Sun, Oct 06, 2024 page12

• Milei cuts Argentina’s research budgets

  • By Tomas Viola / AFP, BUENOS AIRES
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  Argentine biochemist Alejandro Nadra worries that Argentine President Javier Milei’s budget cuts would undo his scientific quest to unravel the cause of genetic diseases that disable and kill millions.

  Since taking office in December last year, budget-slashing Milei has frozen public university and research budgets even as annual inflation stands at 236 percent.

  This meant real spending on science and technology fell 33 percent year-on-year in August, the CIICTI research center said.

  

  Argentine biochemist Alejandro Nadra poses for a photograph in his laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires on Sept. 16.

  Photo: AFP

  Nadra said he has already had to stop some of his experiments with the proteins responsible for gene mutations that cause diseases.

  “We are on the verge of collapse,” Nadra said from his laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires, home to three Nobel Prize laureates in science.

  Along with artists, teachers, pilots, social workers and countless other professionals affected by Milei’s drive to curb flyaway inflation and public debt, scientists fear for their future in Argentina.

  “People are leaving, and they aren’t applying for scholarships or teaching positions anymore, because they can’t make a living,” Nadra said.

  Those who do often end up working in labs without the necessary equipment or supplies.

  “If things don’t change, the time is near when everything disintegrates,” said Nadra.

  Nadra said he has not been able to buy anything he needs for his research since November last year.

  “So, if I run out of supplies, I either borrow from someone who still has some, or I stop doing those experiments,” Nadra said.

  The gross monthly salary of a research assistant today at the Argentine National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina (CONICET) is about 30 percent less, about US$1,180, than a year ago, the RAICYT network of science institutes said.

  Official figures released last week showed that 52.9 percent of people live in poverty in Milei’s Argentina.

  Biologist Edith Kordon works at the Institute for Physiology, Molecular Biology and Neurosciences, where she investigates breast cancer.

  “This is the first time this has happened to me. I mean, it has always been very hard to get funding, it has always been very hard to get scholarships, but now there is this practical certainty that we have nothing... I’ve never had so little money to do anything,” she said.

  Former Argentine minister of science, technology and innovation Lino Baranao recently highlighted that even before Milei’s cuts, Argentina spent about 0.31 percent of GDP on science compared with 1.21 percent in Brazil, 3.45 percent in the US and 4.9 percent in South Korea.

  Today, it is even less, at about 0.2 percent.

  “Never in the recent history of Argentina has there been such a drastic reduction in the [scientific] budget,” Baranao told La Nacion newspaper.

  In a more prosperous past, state funding of research had made possible the development of a transgenic wheat strain resistant to drought by a CONICET research team, among other life-changing breakthroughs.

  Last week, Milei’s government adjusted CONICET’s working budget upward to just more than US$100,000 for this year, a figure which physicist Jorge Aliaga considers “irrelevant” in its inadequacy.

  “It doesn’t change anything,” Aliaga said.
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