Thomas Viola/AFP, Buenos Aires
Argentine biochemist Alejandro Nadra says Argentine President Javier Millei’s budget cuts have undermined his scientific quest to understand the causes of genetic diseases that disable and kill millions of people. I am concerned that this will happen.
Since taking office last December, Millais has been on a budget-cutting agenda, freezing public university and research budgets despite annual inflation reaching 236%.
This means real spending on science and technology in August was down 33% year-on-year, the CIICTI Research Center said.
Photo: AFP
Nadra said he has already had to halt some experiments using proteins that are responsible for disease-causing genetic mutations.
“We are on the brink of collapse,” Nadra said from his lab at the University of Buenos Aires, which has produced three Nobel Prize winners in science.
Artists, teachers, pilots, social workers and countless other professionals have been affected by Millay’s work to curb inflation and public debt, and scientists are weighing their future in Argentina. I’m concerned.
“People are leaving and not applying for scholarships or teaching jobs because they can’t make a living,” Nadra said.
Those who do so often end up working in laboratories that lack the necessary equipment and supplies.
“If things don’t change, the time is near when everything will collapse,” Nadra said.
Nadra said he has not been able to buy anything he needs for his research since last November.
“So when we run out of supplies, we either borrow from people who still have them or we stop experimenting,” Nadra said.
Research assistants at Argentina’s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) currently earn about $1,180 a month, about 30% less than a year ago, according to RAICYT, a network of scientific institutions.
According to official statistics released last week, 52.9 percent of people in Mirei’s Argentina live in poverty.
Biologist Edith Cordon works at the Institute of Physiology, Molecular Biology and Neuroscience and studies breast cancer.
“This is the first time something like this has happened. I mean, it’s always been very difficult to get funding, it’s always been very difficult to get scholarships, but now we have a realistic situation where we don’t have anything. “I’m sure…I’ve never had so much money for anything,” she said.
Former Argentina Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation Lino Varanao recently said that even before Millei’s cuts, Argentina spent about 0.31% of its GDP on science, compared to 1.21% in Brazil, 3.45% in the United States, and 3.45% in South Korea. emphasized that it was 4.9%.
Today it is even less, at about 0.2 percent.
“Never in Argentina’s recent history has the (science) budget been cut so drastically,” Varanao told La Nación newspaper.
In a more prosperous past, state-funded research enabled the CONICET research team to develop drought-tolerant transgenic wheat lines, among other life-changing breakthroughs.
Last week, the Millais government revised CONICET’s operating budget for this year upwards to just over US$100,000, but physicist Jorge Arriaga believes this figure is insufficient and “irrelevant.”
“Nothing changes,” Arriaga said.
