Barañao plans both to reverse the brain drain and to retain scientists. He has promised that in 2009 the government will increase the budget for competitive research grants by 40% over the current year, to around 700 million pesos (US$ 210 million). More is being pumped into professorial labs and salaries. In 2008, the national research council CONICET increased researchers' salaries by 30 % to about $ 1,000 a month; a far cry from the $ 450 or so that a full professor made in 1990. Infrastructure expansion, with an initial budget of $ 50 million, is to start next year.
In one of its most ambitious plans, the government is building a $ 50-million science complex called Polo Cientifico in the trendy Palermo area of Buenos Aires to house several new research institutes. One will be an international interdisciplinary research centre focusing on biomedicine, information technology, nanotechnology and the social sciences. Another a partnership with the
Max Planck Society in Germany will have 200 scientific staff working on molecular biology, neuroscience and cancer when it is completed in 2011. And at the University of Buenos Aires, an $ 8-million science building is being planned to house the centre where Kornblihtt works: the Institute for Physiology, Molecular Biology and Neurosciences, directed by Osvaldo Uchitel.
But it may take more than money to bring scientists back. In the worst years of military rule, the 1976-83 Dirty War, an estimated 30,000 people disappeared. Subsequent investigations revealed that they were often dumped from military aircraft into the ocean. "We all know someone who disappeared," Kornblihtt says. In the university building containing Kornblihtt's lab, there are floor-to-ceiling banners with names and photographs of the disappeared students - a daily reminder ofthe past.
Kornblihtt was one of those who remained in Argentina through much of the troubled times, aided at times by philanthropic grants. In 2000, he was selected by the Antorchas Foundation of Buenos Aires to receive three consecutive three-year grants worth a total of $ 900,000. "This changed the quality of my science", he says. The money has allowed him to equip his lab, nurture students and collaborate internationally in his work on alternative splicinig, the process by which messenger RNA is cut into different forms before coding for proteins.
In 2002, and again in 2007, Kornblihtt received a five-year international fellowship of around $ 100,000 a year from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The HHMI expanded its international programme to Latin America in 1997 and Argentina now has 14 HHMI-funded researchers. Only Canada receives more of the institute's international awards. "We don't make grants because a nation has difficult economic times," says Jill Conley, director of the HHMI's international programme. "We hold the bar high. But it is gratifying to see that this offers some folks a lifeline."
Anonymous donors
As Argentina's economy has strengthened, philanthropy from national donors has also grown. By 2006, the Leloir Institute Foundation in Buenos Aires had amassed a $ 25-million endowment from private donations, of which about $ 3 million is now being used to build a new wing that will house core equipment for the institute's 25 principal investigators. The wing is set to open in 2009, when a symposium is planned around the institute's primary fields of neuroscience, cell biology, cancer and infectious disease. But the main donor wishes to remain anonymous. Maintaining such a low proftle is common in Latin American countries, because the wealthy fear undesirable scrutiny or kidnapping.
Located in central Buenos Aires, the Leloir Institute looks like a research centre in any major world capital, from its airy labs to the modern art on the lawn. The foundation was named after Luis Federico Leloir, who won Argentina's second scientific Nobel for chemistry - in 1970. Institute director Fernando Goldbaum, one of five HHMI fellows there, studies brucellosis, a bacterial infection that has re-emerged in recent years in both humans and livestock. As two of the world's largest beef exporters, Argentina and its neighbour Brazil together lose an estimated $ 100 million annually to the disease. Last year, working with Roberto Bogomolni of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Goldbaum identified light-sensitive proteins that increase the virulence of brucellosis bacteria.
Goldbaum says that high-quality research of this type is already commonplace in Argentina, but often receives little international notice. Last year, Leloir scientists felt that Argentina was improperly lumped together with developing countries in an issue of Nature Medicine about "shoestring" science, which included an article about
bamboo microscopes in India.
Neuroscientist Alejandro Schinder almost jumps from his seat at the mention of bamboo microscopes. Schinder did postdoctoral research with neuroscientist Fred Gage at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California, and then returned in 2002 to establish his own laboratory at the Leloir Institute. In a recent paper, Schinder, Gage and their team showed that newly born neurons in the adult brain make connections with existing cells, resolving a controversy about whether such cells contribute to working neuronal circuits. As part of this, Schinder's lab used a light-activated ion channel to show how the connections functioned. "You don't publish research like this with bamboo microscopes," says Schinder. "Not a single day do I regret my decision [to move back]. The impact of my science is much greater in Argentina than in the United States. We started a virgin field here."
Goldbaum says that six new principal investigator positions will be added at the institute in the next few years, funded by the endowment. "We have a strong policy to reverse the brain drain", he says.
Barañao estimates that about 850 of the 5,000 researchers in Argentina are of the world-class calibre that he particularly wants to retain and, to do so, the science ministry plans to match the money that Argentinian researchers receive from international grant givers, such as the HHMI. "We want to reward the most innovative and productive", he says. "So we are going to match their outside grants." Much of the money promised to competitive grants in the 2009 budget will go towards this.
Juan Pablo Paz, a physicist at the University of Buenos Aires, sees these actions as vital to giving science a greater cultural and political presence in Argentina. "Science has not been viewed as something that creates economic opportunity," he says. "But now it is being seen as part ofour economic policy. I am very encouraged."
Outside the country though, there is still hesitancy. Oscar Bruno, a mathematician who attended Kirchner's New York meeting, left his homeland in 1986 to complete a doctorate in mathematics at New York University. Now he is a tenured professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Barañao is creating an institute for applied mathematics, a public-private partnership based in Buenos Aires. But although Bruno feels the cultural draw to return, he is not yet sure if the incentives and investment in Argentinian science are enough to persuade him to leave the US lifestyle he has adopted. "I am watching and thinking," he says, "I would like to help my country. But returning is a very difficult call."
Rex Dalton is a reporter for Nature based in San Diego.
Adapted by Sebas from
Nature, 456, 441-442 (2008).
