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.
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.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
RSS