War's invisible toll on science
When war destroys a university laboratory, the loss is visible: shattered instruments, burned buildings, scattered equipment. But researchers working in Ukraine argue that the deeper, less visible damage comes from the severing of human networks through which science reproduces itself. Mentorship, collaboration, and informal ties that turn students into researchers are all casualties of conflict, and they are far harder to rebuild than a room full of microscopes.
In a new Comment published in Nature Genetics, an international team including Roderic Guigó, a researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, makes the case that protecting science under the systemic stress of wartime requires a shift in perspective. The authors contend that education and training should be treated as infrastructure in their own right, not as a series of one-off events attached to research projects.
The argument is grounded in direct experience. Since 2023, the team has run the Ukrainian Biological Data Science Summer School (UBDS3), an in-person program held at Uzhhorod National University in western Ukraine. The 2026 edition is currently underway, running from July 11 to 25. The school was created as a response to a clear and painful constraint: martial law prevents most male students and early-career researchers from leaving the country. For them, any educational model that depends on traveling abroad is effectively closed off.
Bringing the world to Uzhhorod
UBDS3 inverts the standard logic of international academic exchange. Instead of sending Ukrainian researchers out to world-leading institutions, the program brings world-class researchers into Ukraine. Participants gain a direct point of contact with the international scientific community that would otherwise be nearly impossible for many of them to reach. For two weeks every summer, students in Uzhhorod sit in classrooms alongside faculty drawn from leading research institutions across Europe, North America, and Asia, including the CRG.
What started as a two-week pilot that attracted more than 100 students to Uzhhorod, Ukraine's westernmost city, has now run every summer since. The organizers cover travel, room, and board, and the school is offered free of charge. Teaching is conducted bilingually in Ukrainian and English, ensuring that language does not become another barrier to participation.
The summer school is not merely a morale-boosting exercise or an intellectual escape from the realities of war. Its organizers describe it as a concrete investment in rebuilding the human infrastructure of Ukrainian science. A scientific field does not exist merely because textbooks and papers describe it. It exists because people with shared methods, values, and questions teach one another, challenge one another, and carry a discipline forward across generations. War interrupts that intergenerational transmission and leaves a gap that cannot be filled by imported equipment or remote lectures alone.
Disrupted mentorship under martial law
The Comment authors emphasize that mentorship-prolonged, close relationships in which experienced researchers shape the skills and instincts of novices-is among the most fragile elements of scientific life. In ordinary times, mentorship happens through daily lab meetings, corridor conversations, informal reading groups, and long-term projects that unfold over years. Under martial law, many of these interactions become impossible. Male students and early-career researchers cannot travel abroad, and even domestic mobility may be constrained by the security situation. Senior researchers may be displaced, fighting, or overwhelmed by other responsibilities.
The result is that the pipeline that produces the next generation of researchers becomes dangerously thin at its most critical stage: the transition from coursework to independent investigator. This is precisely the stage at which informal ties matter most. The authors argue that educational initiatives such as UBDS3 should be treated with the same seriousness as physical infrastructure when institutions and funders plan for wartime resilience.
This reframing has practical implications. If education is merely a series of events, it can be canceled or postponed whenever the immediate crisis deepens. If it is infrastructure, then it requires sustained commitment, predictable funding, and protection even when the strategic benefit is not immediately measurable. Infrastructure is built to outlast the present emergency, and its value is measured in decades.
Beyond the summer school: a genomics hub takes root
UBDS3 is one half of a larger effort centered on Uzhhorod. The city's university has established a new genomics research facility, which has already begun to deliver clinical benefits. Patients with rare forms of diabetes have received corrected diagnoses, making possible treatment that might otherwise have been delayed or denied. These clinical outcomes are a reminder that research depends entirely on trained people, the very people the school exists to produce.
The connection between training and clinical impact is not abstract. A corrected diagnosis in a rare, treatable form of diabetes requires researchers who can handle biological data, interpret genomic evidence, and communicate with clinicians. None of that capacity exists without sustained investment in education. The Uzhhorod team's ambition, as described by Guigó, is bold: before this initiative, biological data science did not exist as an organized field in Ukraine. His stated aim is to bring as much expertise to Uzhhorod as possible and to turn the city into a Ukrainian center of excellence in the discipline, something like a Cambridge for biological data science.
The stakes for science policy
The implications of the team's argument extend well beyond Ukraine. Around the world, scientists work under conditions of conflict, displacement, or systemic instability. Yet most academic institutions and funding agencies treat education as a secondary activity, a necessary but lower-priority counterpart to research production. The Nature Genetics Comment challenges this assumption by showing how effective research institutions depend on continuous training ecosystems.
The summer school model developed at Uzhhorod offers a template for operating under severe constraints. By bringing international faculty into the conflict zone rather than moving students out of it, the program sidesteps martial law restrictions while maintaining genuine face-to-face interaction. It also builds local capacity in a way that cannot be relocated or extracted. When the war eventually ends, Uzhhorod will not just have a stock of graduates; it will have a functioning scientific community with its own internal ties and a connection to global networks that were maintained deliberately throughout the war.
The broader request from the researchers is straightforward: treat education as infrastructure during wartime. That means recognizing that every summer school, every mentorship relationship, and every informal tie sustained across borders is part of the long-term scaffolding on which science will be rebuilt. The work of protecting science under the systemic stress of wartime cannot be reduced to preserving buildings or instruments. It means protecting the slow, human process by which a new generation of scientists comes into being. The summer school at Uzhhorod demonstrates that this is possible, even under the most difficult conditions, and that the dividends will be measured not only in papers and grants, but in diagnoses, treatments, and lives changed by a rare disease.
This article is based on reporting by Phys.org. Read the original article.
Originally published on phys.org
