A niche for scientists from Eastern Europe

Eastern European biomedical researchers who collaborate with Western scientists have benefited from the West's more advanced technology, which is sorely lacking in their home countries. In return they have provided Western researchers with valuable insights into basic biological systems and processes that Westerners lost as a result of overspecialization. Electron microscopy and electrophysiology, for example, were skills still practiced by Eastern scientists, but which had waned in the West. Western advances in molecular biology reestablished a demand for these skills and their practitioners.