Brain Drain
Mathematician Bienvenido
Nebres recently wrote in the Inquirer about the Engineering and Science
Education Project of the Department of Science and Technology. Dr. Nebres
was extremely hopeful that this effort to improve local science and engineering
programs will induce many of our expatriate scientists and engineers to
return home.
A few days later, physicist
Roger Posadas in a letter to the editor took issue with Nebres. Posadas
maintained that we will continue to suffer a brain drain as long as salaries
here remain so low that scientists and engineers cannot maintain a decent
standard of living.
Perhaps Nebres does not
fully appreciate Posadas' position. Unlike Posadas, Nebres does not have
to worry about how to put food on the table, or, for that matter, where
the children are going to get their tuition money. Nebres, after all, is
a Jesuit priest who is president of Xavier University,
Both Nebres and Posadas,
however, will certainly agree that coming home is not enough. The returnee's
skills should be put to good use.
This is true not merely
of the hard sciences but also of the soft ones. Consider Estefania Aldaba-Lim,
who returned about 30 years ago as our first PhD in clinical psychology,
but the country was not ready to use her skills fully. For many years,
she spent her time with the Girl Scouts of the Philippines and the National
Federation of Women's Clubs. Then, there is Juan Jamias, our first PhD
in communication, who was promptly made public information officer of UP
Los Banos. Unlike Larry Henares, they did not have a family corporation
to return to.
Harvard men Onofre D. Corpuz
and Ruben Santos-Cuyugan did not last long in research. They were pirated
from the UP by the Marcos government -- and Corpuz brought many UP professors
along with him, to the frustration of colleagues like Jose Encarnacion,
who was building the UP School of Economics.
For an institution-builder,
does it really matter whether a valuable staff member emigrates or is pirated
by a local institution? The UP School of Economics lost Mahar Mangahas
to the Development Academy of the Philippines; it also lost Roberto Mariano
to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. In
either case, Encarnacion's timetable for building the UP School of Economics
was upset.
In fact, Encarnacion is
merely one of our many top-flight researchers who had to give up their
research interests early in order to become institution-building administrators.
In this category we find people as varied as Mercedes B. Concepcion, Gloria
Feliciano, Bro. Andrew Gonzales, Fr. Jaime Bulatao -- and even Father Nebres
himself, who was named dean of the college at the Ateneo de Manila even
before he was ordained a priest.
All these researchers-turned-administrators
have lost key people to piracy. Sometimes, the person pirated goes into
a completely alien field -- like historian Roberto Paterno, who was expected
build up a department of Chinese studies at the Ateneo. Paterno was pirated
by Meralco. Eduardo Magtoto, who until recently was an undersecretary at
the DOST, did not even get a research job when he came back with a degree
in nuclear engineering; he landed in the Coca-Cola Export Corp.
Of course, there's more
to coming back than money. Over 20 years ago, Nebres, Mariano, Jolly Benitez
(yes, that Jolly Benitez) and their fellow graduate students at Stanford
used to gather in the house of Eduardo Sacris (now a mineral engineer with
the Benguet group). Whenever the question of returning home was brought
up, Bobby Mariano invariably remembered Federico Sioson, his mathematics
professor, who left the Philippines several times, only to return home.
Each time, Sioson gave this explanation, ``You've got to give your country
a chance.''
This is the message Nebres
conveys today to our expatriate scientists, but too many of our trained
people, like Posadas, retort that, unfortunately, our own country does
not feel that it must give them a chance.