Milei’s cuts put Argentine science on the brink of collapse – 10/01/2024 – Science
Argentine biologist Alejandro Nadra is worried because he has had to suspend some of his experiments on proteins to prevent genetic diseases. Javier Milei’s government’s drastic budget cuts are cornering science and opening the door to an exodus of researchers.
“We are on the verge of collapse,” says Nadra in an interview with AFP, surrounded by boxes and test tubes on the crowded table in his laboratory at the Faculty of Exact Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, home to three Nobel Prize winners in science.
“If something doesn’t change, everything will soon fall apart”, he warns.
The “anarcho-capitalist” president Javier Milei, elected at the end of last year in a context of uncontrolled inflation (236% in August), immediately began a crusade against public spending.
Among other measures, the government began the year by freezing public university and research budgets, and although there were later updates, real spending on science and technology was down 33% year-on-year in August, according to the Centro Ibero -American Research in Science, Technology and Innovation.
“People are leaving, stopping applying for scholarships or teaching positions because they can’t make a living,” says Nadra.
The researcher, who is also working on the development of biosensors to detect pollutants such as lead or arsenic in water, explains that “the discontinuity of one of these lines implies that they will not have immediate or long-term application.”
Salaries (around R$6,000) lost between 25% and 30% in real terms in June compared to last year, according to a September report from the RAICYT network of scientific institutes.
Drastic reduction
“This is the first time that we have had subsidies granted for which we have not received a peso, and not only have we not received them, but they have told us ‘you are not going to receive them’,” biologist Edith Kordon, from the laboratory she directs, told AFP. at IFIBYNE, a state institute dedicated to animal physiology, molecular biology and neurosciences.
Kordon and his team are studying the similarities and differences between what happens in the normal mammary gland and in the breast tumor to find mechanisms for preventing or curing breast cancer.
“It’s a small amount of money that a scientific system needs to function well,” says Kordon.
Former Science Minister Lino Barañao (2007-2018) recently highlighted that, while Argentina invests 0.31% of its GDP in science, Brazil spends 1.21%, the United States, 3.45% and Korea from the South, 4.9%.
In Argentina, budget execution in science and technology fell, in real terms, 51% compared to the previous year until June, according to RAICYT.
“Never in Argentina’s recent history has there been such a drastic reduction in the scientific budget,” Barañao told the newspaper La Nación.
It was state investment that allowed, for example, the development of drought-resistant transgenic wheat by Raquel Chan, a researcher at Conicet, the main scientific body in Argentina, with hundreds of award-winning researchers.
One of them, Florencia Cayrol, has just won the 2024 Global Research Award for her work on thyroid hormones in cancer therapies.
A 2021 law establishes a staggered increase in the scientific budget to 1% of GDP, but this year the rule is not being applied and the government has proposed repealing it in 2025.
“You think of the collapse as a massive catastrophe, and in fact it’s already happening,” Kordon said.
Dangerous precipice
Last week, the government adjusted Conicet’s budget by just over US$100,000 (R$544,700), a value that one of its researchers, physicist Jorge Aliaga, considered “irrelevant” to the sector’s needs. “It doesn’t change anything,” he told AFP.
In March, a group of 68 renowned scientists expressed in a public letter their concern about “how the Argentine system of science and technology is approaching a dangerous precipice.”
When justifying the cuts, Milei targeted “supposed scientists and intellectuals who believe that having an academic degree makes them superior beings.”
“If you think your research is so useful, I invite you to go into business like any other neighbor’s kid, do your research, publish a book, and see whether people are interested or not, rather than hiding behind force state coercion,” he said.
“What he said is absurd,” said Alejandro Nadra. “Historically, all technological developments have been wholly or largely leveraged by the state.”
“State support,” he added, “has made everything possible, from the development of vaccines to antibiotics, such as Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in the last century.”
