Babbage | Science in Vietnam

Stemming the outflow of talent

Vietnam needs to do more to keep its best scientist from leaving for good

By H.C. | HANOI

LAST month Vietnam placed third at Robocon, an Asia-Pacific robot-building competition for university students. With rivals like the famously tech-savvy Japan and Korea, coming third in a 19-strong field may sound like a sterling achievement. In fact, it was a poor showing. Vietnam has won the event three times in the past ten years (in 2002, 2004 and 2006).

Though the nation excels at international contest it fares less well in day-to-day work. Much of that winning talent goes to waste (or abroad) for lack of resources. The new-ish science and technology minister, Nguyen Quan, hopes to change this. He told Thanh Nien News, an English-language daily, that Vietnam ought to increase its investment in the sector four- or fivefold. Vietnam's investment in the sector ostensibly stands at 2% of GDP, not bad by international standards. But the relatively low GDP means that, in absolute terms, the area stays under-resourced.

Only more money will staunch the brain drain, warns Mr Nguyen. Too many talented scientists who have studied overseas prefer to stay there. Ngo Bao Chau, a mathematician who won the Fields Medal, the discipline's highest accolade, in 2010 for his work in a branch of mathematics known as group theory, is one such. Dr Ngo was educated in France, and has since taken French citizenship and currently works in the United States.

Pierre Darriullt, a physicist who has been working at Vietnamese universities since his formal retirement from academic work in 1998, says that Vietnam provides no incentives for students to return to Vietnam from their foreign graduate programmes. This was less of a problem in the past when much of the scientific community was educated in the Soviet Union, and often had no choice but to return. Today's globalised world imposes fewer constraints.

Other problems abound. Foreign scientists often complain that research is simply not up to snuff, even in areas which raise important public-health concerns. For instance, it is estimated that some 3m people across three generations have been affected by Agent Orange. The chemical defoliant used by the Americans during the Vietnam war is blamed for a slew of debilitating conditions, including cancers, birth defects and spina bifida. Yet sample groups used for research tend to be tiny, and research is rarely properly peer-reviewed before publication.

There are some hopeful signs. One Australian climate scientist praises Vietnamese hydrologists. The country has always been prone to severe flooding—there is evidence of dykes going back several thousand years. As a result, scientists and engineers are adept and moving water around and controlling its behaviour. If only it were this good in stemming the outflow of talent.

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