🌐 How Russia’s 'brain drain' could be a 'brain gain' for the world (especially America 🤞)

Also: 5 Quick Questions for … existential risk expert Toby Ord on humanity’s precarious future

In This Issue

The Essay: How Russia’s 'brain drain' could be a 'brain gain' for the world (especially America 🤞)

5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … existential risk expert Toby Ord on humanity’s precarious future

Micro Reads: energy abundance, civilizational estate planning, SpaceX

Nano Reads

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Quote of the Issue

“America is the land of opportunity — there is no other country where I could have done this.” - Elon Musk

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The Essay

🌐 How Russia’s 'brain drain' could be a 'brain gain' for the world (especially America 🤞)

The growing disruption of scientific exchanges between Russia and the West is hardly the most important shockwave emanating from Russia’s shocking invasion of Ukraine. But it has me thinking about the story of Mikhail Brin. As a bright young man, Mikhail was eager to study physics at Moscow State University in the 1960s. He was turned down, however, because the Soviet-era government didn’t want to risk Jews having access to nuclear secrets.

Mikhail ended up studying mathematics, graduating in 1970. The Soviet space program or military research was the natural next step for a talented mathematician like Mikhail. But anti-semitism closed those doors, too. So he landed at Gosplan, the Soviet economic planning agency. But Mikhail continued to study mathematics, eventually earning a PhD at Kharkiv University in what was then called the Ukraine.

Kharkiv University today

Then in 1977, Mikhail attended an international conference where he met foreign researchers and academics. He went home that night a man transformed. He told his wife, Eugenia, also a mathematician, that they needed to leave the USSR for America and the opportunities sure to await them. Mikhail and Eugenia, along with their young son and daughter, left everything behind in 1979 and emigrated to America. Mikhail, who then changed his name to Michael, obtained an academic post at the University of Maryland, while Eugenia became a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

An American Tale

Clearly the Brins, now both retired, have made a tremendous contribution to their adopted country. And so has their oldest son, Sergey. He’s co-founder of search giant Google, a company currently valued at nearly $2 trillion. (The family’s story is told at greater length in 2011’s excellent The Google Guys: Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin by Richard L. Brandt.)