Harvard Faculty Meets Soviets In Scientific Exchange Program

Two Soviet scientists met last week with Harvard and MIT faculty as part of a national scientific exchange program.

The visiting Soviets, Viktor L. Talroze and Ardalyon N. Ponomarev, both from the Institute of Chemical Physics in Moscow, were visiting the United States as part of a one-month exchange program between the National Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Union's Academy of Sciences.

Participants in the interchange said the meetings were successful in trading ideas and information on radiation chemistry research.

Talroze said last week he found the meetings successful and hospitable.

"It's always useful to exchange ideas," Dudley Herschbach, Baird Professor of Science, a Chemistry Department member who met with the Soviet scientists, said last week. Klaus Biermann, professor of chemistry at MIT, said that "talking always gets more details across that reading a [scientific] paper."

The program, designed in 1973 to facilitate the spread of scientific knowledge and research, has continued to function despite the strained political relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Herschbach said the discussions primarily dealt with mutual scientific interests, adding that aside from a few personal discussions, there was very little reference made to politics.

Intact

A spokeswoman for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington said last week that "the exchange program agreement between the USSR and the United States remain intact, and no future alterations are anticipated."

In addition to their three-day stay in Cambridge, the Soviet scientists have visited institutions in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and California. Their schedule also included meetings with scientists at Rockefeller University in New York before they return to Moscow.