This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's 16-year rule ended in the spring, when voters replaced him with Péter Magyar, who has pledged to undo Orbán-led initiatives that, in the eyes of critics, isolated and politicized science. Albert-László Barabási, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and distinguished university professor at Northeastern University, is a graduate of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and a visiting professor at the Central European University in Vienna.
He recently penned an op-ed in the journal Science laying out a blueprint for how Magyar might proceed. Barabási spoke about his proposals for Hungary and how politics can undermine research. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Albert-László Barabási: Hungary has a particular pride in science and in how many intellectuals the country produces, particularly how many Nobel Prize winners, which is close to a dozen. That includes two in 2023, one in physics and one in medicine, and last year's literature winner. The Orbán regime politicized science.
Research institutions and national labs had traditionally been under the direction of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. About seven years ago, the government removed these institutions from the academy, saying it wanted to reorganize them to be more competitive. Virtually all scientists, including all members of the academy, were against the change, but it did not matter.
To its credit, the government attracted a well-respected academic back from Singapore to run the new institutions and increased funding. It increased both salaries and the resources going to research projects, but it never managed to address the psychological break that resulted from stripping away academic control. The Orbán government started a system that, on the one hand, you could view as positive.
But on the other, the execution was politicized. It wanted to bring Hungarian universities up to an international level and concluded, rightly, that the universities needed new funding and independence. So, it created foundations that effectively made them organizations independent of the government and then donated state properties—shares of major companies and land—to those foundations to secure the resources to expand and function.
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