a meeting of great, at least in the past, people, a large number, you know, who have grown old. They are worthy people. It’s hard for me to imagine what’s in their heads. […] The fact is that, you see, they got used to a certain life, got used to living, and then they somehow fell through. And Soviet greatness disappeared. And in order to clean the tarnished tablets, you have to bend down. And on the one hand, some of them are old, and on the other hand, some of them are already completely lazy and incapacitated. They can't do that." If the tablets at the Academy have become tarnished, then at the Institute of Crystallography, as Kovalchuk told the correspondent, there are marble steps, flowers on the lawn, and even, yes, a painted fence. The Institute of Crystallography, unlike other institutes of the Academy, does not rent out its premises to commercial companies. Was it not this adherence to principles, Kovalchuk hinted, that prevented him from being re-elected?

President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vladimir Fortov and Director of the Kurchatov Institute Research Center Mikhail Kovalchuk during a meeting of the Council for Science and Education in the Kremlin.Photo: Mikhail Metzel/TASS

In fact, Kovalchuk was most likely removed from his post for more prosaic reasons. Some noticed that he occupies too many leadership positions, others drew attention to Kovalchuk’s sharp public statements about the Russian Academy of Sciences (for example, “The Academy must inevitably perish like the Roman Empire”). Finally, there were rumors that Kovalchuk plans to do the same with the Institute of Crystallography as with the PNPI: withdraw it from the RAS and join it to his Kurchatov Center.

But the Academy, with a new president, Vladimir Fortov, elected thanks to his reform program, and without Kovalchuk, had very little time left to exist in its usual form. A month after the elections, at the end of June, the bill “On the Reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences” was introduced into the State Duma, which deprived the Academy of all its scientific institutes (they were resubordinated to a new body - the Federal Agency of Scientific Organizations), turning the Russian Academy of Sciences into a kind of club of academicians, with almost no influence on bureaucracy and finance in Russian science. On September 27, 2013, the law was signed by President Putin, and the Russian Academy of Sciences, created by decree of Peter I in 1724, was essentially collapsed.

Spectrometer in a box

One can only guess about the specific role of Mikhail Kovalchuk in what most Russian scientists consider to be the defeat of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The bureaucratic struggle against the Academy was waged by the Ministry of Education and Science for many years, and the insult inflicted by the academicians on a person who was part of the president’s inner circle could become a trigger for a decisive attack on the RAS.

“the system created by Kovalchuk represents feudalism, in which scientists are relegated to the role of quitrent peasants”

Today, two years later, it is too early to evaluate the results of the Academy reform, but one thing is clear - it has instilled pessimism in the scientific community. Scientists were pushed away from the distribution of financial flows, and most importantly, from decision-making. Surprisingly, this is very reminiscent of the state of affairs at the Kurchatov Institute itself. Speaking at the General Meeting of the Department of Physical Sciences in May 2013, Leonid Ponomarev, at that time the head of the laboratory of the Institute of General and Nuclear Physics of the National Research Center Kurchatov Institute, said that “the system created by Kovalchuk at the once glorious institute represents feudalism, in which scientists have been relegated to the role of quit-rent men who feed the swollen and well-fed bureaucracy.”

In September 2013, Leonid Ponomarev left the Kurchatov Institute. On October 27, 2015, PNPI, which became part of the Kurchatnik structure, appointed a new director - Doctor of Technical Sciences, expert in the field of fire safety Denis Minkin, according to community data Dissertation, which defended a dissertation almost completely copied from other sources. On October 30, 2015, world-famous physicist Mikhail Danilov was fired from ITEP, which is part of the Kurchatnik structure. The order contained wording according to which there were no vacancies at the institute that corresponded to his qualifications.

According to another former ITEP employee, Mikhail Kovalchuk’s goal is to transform subordinate scientific organizations into “institutes on paper” with loyal employees and a minimum of scientific activity, which require almost no funding, but for which huge budget funds can be obtained. Today, the Kurchatov Institute is one of the richest scientific organizations in the country; the most modern scientific equipment was purchased here, some of which, however, is not even unpacked in the buildings. One of the physicists who visited the Kurchatov Institute several years ago said: “Kurchatnik made a strange impression on me. There are a lot of places that shine and sparkle, but don't work. There are a lot of young people, but they are also strange. A specialist from Siemens tells them how to work with the equipment through an interpreter. It is nonsense that fifth- and sixth-year students cannot understand technical English.” The level of publication activity of the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute" is far from corresponding to the generous funding of the institute.

To be fair, it is worth noting that in the Kurchatov Institute itself, and in the sponsored ITEP, PNPI and IHEP in Protvina, there are still some strong researchers and entire scientific directions. Many employees maintain a formal affiliation with Kurchatnik, in fact working in the West, for example, at the Large Hadron Collider. They do not wash their dirty linen in public, do not speak publicly about the situation at the institute, but their publications, prepared at CERN and other Western institutes with Western money, are formally considered to have been made in Kurchatnik - this is fully consistent with the philosophy of the “paper institute”.

Zombie invasion

On September 30, 2015, Mikhail Kovalchuk read a lengthy report at the Federation Council. Most of it consisted of describing the threats that modern science poses to humanity, and especially to Russia. “Today a real technological opportunity has arisen to [intervene] in the process of human evolution,” Kovalchuk said. “And the goal is to create a fundamentally new subspecies of homo sapiens, a service person.” The head of the Kurchatov Institute explained to the senators that a service person has limited self-awareness, his reproduction is under external control, and genetically modified organisms serve him as “cheap food.” Mikhail Kovalchuk never directly said who was busy creating the “official person,” but made it clear that the technologies needed for this were actively being developed in the United States. Among other things, this is the “absolutization of individual freedom,” which, as Kovalchuk explained, leads to the destruction of sovereign states, as well as “the introduction into the mass consciousness of ideas that are contrary to natural ones” (here we were talking about the refusal of some families to have children and the LGBT movement).

Of course, to create zombies, mass deception alone is not enough; fundamental science is also needed. A service person can be created, on the one hand, thanks to breakthroughs in nano- and biotechnologies, and on the other, with the help of information and cognitive technologies. So what should the progressive part of humanity do, which is threatened with becoming obedient slaves? Kovalchuk recalled the danger of “one-sided ownership of technology by one country” and proposed setting a new strategic priority for scientific research in Russia, based on “the rapid development of fundamentally new interdisciplinary convergent fundamental research and interdisciplinary education.” In other words, a new nano-bio-info-cogno-arms race is beginning in the world, and Russia must join it before it’s too late, throwing as much money as possible at something called the convergence of NBIC technologies.

At the beginning of 2016, it became clear that the speech in the Federation Council was only the first element of a brilliant two-move. On January 14, the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Fortov, sent out a document entitled “Concept of “Strategy for the Development of Convergent Technologies” to the branches of the Academy of Sciences.” The accompanying letter stated that the text was prepared by the Interdepartmental Working Group of the Ministry of Education and Science, but references to the Kurchatov Institute and Mikhail Kovalchuk personally are found in the concept so often that there is little doubt about the actual authorship of the text.

Vladimir Putin and director of the Kurchatov Institute Research Center Mikhail Kovalchuk (right) during a visit to the St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics named after B.P. Konstantinov in GatchinaPhoto: Alexey Nikolsky/TASS

The concept is written in a much more restrained language than Kovalchuk’s speech in the Federation Council, but at the same time, their rhetoric largely coincides. The basis of the proposed “development of convergent technologies” is the prioritization of research lying at the intersection of sciences included in the abbreviation NBICS; here “socio-humanitarian” ones were added to nano-, bio-, cognitive and information technologies. According to the authors, NBICS and convergent technologies should be included as a priority in all key documents describing the future development of Russian science and its financing. At the same time, it is proposed to allocate 5-10% of all expenditures on civilian science to finance convergent technologies, that is, tens of billions of rubles, not allocated as an additional budget, but transferred from other areas. The concept does not reveal what exactly should come of this; there are no examples of technological and scientific breakthroughs that the convergence of NBICS should lead to in the text. But it is noted that “the concept has found wide application in the field of expert development in various countries since the 2000s, and on its basis, many countries subsequently formulated a policy for the implementation of this paradigm as a whole.”

The last statement is true, but only half. The NBIC concept was actually proposed in 2002 by two officials from the US National Science Foundation. Then, in the wake of the fashion for the ideas of transhumanism, it even formed the basis of some decisions on scientific budgeting in the United States, but was soon forgotten and sent to the table. Fifteen years later, Mikhail Kovalchuk dusted it off and presented it as a fresh idea that should determine the future of Russian science and protect Russians from the invasion of “official people.” Several representatives of the scientific community told me that the concept of “convergent technologies” was supposed to be presented to President Putin during the meeting of the Council for Science and Education on January 21. However, this did not happen, as they say, due to the active opposition of the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Fortov, who managed to receive negative reviews of the document from several branches of the Academy. The word “convergence” was heard several times at the meeting, but Mikhail Kovalchuk himself never spoke about NBICS. But, speaking about the responsibility of “leading scientific organizations” in Russia, he quoted Pasternak’s poem “High Disease”:

“Then, having seen him in reality,
I thought and thought endlessly
About its authorship and rights
Dare in the first person."

Today, there is a need to develop interdisciplinary programs to create specialists who are able not only to manage, but to integrate and think strategically correctly. One of the supporters and ideologists of convergence is the director of the Kurchatov Institute Research Center Mikhail Kovalchuk, who has been working on the development of an interdisciplinary education system for several years. The emergence of a platform for the introduction and development of the idea of ​​convergence is intended to give a powerful impetus to domestic science, which will create breakthrough technologies in a variety of industries. All this will solve a number of technological and economic problems, including the problem of import substitution.

These issues were discussed at a round table organized by the Expert North-West publication together with the Kurchatov Institute Research Center and the IVAO company (investments in venture innovative projects in the field of biomedicine and anti-aging).

According to Pavel Kashkarov, Deputy Director for Research at the Kurchatov Institute Research Center, back in 2011, interdisciplinary methods were introduced first into one and then into 37 more metropolitan schools. “Interdisciplinary educated people are a global trend that is discussed at almost all educational conferences. These are leaders of interdisciplinary teams who must look above everything and understand the language of related disciplines,” he noted. – Moreover, such programs give concrete results. For example, this is regenerative replacement medicine, which allows, in essence, to re-make human organs from stem cells. Human stem cells are planted onto a polymer frame, and then an artificial trachea or artificial vessels are formed around it. Over time, the polymer decomposes into water and carbon dioxide, and the stem cells remain, forming a new organ.”

Speaking about other areas, Pavel Kashkarov gave an example of a superconducting cable for a thermonuclear reactor. This is approximately a six-centimeter stainless steel pipe, inside of which there are 120 wires, the resistance of which tends to zero when liquid helium flows inside the wire. Each core is made of 7 thousand nanometer wires.

“That is, this is a fantastic design that could only be made in Russia. They say that everything is bad with our technology, but we won the tender and are making wires like this for an experimental thermonuclear reactor. This is necessary in order to create extreme magnetic fields, which are needed in accelerators, thermonuclear reactors, and also in tomographs. We can do this, which is import substitution. Moreover, we can do this better than in any other country,” emphasized Pavel Kashkarov.

In St. Petersburg, individual faculties of local universities create a kind of analogues of interdisciplinary programs of the Kurchatov Institute. A long-time ideologist of convergent processes, head of the laboratory of cognitive research at St. Petersburg State University, Tatyana Chernigovskaya, said that her department successfully runs interdisciplinary master’s and postgraduate programs on the topic “Cognitive Research and Complex Systems.”

“And we provide education there, similar to the programs of the Kurchatov Institute. Linguists, physicists, biologists, doctors, psychologists, philosophers can come to us. I envy with all my heart the people who receive such an education, because they receive this dose of interdisciplinary education - they are taught by psychologists, philologists, physicists, philosophers. But the humanitarian block plays an important role in this whole technological story. I am sure that good philosophical preparation is necessary, since it is very important to correctly pose the task and understand why it is set. Only a broad-minded person can do this,” she noted.

Advocating for the development of a convergent direction, the university community emphasizes that it is impossible to train only such specialists, since in this case there may be a shortage of employees with a narrow focus, but it is necessary to select gifted ones specifically for training in interdisciplinary programs. And in this selection, Tatyana Chernigovskaya is sure, there is no place for formal tests.

“If we offer such a test to Pushkin, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, Kant, Vernadsky, Kurchatov, and so on down the list, then they will not pass it. Because of this, we may miss the people we need most. Meanwhile, it is Russia that has great chances in this convergent industry. Our type of consciousness cannot make things on assembly lines, but it can assemble one car, better than a Rolls-Royce, but we won’t be able to mass-produce it, because it’s boring for us,” concluded the head of the laboratory. “Culture, painting, humanitarian education, music are directly related to the convergent specialist, because a person who cannot distinguish Dürer from Levitan will not do anything good in the industry.”

Director of the North-Western Institute of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Shamakhov, supported Tatyana Chernigovskaya, emphasizing that without clear goal-setting, “no nanotechnology can extend the country’s economy.”

He confirmed the need for a convergent approach and even gave an example of highly effective experience in this area.

“This experience is over 300 years old. I'm talking about the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. These graduates were ranked number one in the world in terms of performance and career trajectory. At the same time, the development of domestic technologies is largely hampered by the lack of management discipline. This is what prevents Russia from achieving consistently high results,” said Vladimir Shamakhov.

The solution is cluster and project forms, which are widely used today. They are also based on an interdisciplinary approach. More than ten clusters of various types are successfully operating in St. Petersburg alone.

In September, on the initiative of the North-Western Federal Medical Research Center named after. V.A. Almazov" medical cluster "Translational Medicine" was created. Rector of the St. Petersburg State Electrotechnical University "LETI" Vladimir Kutuzov said that then doctors turned to his university for help.

“The so-called Rolls-Royce, which we made in a single copy, was needed in mass production for medicine and pharmaceuticals. During the creation of the cluster, the chairman of the coordinating council, heading the center named after. V.A. Almazov, academician Evgeniy Shlyakhto warned about overcoming a kind of “valley of death” on the way from idea to implementation and back. Several interdisciplinary projects have been prepared, some of them are already at the stage of clinical trials, some are only in development, but this helps to unite professionals, says Vladimir Kutuzov. – I absolutely agree that in order to create interdisciplinary programs, to unite, we need to be well divided. In order for good interdisciplinary projects to turn out, there must be professionals in individual disciplines. About 20 years ago we had experience working with the Ministry of Emergency Situations. They had the problem of monitoring natural and man-made emergency situations. Specialists of a narrow profile were recruited in the physical fields, and at the top there were chief designers who were well versed in implementation. This is a pure approach where you can overcome the “valley of death.” We will also use it in our cluster.”

Continuing the topic of medical science, Igor Narkevich, rector of the St. Petersburg State Chemical-Pharmaceutical Academy, expressed his view on pharmaceuticals. He noted that in this industry it all comes down to the need for “educated local personnel who would localize technologies in Russia.” According to his disappointing forecasts, in the next 10-15 years Russia will make copies of foreign medicines or cheaper analogues. Even interdisciplinary programs will not cope with import substitution in this industry. The fact is that large companies spend up to $3 billion on one drug; there are no investors in Russia who can cover these costs.

“Pharmaceutics is developing, but so far it has laid the foundations for the development of the industry itself. Factories are launching, registering their medicines, and then the scientific infrastructure should follow. And here, in the future, I would like to have several projects of a national scale that could have clear funding and distribute the work among universities and scientific institutes, as well as corporations,” formulated Igor Narkevich.

Deputy Vice-Rector of Peter the Great St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University Vitaly Sergeev noted that the university is already successfully carrying out research work for a number of companies. And in this process, an interdisciplinary approach plays a key role, since well-formulated tasks are needed. Otherwise, import substitution is impossible, because it is possible to produce a narrow, specialized product now, but if we take an entire industry, then an integration system is already needed. It must be built by general specialists, who are now identified and selected in schools.

In particular, a number of programs to support talented youth are being implemented in St. Petersburg. Chairman of the Committee on Science and Higher School of St. Petersburg Irina Ganus said that the projects “Economic Development and Knowledge Economy”, “Training of Highly Qualified Personnel” and “Promotion of Scientific Activities” are currently underway. Competitions for grants are held among talented youth. Out of 400 thousand students, according to the results of such selections, only 1.5 thousand are supported from the budget of St. Petersburg.

“The best investment project” is already a competition among adults, among, so to speak, small clusters (see material about this competition on pages 8-9). They actively submit their projects, happily receive the stele we developed, a gift, a diploma, and they are truly proud that the government has recognized them. But what next? How can he fit in with his project? We come to the business and stop. Universities have enough developments, especially in the field of medicine, that are ready for implementation. The university will even take on the experimental stage, but then we need someone who will invest money and put it into mass production, and it’s not clear where to get it,” explained Irina Ganus.

While scientists claim that investors cannot be found, these same investors explain that it is often simply impossible to come to an agreement with developers. IVAO director Lada Fomenko is helping scientists and sponsors meet. In her opinion, the problem lies in the lack of an interdisciplinary approach among the developers to their project.

“Alas, many scientists do not know economics, marketing, or how to conduct patent research. They come to the investor only with a project, but they need a business plan, they need to understand whether there are similar patents somewhere, they need the same marketing research. And here a problem arises - the investor and the scientist speak different languages. Thus, there is no culture of communication and the concept of interdisciplinary connections. The scientist believes that his developments are intellectual property, and he is not ready to talk and negotiate with the investor, offering him a tiny share. All this alienates the investor and the developer from each other. As a result, we decided to help both sides resolve this problem. We began to conduct examinations, help resolve issues with patents, to help package the project in a format understandable for investors,” added Lada Fomenko.

In the process of developing domestic technologies, business does not stand aside and works with potential scientists. Bank St. Petersburg annually accepts 170 students for internship, who can apply for a special scholarship. However, the organization is engaged not only in growing its own personnel, but also invests in intelligent technologies. They believe that it is important to promote positive changes in the country. Director of the bank's HR Directorate, Maria Smirnova, sees the problem in the lack of employees in the labor market who are competent in related fields. From the point of view of interdisciplinary projects in science, there are no such platforms; there is simply nowhere for the employer and the applicant to meet.

To summarize, Pavel Kashkarov noted that everyone understands the term “interdisciplinarity” differently, but it is important that this ideology penetrates the masses and the need for it is felt.

“As today’s conversation showed, even in the banking sector it is necessary not only to combine the efforts of specialists from different fields, but also to have a person who could lead such a team,” he noted.

According to the scientist, two examples of megaprojects of the 20th century can be cited that became successful only because interdisciplinary educated people were at the helm.

“This is an atomic project and Igor Kurchatov, since you had to be a nuclear physicist, a geologist, and a chemist. The second example is the space project and Sergei Korolev. However, today we need much more such people. Of course, it is impossible to switch all education to interdisciplinary, because then there will be no specialists left who will bring the problem to the end. Therefore, we must understand and maintain this balance. And interdisciplinary educated people will be integrators of powerful teams where this is required. Interdisciplinarity is different in different fields, but it must be present, since the world is so complex that even a philologist or philosopher must have a natural basic education,” concluded Pavel Kashkarov.

Thus, the government, universities and business have agreed that in the current geopolitical and economic conditions it is necessary to unite the efforts of the best specialists under competent management. The discussion participants are confident that for an economic and technological breakthrough the country needs the Kurchatovs and Vernadskys of their time. Their selection and cultivation has today become a common task of all three parties - the state, education and business.

Saint Petersburg

The main goal is to create a galaxy of thinking people

Mikhail Kovalchuk, Director of the National Research Center "Kurchatov Center", Dean of the Faculty of Physics at St. Petersburg State University, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences:

The difference between a university education and any other education is great and lies in this: in a technical university you are given a specific set of professional knowledge, and the university should teach you to think. Once you have been taught this, it doesn't matter what you do. The main task of university education is to give a broad outlook and teach you to think. And I am convinced that the main difference between university education and its main goal is to create a galaxy of thinking people. At the same time, give them a set of knowledge, but not highly specialized, but quite broad. Another person must be a patriot. I want to emphasize: there is no national science, science has no borders, it is international, but there are national interests. And people should remember this when receiving a start in life from the hands of the state. Remember that the responsibility for national interests lies on their shoulders.

A person should be interesting in himself, but what is human interest connected with? When a person knows a lot and interacts with it interactively, when he has a sense of humor, which, as a rule, is associated with this. You know, there is such a word - “passionarity”. This is a kind of ascetic inner essence that allows people who are focused on emotionally good deeds to move forward. It seems to me that the university should educate thinking and passionate people. A thinking person, a professional, a patriot, a passionate person - that’s who will get to the “Nobel pedestal”.

And to applicants who want to become university students in the near future, I will give very simple advice: “Study, my son: science reduces our experiences of fast-paced life.” But to be more specific, we must remember that we live in a great country, and in this regard, understand that today, after the difficult decades that we have lived through, the country is on the rise, it is, as it were, being reborn. It is the work of the young to work on this. People entering university must understand that the burden of responsibility for the advancement of a great country rests on their shoulders. This is a colossal responsibility, but also colossal prospects that do not exist anywhere in the world today. Russia is a country of opportunities.

The National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute” is considered one of the most closed and productive scientific centers in Russia and the world. Kurchatnik President Mikhail Kovalchuk rarely gives interviews, but sometimes makes exceptions. Lenta.ru reviewed his recent publication and selected the seven most important theses.

“Today we hear about CERN - the European Center for Nuclear Research, located on the border of France and Switzerland, the world's largest laboratory for high energy physics. All accelerators operating there, including the Large Hadron Collider, use the principle of colliding beams, invented by our physicists,” said Mikhail Kovalchuk.

According to him, almost all major scientific projects being implemented in Europe today were largely initiated by Russian scientists. For example, the Large Hadron Collider's "detectors are structures the size of five-story buildings, two of which consist of elements made from single crystals of lead tungstate." It was Russian scientists who came up with the idea of ​​combining 100 tons of crystals in a single structure, and then grew them, manufactured elements and assembled detectors.

About convergence

“Today we are ready to combine existing microelectronics technology with the “structures of living nature” we have studied and create nature-like technologies. The tool for their creation is the convergence (merger, unification) of a number of scientific disciplines - at the first stage this is nano-, bio-, info-, cognitive and socio-humanitarian knowledge,” said Mikhail Kovalchuk.

The President of the Kurchatov Institute said that convergent sciences and technologies are being actively promoted in the United States. He learned about this in 2006 in Switzerland at a scientific conference.

An important step towards the introduction of convergence is the development of nanotechnology. But their implementation in Russia faced a number of unnecessary obstacles.

“A new business always and everywhere encounters resistance and is received with hostility. This is how human nature works. And today nanotechnology has become everyday life, even at the consumer level. And those who 10 years ago shouted the loudest that this was profanation are now just as ardent supporters of them,” Kovalchuk noted.

About science and sanctions

“Economic sanctions, other tools from the arsenal of big politics are on one side, science is on the other. Russia has been and remains an integral part of the global scientific landscape,” emphasizes Mikhail Kovalchuk.

For example, recently, together with Rosatom, scientists from the Kurchatov Institute completed the delivery of almost 300 tons of a unique superconducting cable to create magnetic fields in ITER, an experimental thermonuclear reactor being built in the south of France between Nice and Marseille, winning a tough competition from Western competitors.

About peaceful colonization

“Military colonization, which was carried out in past centuries by the leading world powers against less powerful and developed countries, has been replaced by technological colonization today. Why rattle weapons and use them to conquer foreign territories if you can achieve the same without firing a single shot? But before, the objects of colonization were mainly backward states, but now the emphasis is on developed countries,” says Mikhail Kovalchuk.

In many ways, a new form of colonization is manifested in the construction of high-tech facilities, such as nuclear power plants, on the territory of other countries. The former Soviet republics, on the contrary, faced deindustrialization, abandoning many facilities built during the Soviet era.

About Russian science

“What is especially surprising in the West is how we withstood everything. So much was destroyed, lost, given away in the 1990s that for any other country it would have become an irreparable disaster! Yes, it was not in vain for us, including for our science, but the traditions and foundations were so powerful that we managed not only to survive, but also to begin to develop again. In fact, today Russia remains one of the most high-tech countries in the world. In many areas we are in leading positions,” says Mikhail Kovalchuk.

In his opinion, any country that has embarked on the path of industrial development necessarily strived to have a mega-installation built on its territory. An example is the synchrotron in Kurchatnik, essentially a pass for Russia to the pool of states ready to move science further.

At the site of the Kurchatov Institute in Gatchina, the high-flux neutron research reactor PIK, one of the most powerful in the world, is being prepared for power start-up. In addition, together with Rosatom and Italian partners, a fundamentally new tokamak, Ignitor, is being created.

“If a state wants to be rich, strong, independent, it must concentrate its intellectual resource. To do this, you need to create your own education system, develop it, and improve it. But it's a long road. It’s easier to collect the cream of the crop from all over the world, lure them away, and buy up their brains. The special beauty is that you strengthen your potential by attracting players from someone else’s team, and at the same time weaken your opponent,” believes Mikhail Kovalchuk.

About publications in English-language magazines

“When I worked in the States in the 90s, local scientists had our academic journals on their desks. A significant part of them was translated by AIP - the American Institute of Physics. We even received publishing royalties from the Copyright Agency. And what was not included in the translation was sorted out by overseas colleagues themselves using a dictionary. Including those who did not speak Russian. If they didn’t understand, they asked, we helped. And now we are offered to earn points by publishing in their magazines. But playing with one goal is definitely not part of the plans of Russian scientists,” Mikhail Kovalchuk is sure.

According to him, Russian scientists are evaluated using American methods through the prism of what will be considered valuable and important for the United States. In fact, this leads to the destruction of Russian-language scientific periodicals.

About the scientist’s soldering and more

“At the Institute of Crystallography, where I worked for a total of more than 40 years, the seething of the working masses began precisely at the moment of distribution of milk in triangular bags... The bags were red, white and blue, the colors of the Russian flag. By the way, I only just now noticed this. There was no independent Russia yet, but the milk was already being bottled... True, the cocked hats had a significant drawback: the bags got wet and began to leak. In some laboratories they made yogurt from sour milk, in others they specialized in cottage cheese,” said Mikhail Kovalchuk.

According to him, “there was nowhere to ferment,” so Kovalchuk drank pasteurized milk. Already in adulthood, he unexpectedly discovered wine, amassing not only an excellent collection, but also an entire library.

Mikhail Valentinovich Kovalchuk(born September 21, Leningrad) - Soviet and Russian physicist, specialist in the field of X-ray structural analysis. Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2000. Director in 1998-2013, director in 2005-2015, president of the Kurchatov Institute since December 2015. President of the All-Russian Society of Inventors and Innovators (VOIR). Dean of the Faculty of Physics, St. Petersburg State University. He was a permanent scientific secretary in 2001-2012, after its transformation into the Council under the President of the Russian Federation for Science and Education in 2012 - a member of the presidium. Host of the popular science television programs “Stories from the Future” (2007-2018) and “Picture of the World” (since 2019). Full holder of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland.

Parents

M. V. Kovalchuk’s mother, Miryam Abramovna Kovalchuk (Viro) (1918-1998), was a scholar-historian, studied the activities of the RSDLP (b) / RKP (b) / All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in the conditions of popular representation in the State Duma of the Russian Empire and in the Far Eastern Republic, as well as the organizational and ideological role of the party in the national economy (socialist competition, Stakhanov movement). Until 1980, she worked as a teacher in the departments of the foundations of Marxism-Leninism, Marxism-Leninism and the history of the CPSU, Faculty of History, Leningrad State University, while teaching classes almost exclusively at the Faculty of Geology. She gained authority among geology students, many of whom subsequently occupied key positions in the mineral resources sector of the economy of the USSR and the People's Republic of China. She protected students from persecution for their protest activities characteristic of youth, which some other teachers and Komsomol activists from among the students themselves then perceived as politically unacceptable.

The parents are buried together at the Kazan cemetery in Pushkin.

Biography

Since the beginning of the 2000s, he has headed the Research Center “Space Materials Science” at the Institute of Crystallography. He headed the institute for 15 years. But as a result of two secret votes at meetings of the Division of Physical Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences on May 27 and 30, 2013, he was not re-elected to his post of director.

He also holds a number of other positions:

• Member of the Presidium of the Presidential Council for Science and Education;
• member of the Commission under the President of the Russian Federation for modernization and technological development of the Russian economy;
• member of the board of the Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology of the Russian Federation (2002-2004) and the board of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia (since 2004);
• President of the All-Russian Society of Inventors and Innovators (VOIR);
• Chairman of the National Committee of Crystallographers of Russia;
• Chairman of the National Conference on the Application of X-rays, Synchrotron Radiation, Neutrons and Electrons for Materials Research (RSNE);
• Chairman of the National Crystal Growth Conference (NCGG);
• scientific director of the faculty of nano-, bio-, information and cognitive technologies;
• Head of the Department of Physics of Nanosystems, Faculty of Physics, Moscow State University;
• Head of the Department of Nuclear Physical Research Methods, Faculty of Physics, St. Petersburg State University.

In the 2000s, he simultaneously headed the department of physics of interaction of radiation with matter, Faculty of General and Applied Physics, MIPT, and was a professor at the Faculty of Materials Sciences, Moscow State University.

Editor-in-chief of the scientific journal “Crystallography”, deputy editor-in-chief of the journal “Surface. X-ray, synchrotron and neutron research"; Deputy Chairman of the RAS Commission on Nanotechnologies.

Author and presenter of the popular science television program “Stories from the Future” on Channel Five.

Scientific activity

Kovalchuk's areas of scientific interest: X-ray diffraction analysis (in particular, X-ray and protein crystallography); human genetics; X-ray and synchrotron radiation in materials research; condensed matter physics; X-ray physics and optics; physics of crystallization processes; x-ray standing waves (X-ray waves); multi-wave diffraction.

In 1999, on the initiative of the President of the Russian Scientific Center “Kurchatov Institute”, Academician E.P. Velikhov, a decision was made to create. Kovalchuk became its organizing director and focused his efforts on creating a complex of research stations based on the Siberia-2 synchrotron created in Novosibirsk, paying special attention to the research of nanobioorganic systems. He successfully completed the implementation of a scientific project to develop, create and commission a complex of unique research equipment - experimental stations using beams from Russia's first specialized source of synchrotron radiation, intended for collective use by the scientific community.

Since approximately 1999, M. V. Kovalchuk has been successfully developing a new area of ​​X-ray optics related to the study and use of multi-wave diffraction. Currently, in the 21st century, Kovalchuk is focusing his efforts on developing research in the field of nanodiagnostics, nanomaterials and nanosystems, becoming in fact one of the ideologists of the development of nanotechnology in Russia. Thanks to him, an attempt was made to unofficially propose the development of nanotechnology as a kind of state ideology of Russia (just as the development of two specific nanotechnologies - iron and steel production - was an important element of Soviet ideology).

According to the official website of Moscow State University, where he heads the department of physics of nanosystems, under the leadership of M. V. Kovalchuk, a fundamentally new method for studying the surface of condensed matter was developed, using standing X-ray waves (X-ray waves) and combining the capabilities of diffraction study of structure with spectroscopic sensitivity to specific types of atoms . The SRV method has been adapted for the structural characterization of multicomponent crystals, semiconductor heterostructures, multilayer X-ray mirrors, X-ray waveguide structures, organic multilayer systems based on Langmuir-Blodgett films, and protein-lipid systems.

Author and co-author of more than 250 scientific papers, including 21 certificates of authorship and 10 patents. The Hirsch index according to Scopus is 14, according to the RSCI - 18.

RAS reform

According to one version, Kovalchuk is the author of a bill on reforming the Russian Academy of Sciences, which began after he was not re-elected director of the Institute of Crystallography of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A number of media outlets claim that the scientist, who was not elected as a full member of the RAS several times and was not approved as director of the Institute of Crystallography, started this reform because of a personal grudge. Kovalchuk himself said in an interview that “The Academy must inevitably perish, like the Roman Empire.”

Statements

On September 30, 2015, Kovalchuk spoke at the Federation Council, talking about the dangers of artificial cells, how the United States influences scientific and technological goals around the world, and how a new subspecies of “service person” is being created:

“Today a real technological opportunity has arisen in the process of human evolution. And the goal is to create a fundamentally new subspecies of Homo sapiens - "service man". The property of the population of service people is very simple: limited self-awareness, this is cognitively regulated in an elementary way, we can see that this is already happening. The second thing is breeding management, and the third thing is cheap food, these are genetically modified foods. And this too is all ready. This means, in fact, today a real technological possibility has already arisen to breed a service subspecies of people.”

January 21, 2016, at the proposal of M.V. Kovalchuk at a meeting of the Presidential Council of the Russian Federation for Science, Technology and Education “to find organizations that should control the flow of thought in specific directions”, just like V.I. Lenin "controlled the flow of thought", V.V. Putin replied: “Control the flow of thought is correct (?), you just need this thought to lead to the right results... They planted an atomic bomb under the building called Russia, and then it exploded” .

February 8, 2018 at the State Council for Science and Education, held in the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok:

“Everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. On average, processing and recognizing one simple voice request sent from a personal smartphone requires enough energy to boil a liter of water,” said Mikhail Kovalchuk, President of the National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute”.

Family

• Father - Valentin Mikhailovich Kovalchuk (1916-2013), Doctor of Historical Sciences, specialist in the history of the siege of Leningrad, chief researcher.
• Mother - Miriam (Miriam) Abramovna Kovalchuk (Viro) (1918-1998), Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of History of the CPSU, Faculty of History, Leningrad State University.
• Wife - Elena Yuryevna Polyakova, specialist in the history of Ireland, daughter of historian Yu. A. Polyakov, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences since 1966, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1997.
• Son - Kirill Mikhailovich Kovalchuk, born December 22, 1968, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Media Group - a large media holding that owns shares in Channel One, Channel Five, REN TV, STS Media, the Izvestia newspaper and other media. Kirill Kovalchuk was mentioned by the press in connection with the scandalous reconstruction of the Bolkonsky house in the center of Moscow.
• Brother - Yuri Valentinovich Kovalchuk, billionaire, chairman of the board of directors of Rossiya Bank. His name is also associated with the National Media Group, the Sogaz insurance company and other business assets. Known as a person close to Vladimir Putin; a number of media outlets call him a personal friend of Putin. Mikhail and Yuri Kovalchuk are often referred to jointly in the press as “the Kovalchuk brothers.” Although, according to media reports, a business empire with the help of their mother’s former students was created by Mikhail Valentinovich Kovalchuk, who is in public service, officially, only his younger brother Yuri owns property in this empire and is a billionaire.
• Nephew - Boris Yuryevich Kovalchuk, Chairman of the Board of JSC Inter RAO UES; Before that, he headed the Department of Priority National Projects in the Government of the Russian Federation.

Awards

Books

• Kovalchuk M. V. Science and life: My convergence: Vol. 1: Autobiographical sketches: Popular science and conceptual articles. - M.: Akademkniga, 2011. - 304 pp., ill., 1,000 copies, ISBN 978-5-94628-356-4

Notes

1. (undefined) . Lenta.ru (30.5.2013). Retrieved September 20, 2013.
2. Picture of the world with Mikhail Kovalchuk / TV channel “Russia – Culture” (Russian). tvkultura.ru. Retrieved May 21, 2019.
3. N. Golovkin. The corridor of death. // Centenary 2014
4. Mikhail Kovalchuk - physicist and lyricist of crystallography
5. Mikhail Valentinovich Kovalchuk (on his sixtieth birthday) (undefined) . Advances in Physical Sciences (October 2006). Retrieved September 23, 2013.
6. Kovalchuk Mikhail Valentinovich (undefined) . Nanometer. Retrieved September 23, 2013.
7. Kovalchuk Mikhail Valentinovich. Historical reference (undefined)
8. Kovalchuk Mikhail Valentinovich. Activities (undefined) . Russian Academy of Sciences (August 23, 2012). Retrieved September 23, 2013.
9. Yulia Latynina. No worse than Galileo. Why was Academician Kovalchuk offended? (undefined) . New newspaper (10.6.2013). Retrieved September 20, 2013.
10. Anna Popova. Escape from Kurchatnik (undefined) . Lenta.ru (September 18, 2013). Retrieved September 22, 2013.
11. Profile of M. V. Kovalchuk (unavailable link) on the website “All about Moscow University”
12. http://www.gazeta.ru/science/2013/05/30_a_5362585.shtmll
13. The main contender for the title of President of the Russian Academy of Sciences did not become an academician // Gazeta.Ru, 05.29.2008
14. The new president of the Russian Academy of Sciences was indignant at Kovalchuk’s non-election as an academician. //Moscow's comsomolets. 3.06.2008
15. Officially to a new level. // [[Search]], No. 50(2015), 12/11/2015. (undefined) (unavailable link). Retrieved December 28, 2015. Archived February 2, 2016.
16. On the assignment of the duties of the dean of the Faculty of Physics of St. Petersburg State University (undefined) . (Retrieved November 27, 2012)
17. Since 2001, he has been the scientific secretary of the Council under the President of the Russian Federation for Science, Technology and Education.
18. The era of Kovalchuk: how the Ministry of Defense decided to take away military science from Rogozin:: Politics:: RBC
19. Kovalchuk Mikhail Valentinovich. International Biographical Center
20. Areas of activity on the RAS website
21. Scopus - Kovalchuk, Mikhail V.
22. RSCI - Mikhail Valentinovich Kovalchuk
23. Lyudmila Rybina. The brain cannot be fed with crumbs from the master's table (undefined) . New newspaper (17.7.2013). Retrieved September 20, 2013.
24. Yulia Latynina. The Russian Academy of Sciences is not being reformed, the Russian Academy of Sciences is being humiliated (undefined) . New newspaper (20.9.2013). Retrieved September 20, 2013.
25. Alexander Belavin. Reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences is Kovalchuk’s revenge (undefined) . Snob (09/18/13). Retrieved September 20, 2013.
26. Alexey Usov. “Reform” of the Russian Academy of Sciences - revenge for the public humiliation of a member of the Ozero cooperative (undefined) (unavailable link). RIA Novy Region (28.06.13). Retrieved September 20, 2013. Archived September 21, 2013.
27. Nikolay Podorvanyuk. “The present of the Russian Academy of Sciences is wonderful, the future is even worse” (undefined) . Gazeta.ru (08/29/2013). Retrieved September 20, 2013.
28. Cellular war, colonies and “service people” of the USA. Official website of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 10/01/2015.
29. Putin told scientists about Lenin’s subversive role in Russian history, mail.ru, 01/21/2016 (undefined) (unavailable link). Retrieved January 21, 2016. Archived January 22, 2016.
30. Zinaida Burskaya. The scientific vessel “Akademik Strakhov” returned to Russia after a two-year stay in Sri Lanka // Novaya Gazeta, 01/21/2016.
31. V. Yakunin resigned due to his son’s request for British citizenship. // Novaya Gazeta, 10/09/2015
32. Dmitry Peskov responded to Gref’s statement about the country’s downshifter. // RT, 01/21/2016.
33. Putin called for debureaucratization of science (undefined) . Retrieved December 20, 2018.