Argentine biochemist Alejandro Nadra worries that President Javier Millei’s budget cuts will undermine his scientific quest to understand the causes of genetic diseases that disable and kill millions of people. I am concerned that this may not be the case.
Scientists fear underfunded Argentina research is on the verge of collapse
Since taking office last December, Millais has been on a budget-cutting agenda, freezing public university and research budgets despite annual inflation reaching 236%.
According to the CIICTI Research Center, this means real spending on science and technology fell by 33% in August compared to a year earlier.
Nadra said he has already had to halt some experiments using proteins that are responsible for disease-causing genetic mutations.
“We are on the verge of collapse,” Nadra told AFP 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 you run out of materials, you either borrow from someone who still has them, or you stop experimenting.”
Research assistants at Argentina’s Conicet Research Council now earn a total monthly salary of about $1,180, about 30 percent less than a year ago, according to the network science institute RAICYT.
According to official statistics released last week, 52.9 percent of people in Argentina, where Millay lives, live in poverty.
Biologist Edith Cordon works at the IFIBYNE State Research Institute and studies breast cancer.
“This is the first time something like this has happened to me. I mean, it’s always been very difficult to get funding, it’s always been very difficult to get scholarships, but now we have nothing to do. There’s a real certainty that there won’t be… “I’ve never had so much money to do anything,” she told AFP.
Former science minister Lino Varanao recently said that even before Millei’s cuts, Argentina spent about 0.31% of its GDP on science, compared with 1.21% in Brazil, 3.45% in the United States, and 4.9% in South Korea. He emphasized that it was.
Today it is even less, at about 0.2 percent.
“There has never been such a drastic budget cut in Argentina’s recent history,” Varanao told La Nación newspaper.
In a more prosperous past, state research funding enabled the development of drought-tolerant transgenic wheat lines by the Coniset research team, among other life-changing breakthroughs.
Last week, the Millais government revised Coniset’s 2024 operating budget upwards to just over $100,000, but physicist Jorge Arriaga considers this figure insufficient and “irrelevant.”
“Nothing changes,” he told AFP.
In March, a group of 68 Nobel laureates from around the world expressed concern in an open letter that Argentina’s public research system was approaching a “dangerous cliff”.
Millais, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist,” criticizes “so-called scientists and intellectuals who believe that having a degree makes them superior.”
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