“Scientists are trained not to speculate, although the politician wants us to speculate and society sometimes needs it. But if you speculate too much you stop being a scientist and become a charlatan. In science, ‘I think’ is always a wrong word.” The Uruguayan researcher Rafael Radi thus explains why science has an increasingly important role, but also a more complicated one to define, in a society that faces challenges that are also increasingly complex. Radi specifically speaks of the human right to science, which supports the idea that every human being should have the opportunity to benefit from advances in scientific and technological progress. During conferences held recently in Montevideo on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the UNESCO office in the region, Radi and other Latin American researchers explained that the time has come to talk about that right, and to defend it.
“The universal declaration of human rights already contains it, in article 27, but it is true that, for a long time, the right to science has been in the background or third place. The point is that, today, the complexity of the issues that we must resolve on this globalized planet, such as the aging of the population or the brutal challenge to the environment, means that science has to be viewed as an integral part of human rights. ”, Radi later explains to EL PAÍS. “Scientific thinking, critical thinking and evidence-based decisions would go a long way in resolving these issues. I do not see another sustainable way in the future of the planet than to incorporate the scientific arsenal to all the dimensions of human activity”.
The complexity of the issues that we must resolve in this globalized planet means that science has to be viewed as an integral part of human rights”
Rafael Radi is one of the most recognized and prestigious Latin American researchers. Born 56 years ago in Montevideo, this biochemist and biomedical doctor works on the molecular mechanisms of free radicals. He is the director of the Center for Biomedical Research (CEINBIO) of the University of the Republic (Montevideo), the president of the Academy of Sciences of his country, also a member of the Academy of Medicine, and is the first Uruguayan to be elected as associate member of the US National Academy of Sciences. As a member of the Academies of Brazil and Argentina, he knows very well the state of science and biomedical research in the region. “The base, that is, that there is a critical mass of researchers, research centers and infrastructures, is in many countries. In the Southern Cone, sure; Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, which is what I know the most”, he explains. “But moving from preclinical to clinical research is a very complex leap in healthcare systems that are in high demand and that do not always have enough resources. Assistance beats research, because it’s always the priority,” he adds.
Radi says that one of the problems of biomedical research in Latin America is found in the region’s university hospitals, where “clinical research always comes second because what needs to be resolved is healthcare and there is no tradition of set aside time to do research.” In the best American or European hospitals, the opposite happens: doctors spend more hours researching than in clinical practice, since the results of that research are essential to improve that practice. “This virtuous circuit must be encouraged, because research feeds better clinical practices and medicine generates new questions. Research in biomedicine has to be an integral part of a country’s health system”, explains Radi. “The WHO says that the health system should invest 2% of its spending on R&D. Uruguay and the countries of the region are far from that, surely they are between 10 and 50 times below that value. But we have gained a lot, in these 30 or 40 years, in generating the basic capacities so that our systems have the future capacity to generate these investments”, he adds.
The researcher believes that part of the problem is the “lack of scientific culture” that he detects in a large part of the political class. “This is a problem that also cuts across all politics in the Southern Cone; very few politicians are genuinely interested in science, beyond the anecdotal. In our national Parliament, in which there are 99 deputies and senators, those who approach science may be five or six. I think that politicians see the issue with interest and with good humor, but you see them still distant, they find it elusive, they realize that that’s where things are going, but they don’t know very well where to grab it. And they fear that the wave will pass over them. And this is a country issue, of national sovereignty, it doesn’t matter if the right or the left wins, science has a lot to contribute in an evidence-based policy, in issues such as health, climate change, education…” , he explains, forceful.
Fight against cancer
The researcher is optimistic about the “arsenal” that science is discovering in its fight against cancer and neurodegenerative diseases; This year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded precisely to the discipline he studies. “In two years, Nobel Prizes have been awarded to a set of investigations that begin with very basic elements but that have implications for cancer in both cases, one with immunotherapy, and the other, actions to take advantage of the metabolic advantage they have. tumor cells in relation to hypoxia. What we have is an increasingly larger and more selective arsenal to fight cancer.” What is happening is that the growing aging of the population is going to make precisely cancer and neurodegenerative diseases become a growing biomedical challenge. The researcher explains it this way: “One of the great challenges of modern medicine is how to identify the pathology associated with aging, how to modulate and correct it so that the expansion of life expectancy is accompanied by another expansion of health expectancy. . And there we have neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, cancers and a very important topic, which is rarely talked about, and which is the first reason for disability in older patients: fragility and collapse of the musculoskeletal system”.
“One of the great challenges of modern medicine is how to identify the pathology associated with aging, how to modulate and correct it so that the expansion of life expectancy is accompanied by another expansion of health expectancy.
Radi returns to the initial idea: science is the only tool with which modern societies will be able to face this brutal challenge, that of an increasingly aging population and a system that will not be able to take care of all of them. “The idea is that the caregiver is the last measure, not the measure. The WHO speaks that there is only one health: human, plant, animal, environmental… they are all interconnected. And it is that another matter that appears in the panorama are the centenarians and the supercentenarians, which are going to multiply by ten in the next 20 years. They are great dilemmas of the 21st century, and this is where politics and science have no choice but to interact”, he concludes.