Internatiomal science: Function, dysfunction and flowers in a grassy field

(Second of two parts) Lessons from Latin America

So far, my stories have only provided readers with images of First World science. Moving on to examples of greater imperfection, I would like to offer some observations concerning a few developing countries, starting with Brazil. In the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, I am told that one percent of tax revenues go directly into science. Like Filipinos, the Brazilians do not have a perfect system. They have their share of power-hungry and/or incompetent bureaucrats, unpublished scientist-administrators, destructive professional jealousies or rivalries among scientists, and instances of outright corruption. As a society, they are also recovering from years of political dictatorship and face social problems such as poverty, crime and lack of education. One can walk on a downtown street in Sao Paulo and imagine being in Europe, turn a corner and find oneself again in the Third World amid garbage, beggars, potential robbers, and kidnap rings. But, democracy is at work in Brazil. They have a populist president who is committed to change (and, by the way, has a good relationship with Washington arch-enemy Hugo Chavez). Despite their problems, they have a system enlightened enough to use tax money to properly equip laboratories, adequately fund research projects, finance attendance at scientific meetings abroad, send their young scientists for research training (for example, to my laboratory in California), fly foreign scientists (like me) to the University of Sao Paulo to give lectures. As an editor of a leading international scientific journal, I get to oversee the rigorous peer-review process that manuscripts from my Brazilian friends are subjected to. Clearly, Brazilians can do world-class science, and they do it in Brazil. It is not so surprising when I go from my place of work in Santa Barbara to Los Angeles (on my way to visit loved ones in Canada), that I often fly in a plane called the Brasilia, designed and manufactured in Brazil, or that my former car was a Brazilian Volkswagen. An anecdote worth including involves a Brazilian student who spent a year in my laboratory: he says he was once reported to the police when he arrived at a small Brazilian town to catch hummingbirds for research. His permit had been approved but was not in his possession, so they threw him in jail. Even my ex-convict visiting student thought this was an admirable demonstration of Brazilian environmental consciousness.

I am writing this article in Colima, Mexico, where my graduate student and I are conducting research in collaboration with a Mexican scientist and two of his students. My collaborator says two-thirds of his salary is based on his productivity — if he did not publish scientific papers, his salary would be one-third of what he currently receives. On two occasions, I conducted research at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution’s station on Barro Colorado Island, in the Panama Canal. There, we got to know scientists and students from various Central and South American countries who were conducting research alongside Americans, Canadians, Australians and Europeans of various nationalities. The Hispanic scientists had international reputations, were well published in peer-reviewed journals, and were excellent role models for their students. I also had a visiting Chilean student in my California laboratory who got her own grant from the Chilean government and brought samples to my laboratory for biochemical analysis. While she was washing cuvettes (sort of a rectangular test-tube that fits in an instrument called a spectrophotometer) in the laboratory, I asked her what the word for cuvette was in Spanish. She said cubeta. Lavandera de cubetas is now a Ph.D. student funded by the Fulbright Foundation at the University of California at Berkeley. Her home department at the Universidad Catolica, in Santiago, Chile, is staffed by a number of internationally recognized scientists (I know two of them personally) who are great role models to their students, assets to their country, and active contributors — through their peer-reviewed publications in international journals — to the advancement of scientific knowledge.

It is interesting to think of how many of these countries were also former colonies of European countries and that they are subject to the same (or at least very similar) influences as those seen in the Philippines, i.e., former dictatorships, anti-communism used to justify oppression, government corruption, inequities between the rich and poor, Spanish or Portuguese and Church influences on culture and way of life, history of covert or overt US meddling in national affairs. They should have as many excuses as anyone or any country for having a completely dysfunctional scientific system.

Avoiding the road to dysfunction

In my youth in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Philippines was full of talent, nationalism, and promise; in many ways, it somehow still "worked" as a country and its progress seemed unstoppable. It is very common for Filipinos my age and older to lament the fact that then, the Philippines was ahead of many developing countries but now has been overtaken by them. I promised not to be critical. But we are in the 21st century, and the dearth of peer-reviewed articles originating from the Philippines leads me to fear that the country of my birth may be on the road heading toward complete dysfunction. It may be considered improper for an outsider to offer unsolicited "advice" to a scientific community not lacking in intelligence, expertise or nationalism. Despite the current sad state of Philippine science, within this community are "flowers in bloom in the grassy field." As we all learned in grade school, these need sunshine, fresh air, clean water and good soil. We learned from Rizal’s life that it should not be considered a bad thing to write of darkness, foul air, and dirty water. Filipinos shot the messenger in 1896, and his message was censored for decades afterwards by the Church and banned in some of the best universities in the country. It is in this light that I view negative reactions to objective analyses of the state of Philippine science. How sadly counter-productive! How contrary such reactions are to the interests of the Filipino people! But for every Filipino in Rizal’s firing squad in 1896, there were thousands of others who joined the revolution. Today, for every person who does not want to read or hear of dysfunction in Philippine science, there are many more who realize that it is time for change. May the flowers bloom.

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Dr. Raul Kamantigue Suarez is a professor at the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology of the University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106-9610, USA, and editor of the Journal of Experimental Biology, Cambridge, UK. E-mail him at [email protected]