Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Andres Metspalu still needs, politely, to enlighten many callers that Estonia is no longer a Moscow-steered country. The small Baltic republic is one of eight central European countries that joined the European Union (EU) last year. "But many people in western Europe and the United States still think we speak Russian," says the geneticist at the University of Tartu. Metspalu is the director of the Estonian Genome Project and one of the country's most prominent researchers. Estonia's small size — it has a population of just 1.4 million people — allowed it to transform its science system in the 1990s more rapidly and efficiently than most other countries in the region. And Metspalu's genome project has further established Estonia on the worldwide map of research. But despite these achievements, even Estonia is struggling to cope with the exodus of many of its best young scientists to the West.
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