Sir

Your News Feature “Dreaming on the Danube” (Nature 427, 94–95; 2004) is right to emphasize the unused intellectual potential in Hungary but it gives a flawed image of Hungarian science overall.

First, the tendency to equate Hungary with its capital Budapest is always annoying. Although Budapest is home to about 20% of the Hungarian population for historical reasons, most Hungarian students do not study in Budapest and most Hungarian researchers do not work there.

I am a 30-year-old chemist working at the University of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. In my discipline, the international reputations of the research communities at three Hungarian universities (Debrecen, Szeged and Veszprém) are at least as good as, if not better than, that of their counterpart in Budapest. It is not accidental that the only Hungarian-born Nobel laureate who did his award-winning work in Hungary, Albert Szent-Györgyi, was a faculty member in Szeged.

Second, I think it is unhelpful to refer to the Hungarian language as “notoriously complex”. Its internal logic is certainly very different from that of European languages, but this does not make it more complex. Hungarian is a language in which there is only one past, one present and one future tense for verbs.

Finally, I disagree that the brain-drain problem has anything to do with Soviet-era thinking and the ‘old guard’. I agree that the biggest obstacle to young Hungarian talent is the way in which research funding is distributed, but this problem is not unique to Hungary. Whenever grant recipients are primarily selected using criteria based on previous merit, such as the number of publications, it makes it difficult for young professionals to develop independent research.

Hungary has had two conservative and harshly anti-communist governments since 1990 and this system got their blessings as well. Blaming the old communist era for everything bad is a political game that has very little credibility now.