Spanish science has been mired in a crisis that seems to have no end for more than a decade. The public research system has lost more than 20,000 million euros since 2009. Although the economic recovery came years ago, the laboratories have barely felt the improvements. Public investment in science is stagnant at levels similar to 2012, largely due to political instability and the inability to pass new budgets.
Amid all this darkness, the scientific community saw one of its historic claims fulfilled in the summer of 2018 with the appointment of Pedro Duque at the head of a ministry that combined the powers of science, innovation and universities, three areas that it considers inseparable. The new Government outlined by Pedro Sánchez now takes that conquest from them to create a Ministry of Universities assigned to the sociologist Manuel Castells, a decision that has achieved unanimous rejection by scientists, rectors and leaders in innovation.
“These powers cannot be separated, doing so can cause a fight between these two ministries over resources that are already scarce,” denounces the physicist Perla Wahnón, president of the scientific societies of Spain (Cosce). “Furthermore, it is a decision contrary to what we see in the main European powers, in the EU executive itself, and that reduces political weight to science in the Council of Ministers”, adds Wahnón. “This is bad news for Spain,” they say in a joint statement sent last Friday by Cosce, the rectors of public universities, the scientific-medical associations and the Severo Ochoa centers and units, the elite of scientific research in Spain.
The key is now in the detailed structure of the new Government, which will define how many powers and budget the Duke’s ministry loses in favor of Universities. “The separation of universities and science is not the most recommended model, but it is not something new either,” explains Jorge Barrero, general director of the Cotec Foundation. “These powers have been separated for 14 of the last 20 years, first in the Aznar government, then in Zapatero’s and since 2012 in Rajoy’s”, he highlights. What is unprecedented is a separate university ministry for education and science, he adds, possibly because most university powers are transferred to the autonomous communities and very little remains in state hands.
In Spain, around 70% of scientific research is carried out by universities, but the state funding they receive for this depends on the National R&D Plan managed by the Ministry of Science and which is awarded based on a competitive contest. , hence the misgivings of the research community about possible Solomonic divisions of these funds. “Breaking up this single bag to take part of this money to universities would be irresponsible,” says Barrero, who sees it more feasible to give Castells a ministry in charge of lifelong training that manages Vocational Training, currently attached to Education , and job training courses that depend on Labor.
The challenges of the upcoming legislature
“Give me 700 million and I’ll tell you how many scientists can return to Spain,” Pedro Duque declared to EL PAÍS in November 2018, four months after taking office. That was an impossible wish because the budget pact that the Government of Pedro Sánchez and Podemos had reached barely contemplated raising the science budgets by 273 million euros. That pact never materialized and the budgets are still frozen and extended, but Duque can say that he fulfilled one of his main promises: approving a package of urgent measures for science that ended the previous intervention, the bureaucratic hurdle that was suffocating the public research centers to the point where scientists couldn’t even buy chairs.
In this new legislature, the main problem will once again be money. In 2018, investment in R&D rose by a timid 6%, which is explained by the greater investment from the private sector. Scientists now ask for a public compensation, but without going crazy. They do not even ask for Spain to spend 2% of GDP on R&D&I, something that most parties have in their program, including Podemos, but that scientists and experts see as totally unfeasible in the short period of four years .
“If in this legislature the budget of the National Plan were to be doubled, which represents a total of some 350 million euros more, it would already be a great achievement”, highlights Luis Serrano, president of Somma.
This program is bread and salt for the vast majority of scientists in Spain and it especially nourishes the middle classes of research, those who do not have the resources or the human capital to manage large projects, but who make up the critical mass of the system public R&D&i. This group faces two years of cuts of up to 20% in this legislature due to the new calendar of calls promoted by the Duke Ministry and that has stirred up the scientific community, especially cancer researchers grouped in the ASEICA association. “Our position is to wait and see,” explains Xosé Bustelo, president of this organization. “The minister so far has spoken more than he has done. We hope that in this legislature the batteries are put in place to solve the pending problems that our long-suffering R&D&i system has”, he adds.
“Almost everything remains to be done,” says Pablo Jiménez, spokesman for the Federation of Young Researchers. “The R&D system is broken and needs a major injection of money,” he stresses.
Despite the measures against bureaucracy approved by Duque, there are still many present. One of them, explains Álvaro Rodríguez-Lescure, president of the Society of Medical Oncology, is that with the current regulations, cooperative groups such as network research centers for cancer, cardiovascular or respiratory ailments, among others, are not “tax subjects fundable, which prevents them from attending calls for public funds”, he highlights. “Another objective for Duque’s new mandate should be to create a specific item to carry out independent clinical trials that, due to their objectives, are not profitable for the pharmaceutical industry but that can bring great benefits to patients and the biomedical community,” he explains. . These are, for example, studies designed to reuse already approved and off-patent drugs or carry out studies that prevent cancer patients who have already been cured from having to go through the usual protocol and receive an additional year of treatment.
The forgotten Cajal museum
Manuel Ansede
Another of the tasks of the Ministry of Science will be to find a solution for the so-called Cajal Legacy: 22,000 pieces —letters, drawings, manuscripts, photographs— of Santiago Ramón y Cajal that have been stored since 1989 in boxes in a basement of the Cajal Institute, a center of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) located in Madrid. The scientific community has been calling for years for the creation of a Ramón y Cajal National Museum, dedicated to the winner of the 1906 Nobel Prize for Medicine, the father of neuroscience.