2023-08-03 21:00:00
The winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine highlights the importance of free, basic research, without it being directed towards any particular practical application, to continue with discoveries that then guide public and private investments. He advocates implementing science education for children, starting in preschool.
Why is basic science, which is strictly speaking experimental and nonapplicational, so important?
The basic sciences are the root of all discoveries that lead to technological and medical developments. There are so many examples that your audience should really be aware of, the range of research that, at least initially, was thought to be of no practical value, but which, of course, later becomes something of great importance. I can tell you from my own experience that my research began with an interest in how cells make protein molecules that are exported out of the cell. This is a process that many of the cells in our body depend on. For example, it is a process used in the pancreas for the production of insulin, which must escape the cell and travel throughout the body to stimulate glucose uptake in tissues such as muscle and fat cells, which are then used. for energy production. Our body, our genome, encodes thousands of different protein molecules that must be made within the cell and exported from it. This is a very basic process that has been studied for many decades, a Nobel Prize was awarded in 1974 for the discovery of the secretion process and how the membranes within a cell organize the trafficking of molecules such as insulin, which ultimately leaves the cell. cell. What I did in my job, early in my career, shortly thereafter, was to study this process in a single microorganism, baker’s yeast, which had the technical ability to allow me to discover the genes that are required to organize and execute this process, using techniques that were not available in the study of animal or human cells, for which a type of genetic analysis was much more difficult. In any case, we discovered these genes, many of them, and we studied how they operate in this process. We later learned that these same genes, which evolved two billion years ago in humble yeast, are virtually the same ones used in the human body to organize the same process. That is, two billion years of evolution have been based on the same machinery that evolved at the beginning of the Earth, in microorganisms. Now, this had no obvious practical application, except that it turns out that if yeast has the same machinery, then it became feasible to use yeast as a platform for the production of clinically important human proteins. So I helped a local biotech company engineer the production of the hepatitis B virus surface protein. And now, yeast cells are used in very large fermentation tanks to make small membranes containing the hepatitis antigen and used for vaccination. The entire world supply of vaccines is made in yeast. Similarly, it was possible to engineer the production of human insulin by introducing the human insulin gene into yeast cells and essentially tricking these cells into making large quantities of insulin, which is now grown in huge fermentation tanks, a third of the world supply of recombinant human insulin. That’s just one of many examples where basic fundamental discovery and observation of processes in the natural world have unexpected practical benefits.
Another, more modern example is the discovery of the genes and proteins that bacteria use to fight infection by bacterial viruses. It turns out that there is an arms race between viruses and cells, not only for us, but even for the most modest bacteria. Bacteria have developed, evolved, a kind of native immunological approach that allows them to fight their own bacterial viruses. And the discovery of these genes and the mechanism of this process led to the current revolution in genome editing. The Crispr Cas9 technology, which you may have heard of and readers may be aware of, is the result of a fundamental series of discoveries made by people who study microorganisms and then, without any particular knowledge of how it could be applied, have had a revolutionary impact, that kind of story repeats itself over and over again. So many of us in basic science have stories to tell about how this has unexpected benefits. That’s why these kinds of efforts must continue, because we still have huge challenges in health care that have not been met.
Do you feel that governments and companies invest less in basic science and focus their attention on investments aimed at specific applications that pursue certain interests?
Of course. It is understandable that governments, and particularly companies that have to make a profit to survive, focus their efforts on practical things. But governments around the world, certainly in the developed world, also see the benefit of an investment in basic science. And many companies, but not all, also engage in basic science as the foundation of their development effort. One major company, an early biotech company called Genentech, still has a very active basic science program where its researchers are allowed to pursue their own interests, and of course, occasionally something of practical value will emerge. So the company is in a perfect position to develop intellectual property patents and then pursue discovery for development. But my point is that it’s not just the developed world, but all countries need to have some base of support for basic science for the following reason: the basic science that is done in countries around the world trains young people in the principles of how to conduct proper experiments, design and conduct experiments. These are the same tools that young people will take with them when they enter, for example, the pharmaceutical or biotech industry. Now, if a country doesn’t invest in this basic infrastructure, the young people who are naturally interested in this technology and these scientific discoveries will simply go elsewhere and the country will lose the investment it made in educating these people. Let me give you a very specific example from my recent experience: A couple of months ago I visited Istanbul, Turkey, at the invitation of a research foundation, and was introduced to half a dozen Turkish basic scientists, who had done outstanding work. Each of them had left the country to have a successful research career, in Germany, in the United States, in Switzerland. They all left Turkey and will not return due to a systematic lack of investment in its basic scientific infrastructure. This is a missed opportunity for a country like Turkey to lose such talented people, who are not there, to invest locally in the development of the industry in that country. Every country needs to have some basic support that is at a world-class level, so that those young people who are interested in science work, stay and benefit the country.
Your research made a great contribution to the biotechnology industry, as it allowed pharmacological products to be obtained on a large scale, among others insulin, interferon and the hepatitis B vaccine. What is the relationship between scientists and the pharmaceutical industry like?
Over the many years of my career, I have enjoyed very good relationships with biotechnology companies around the world. I serve science. The advisory boards of these companies are many of my graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who train and then join these companies. And I have found, particularly in biotech companies, that they are doing cutting-edge research, but it is directed toward practical application. This requires that they have a steady supply of young staff trained in basic science, who can apply that knowledge to a company’s commercial interests. So I have found a big change in my perspective over the years, and now I am very supportive of my students to work in these industries. This was not always true when I started. Many years ago there was no biotech industry, so it was all basic science and no obvious practical applications. But that has changed, and I’m pretty sure that will be the case anywhere in the world.
You have been against any type of privatization of education and health, because, in your opinion, “transforming public institutions into private ones, with private benefits, has an impact on the quality of life of the working class.” Do you think that Is there a tendency to transfer the public to the private and that economic interests are stronger than the need to create more humane and inclusive societies?
I have spent almost my entire academic life at a public university, but I do not discount the value of private universities. I was a graduate student at Stanford, which is an outstanding private university. In the United States there is a good kind of symbiotic or interactive relationship between the public and the private. However, in almost all parts of the world, the vast majority of university students are in public institutions and serve a greater good than private universities could, due to this enormous number of students we train. We train many more students at Berkeley than Stanford could possibly train, and we take a population of students quite different from the demographic profile of the university; students at public institutions are very different. Private universities, of course, have working class students, but the majority of their students are from upper middle class or upper class families. Let me give you a statistic, that I am very proud of, about the University of California, Berkeley. We are the leading institution in the United States in taking students from families in the bottom 20% economic level and turning them into leaders who end up in the top 1%. That transformation from the bottom 20% to the top 1% is remarkable. And that is why universities, particularly public ones, are the most effective engine of social mobility in our societies, thus public institutions fulfill and must continue to play that role.
Listen to the full interview on Radio Perfil.
by Jorge Fontevecchia
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