Argentina's crisis heralds time of torment for scientists

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nature 415, 104 (2002) 

Argentina's crisis heralds time of torment for scientists 

CAROL MARZUOLA 

Argentinian scientists face a grim new year in the wake of their
country's slide into political and economic chaos. With salaries
unpaid and grant money effectively impounded by the banks, work in
Argentina's labs is grinding to a halt. There are widespread fears
that years of effort spent building globally competitive research
groups could rapidly unravel.

"I think the economic situation can only worsen," says Armando Parodi,
a biochemist at the National University of General San Martín's
Institute for Biotechnology Research in Buenos Aires and a chief
investigator for the national council for science and technology
(CONICET). "The economic fiasco has brought on a social fiasco and the
very cohesion of society has been affected."

Unfortunately for Parodi and other Argentinian scientists, it is
unclear who in the government will shield them from the consequences
of the crisis. As Nature went to press, the key post of national
secretary of science and technology - which oversees CONICET,
employing most of Argentina's leading researchers, and a parallel
granting body, the national agency for the promotion of science and
technology - remained unfilled.

The previous occupant, Adriana Puiggrós, resigned immediately after
President Fernando de la Rúa, whose departure from office on 20
December brought the country's crisis to a head. Adolfo Rodríguez Sáa,
the third of Argentina's five presidents since then, appointed a
science and technology secretary during his one-week tenure, but the
post was vacated when he resigned on 30 December. Science has not been
a top priority for President Eduardo Duhalde, who took over on 2
January. "We're in a period of transition and uncertainty," says Juan
Tirao, acting president of CONICET. Tirao suspects that the country's
science agencies may be restructured in the wake of the economic and
political crisis.

Argentina's scientists have struggled during the country's four years
of recession. But their troubles deepened in early December when the
government placed a 250-peso (US$250) weekly limit on bank
withdrawals, effectively denying access to research grants.

"We need the assistance of politicians and economists to avoid
collapse and a waste of resources," says Osvaldo Sala, an ecologist at
the University of Buenos Aires. Sala fears that the chaos will force
many scientists to leave Argentina or to quit science altogether.

Monetary-exchange controls, imposed to protect the peso, have
exacerbated the situation for scientists, many of whom rely on foreign
equipment, reagents and journals. Sala, who heads a major project
funded by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, has
been directly affected. He cannot transfer funds from an Argentinian
bank to his colleagues in other countries.

Argentina's devaluation of the peso, announced on 7 January, pegs the
official currency at 1.4 pesos to the US dollar, while allowing it to
float on unofficial markets. But the devaluation itself is fraught
with difficulty, and it is unclear, for example, whether imported
scientific equipment could be bought at the official rate. "Things are
changing by the minute," says Sala.

"A situation like this is so extreme that we can't predict what will
happen in the next month," says biochemist Eduardo Olivero, director
of the Southern Centre for Scientific Research in Tierra del
Fuego. "Our hope is that the government will quickly clarify the
situation for the country's scientific community - something that
obviously hasn't been talked about in the past few days because of the
gravity of our social and political crisis."


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