international issue 2013 - edition 4

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2013_ edition 4 www.revistapesquisa.fapesp.br

New birds of amazoniaFifteen new species are described in the largest Brazilian ornithological discovery of the past 140 years

quaKesThe dimensions of the earth’s crust affect earthquakes in Brazil

suGaRCaNe Companies are investing in technology to increase ethanol production

HiGH iMPaCT Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers are expected to enhance Brazil’s science

iNTeRVieW Michel Rabinovitch A talent for training scientists

002_2aCAPA_207.indd 2 03/05/13 19:40

2013_ edition 4 www.revistapesquisa.fapesp.br

SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL POLICY

18 infrastructureCompany laboratories in university parks enrich students’ education and respond to new research and development demands 26 the unicamp facility houses modern equipment for research in genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, and cell biology under a single roof

28 High impact Sciencefapesp’s new research, innovation, and Dissemination Centers embolden brazil’s science and enhance its impact

SCIENCE

38 obituaryZoologist paulo vanzolini was one of the visionaries behind the creation of the fapesp, the author of a theory on the origin of species in south america, and an icon of são paulo samba

46 Geneticssmall rNa molecules control lateral stem growth in sugarcane

48 Geologyseismologists propose a new explanation for earthquakes in brazil

54 Astronomysurvey identifies three patterns of galaxy evolution

6 COVER fifteen species from the largest brazilian ornithological discovery of the past 140 years are described

PHoto léo ramos

12 INTERVIEWMichel rabinovitch a parasitologist speaks about his career and his talent for training scientists

SeCtionS

4 Letter from the editor82 Art

TECHNOLOGY

58 Agriculturea small agriculture-automation company in são Carlos gains international recognition

60 Biofuelsin the midst of an industry crisis, companies are investing in technology to increase ethanol production

66 Medicininnovations in women’s health care products and sunscreens at Johnson & Johnson are exported to the rest of the world

HUMANITIES

70 Media assis Chateaubriand’s evening newspaper highlighted technology as part of an agenda to overcome brazilian “backwardness”

74 Musicresearchers from the Móbile project go on tour to show the results of blending art with technology

78 Big dataworkshop participants discuss the potential of escience and affirms the importance of the humanities

4 z special issue october 2013

The birds of the amazon and the

science of são paulo Mariluce Moura

Editor in ChiEf

Letter froM the editor

the cover story on page 6 of this fourth 2013 interna-tional issue of the magazine Pesquisa FAPESP reports on the simultaneous description of 15 new species

of birds in the Brazilian Amazon in scientific articles pub-lished in June, 2013 in a special volume of Handbook of the birds of the world, a fundamental reference work for profes-sional and amateur ornithologists. The work represents an extremely important Brazilian contribution to the under-standing of biodiversity and, at the same time, signifies the greatest discovery in Brazilian ornithology in at least 140 years. Eleven of the new species described are endemic to Brazil, and four of them are also found in Peru and Bolivia. Together, they represent a nearly 1% increase in the known biodiversity of birds in Brazil, today totaling almost 1,840 species of birds, a number second only to that of Colombia, which has approximately 1,900 species.

Usually, the scientific discovery of new species is pub-lished in specialized journals rather than in books. However, in this case, the importance and singularity of the body of information described led the authors to decide to gather their material together in the 17-volume collection Hand-book of the birds of the world. Each species has been de-scribed in a scientific article identical to what would nor-mally be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Although birds are the most studied vertebrates in biol-ogy, ornithologists say that there is still much to be learned about them. And Brazilian museums contain many spec-imens from different biomes including the Amazon for-est that will certainly be described in the coming years.

São Paulo rESEarCh foundation

CElSo lafErpresidenT

Eduardo MoaCyr KriEgErVice-presidenT

Board of trusteesalEjandro Szanto dE tolEdo, CElSo lafEr, Eduardo MoaCyr KriEgEr, fErnando fErrEira CoSta, horáCio lafEr Piva, hErMan jaCobuS CornEliS voorwald, joão grandino rodaS, Maria joSé SoarES MEndES giannini, joSé dE Souza MartinS, luiz gonzaga bElluzzo, SuEly vilEla SaMPaio and yoShiaKi naKano

executive Board

joSé arana varElapresidenT direcTor

CarloS hEnriquE dE brito CruzscienTific direcTor

joaquiM j. dE CaMargo EnglEradminisTraTiVe direcTor

editoriaL BoardCarlos henrique de brito Cruz (Presidente), Caio túlio Costa, Eugênio bucci, fernando reinach, josé Eduardo Krieger, luiz davidovich, Marcelo Knobel, Marcelo leite, Maria hermínia tavares de almeida, Marisa lajolo, Maurício tuffani and Mônica teixeira

scientific coMMitteeluiz henrique lopes dos Santos (Presidente), adolpho josé Melfi, Carlos Eduardo negrão, douglas Eduardo zampieri, Eduardo Cesar leão Marques, francisco antônio bezerra Coutinho, joaquim j. de Camargo Engler, josé arana varela, josé roberto de frança arruda, josé roberto Postali Parra, luís augusto barbosa Cortez, Marcelo Knobel, Marie-anne van Sluys, Mário josé abdalla Saad, Marta teresa da Silva arretche, Paula Montero, roberto Marcondes Cesar júnior, Sérgio luiz Monteiro Salles filho, Sérgio robles reis queiroz, wagner do amaral and walter Colli

scientific coordinatorluiz henrique lopes dos Santos

editor in chiefMariluce Moura

Managing editorneldson Marcolin

editorsfabrício Marques (Policy), Marcos de oliveira (Technology), ricardo zorzetto (Science); Carlos fioravanti e Marcos Pivetta (special editors);bruno de Pierro and dinorah Ereno (assistant editors)

transLator transConsult, fairfax, va – Kim olson

art Mayumi okuyama (editor), ana Paula Campos (infographic editor), Maria Cecilia felli and alvaro felippe jr. (assistant)

PhotograPhers Eduardo Cesar, léo ramos

eLetronic Media fabrício Marques (coordinador)internet Pesquisa FAPESP onlineMaria guimarães (editor)júlio Cesar barros (assistant editor)rodrigo de oliveira andrade (reporter)radio Pesquisa Brasilbiancamaria binazzi (producer) contriButorsabiuro, daniel das neves, igor zolnerkevic, Pedro hamdan; valter rodrigues (image bank) and yuri vasconcelos

Printer ibEP gráfica

the rePrinting of texts and Photos, in whoLe or in Part, is ProhiBited

without Prior authorization

PesQuisa faPesP rua joaquim antunes, no 727, 10o andar, CEP 05415-012, Pinheiros, São Paulo-SP – brasil

faPesPrua Pio Xi, no 1.500, CEP 05468-901alto da laPa, São Paulo-SP – brasil

dEPartMEnt for EConoMiC dEvEloPMEnt, SCiEnCE and tEChnology

sÃo PauLo state governMent

iSSn 1519-8774

PesQuisa faPesP z 5

Those who like prospective studies, or just enjoy dreaming about the future, will find a wealth of raw materials from which to imagine possible scenarios in the panorama of scientific research in São Paulo over the next ten years, given the new list of 17 Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) announced by FAPESP in May 2013. Of course, there are always uncertainties and imponderable inter-ventions— in addition to the possibility of eco-nomic and political changes—which would lead to unforeseen paths in the mists of what’s to come. But, with this proviso, the $680 million to be invested in these centers over the next 11 years, $370 million of which will come from FAPESP and $310 million will be provided in the form of salaries paid by the host institu-tions to the researchers and technical person-nel involved, will without a doubt substantially contribute to the future structure and major thrust of scientific knowledge production in this state within a decade.

These centers focus on research in such di-verse areas as neuromathematics and math-ematics applied to industry, neuroscience and neurotechnology, the development of new drugs and cell therapies, inflammatory dis-eases and obesity, biomedicine, new glass and ceramic materials, optics and photonics, com-

putational science and engineering, studies of metropolitan areas and studies of violence, to name a few, all being developed in the de-centralized, exciting research environment in the state of São Paulo. This creates a rich, multifaceted profile for the state’s science and technology sector, in line with the major trends in international research, and simultaneously taking into account local idiosyncrasies that must be understood and overcome (such as the contemporary phenomenon of violence). All RIDCs must, first and foremost, work to remain at the cutting edge of knowledge. And, secondly, the centers must be intrinsically com-mitted to creating knowledge, to generating innovations derived from this knowledge that can be effectively used by society, and to dis-seminating this knowledge and these innova-tions to society. This is the role of the RIDCs in the best policies to increase Brazil’s scien-tific culture.

Note that these centers will initially hire 535 researchers from São Paulo and 69 oth-er countries, a respectable team for a notable effort to increase and broaden the impact of Brazilian science developed in the state of São Paulo. More details are in the report that be-gins on page 28.

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one of the new species, a scythebill called the arapaçu-de-bico-torto


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Fifteen species

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New birds of Amazonia

Brazilian ornithology has not witnessed such a significant contribution to the ex-pansion of our knowledge of biodiversity since the second half of the 19th century:

15 new species of birds of the Brazilian Amazon region will be formally described for the first time in a series of scientific articles expected to be published in July in a special volume of the Handbook of the Birds of the World from by the Spanish publishing house Lynx Edicions. The volume is the latest in an encyclopedic and educational 17-book collection that is used as a reference source by amateur and professional ornithologists alike.

The descriptions are authored by individuals from three Brazilian research institutions: the Zoology Museum of the University of São Paulo (MZ-USP), the National Institute for Amazonian Research (Inpa) in Manaus, the Emílio Goeldi Museum of Pará (MPEG), in Belém, as well as the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural

New species of jay of the genus Cyanocorax now threatened with extinction; this species is found only along the edges of natural prairies in the southern Amazonas State

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PUBLIsHEd IN MAy 2013


Science (LSUMNS) in the United States. Such a large collection of new Brazilian birds has not been presented to the world in a single work since the 1871 publication of Zur Ornithologie Brasiliens by Austrian ornithologist August von Pelzeln (1825-1891), which described 40 species of birds collected by naturalist Johann Natterer (1787-1843), also Austrian, on his trips through the Brazilian Amazon.

Eleven of the new species are endemic to Bra-zil, and four can also be found in Peru and Bo-livia. Eight occur west of the Madeira River in western Amazonia; five only inhabit areas located between the Madeira and Tapajós rivers in the heart of the northern region; and two are found only in habitats east of the Tapajós in the state of Pará, in the easternmost region of the tropical forest. In the special volume of the Handbook, the authors describe the morphology (forms and structures), genetics and vocalization (song and other sounds) of the new species. Specific maps for each species also show their locations of oc-currence. Until the book is officially published, however, the scientific names and some details of the anatomy and lifestyle of the new species cannot be revealed.

The largest and most spectacular of these birds—all of which are previously unknown and undocumented in the scientific literature—is a jay of the genus Cyanocorax that is approximately 35 centimeters in length. It lives only on the edges of natural prairies amidst the forest between the Madeira and Purus rivers in the state of Ama-zonas. “This jay is threatened with extinction,”

says Mario Cohn-Haft, curator of Inpa’s orni-thology department and principal discoverer of the cancão-da-campina, the popular name for the bird. “Its habitat is in jeopardy, and we could lose the species before we have time to do an in-depth study.” Its principal region of occurrence is a prairie complex 150 kilometers south of Manaus in an area near Highway BR-319, which connects that Amazonas State capital to the city of Porto Velho. The highway is being repaved, and the researchers fear that the access it will provide to the area will put the species’ habitat at risk. “The new jay also occurs in an area of natural prairies in southern Amazonas near Porto Velho where there are many settlers from southern Brazil who confuse it with the gralha-azul or Azure Jay [the state bird of Paraná],” Cohn-Haft notes.

With the exception of a bird of the order Pici-formes, which includes toucans and woodpeck-ers, the other Amazonian species here described belong to the order Passeriformes. Popularly known as passerines, the members of this group account for approximately 55% of known bird species and include sparrows, canaries, tyrant flycatchers, etc. In addition to the jay and a dis-tant relative of the toucan, the book will describe five species of the family Thamnophilidae (which includes antbirds), four from the family Den-drocolaptidae (all new types of woodcreeper), three from the huge family Tyrannidae (which includes 400 species found from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego) and one from the small family Poli-optilidae (which has at least 10 species that are

A poiaeiro-de-chicomendes, the popular name of a species of the family Tyrannidae (at left) soon to be described. Below, a new species of scythebill

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commonly known as gnatcatchers).In numerical terms, the new Ama-

zonian species represent an increase of nearly 1% in Brazil’s avian biodi-versity. “We have the second highest number of known bird species in the world, about 1,840,” says Luís Fábio Silveira, curator of the ornithology department at the USP Zoology Mu-seum, one of the coordinators of the initiative. “Only Colombia has more species than we do—approximately 1,900. But a decade from now, we’ll probably reach 2,000 known bird species in Brazil. The country’s mu-seums contain a number of speci-mens of unknown birds native to various biomes, and these will be described in the next few years.”

Birds are the most extensively studied vertebrate group in biology, yet it ap-pears that much remains to be learned, especially in the Amazon, despite the fact that this region has been the focus of a great deal of research over recent decades. “Biodiversity in general, even in regard to the birds of this biome, is far from fully evidenced,” says ornithologist Bret Whitney, a researcher with LSUMNS and principal coordi-nator of the endeavor. “There is still a long way to go for Amazonia to be considered sufficiently well known to enable us to plan and sustain the

existing and future biodiversity reserves.” Outside his academic life, Whitney is a partner in Field Guides, an ecotourism company that takes people on birdwatching tours in various parts of the world, including the Amazon.

Several of the dozens of Ama-zon expeditions over the last 10 years that have led to the discov-ery of new species were partially or fully paid for by a FAPESP-fi-nanced project that Silveira head-ed. Other expeditions received support from Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Techno-logical Development (CNPq), the Ministry of the Environment, the Biodiversity Research Program of the Ministry of Science and Tech-nology, state-level ministers, and even the National Geographic So-ciety in the US. On one such expe-dition through the tropical forest last year, approximately twenty researchers and post-graduate stu-dents from institutions participat-ing in the project rented a boat for

a month (for R$75,000) to look for new bird spe-cies as they cruised along the Sucunduri River, a tributary of the Madeira.

On other occasions, the scientists have even needed armed protection to go into areas that could be home to new types of birds. A com-mon locale of one of the new species, a scythebill called the arapaçu-de-bico-torto, is the Altamira National Forest near Highway BR-163 in Brazil’s southern Pará State. The area is a conservation unit managed by the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA). “But to be able to work safely in the reserve, we had to be escorted by soldiers from the Brazilian army. There was an illegal gold mine operating inside the unit,” says Dr. Alex-andre Aleixo of the MPEG ornithology depart-ment. “The stress of working in that kind of place is considerable and, if it weren’t for the Army’s presence, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

In modern times, the process of describing re-cently discovered species takes place on the pages of scientific journals rather than in books. How-ever, because of the importance and singularity of this group of new Amazonian bird species, the encyclopedia’s publishers and the authors of the papers chose an alternate route. Each new spe-cies was the focus of a separate paper (a scientific article) written along the lines of what would be prepared for an academic journal. The Handbook team hired the services of a group of specialists

Not since the 19th century has such a large number of new Brazilian bird species been described at once

Where the new birds liveThe 15 recently discovered species occur in three large regions of Amazonia

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to handle the peer review process and approve the texts containing the formal descriptions of each species. In science, a text that describes a new life form and labels it with a Latin name consisting of two terms, genus and species, is the equivalent of a birth certificate for that spe-cies. It also serves as basic documentation of a region’s biodiversity—in this case, birds of the Amazon—and as a basis for formulating public policy on the environment.

The initiative to publish all of the new species at once took shape last year under the leader-ship of Whitney, Silveira, Cohn-Haft and Aleixo, with the ongoing participation of post-graduate students from their respective institutions. The group was producing texts for the 17th volume of the Handbook, which will purportedly contain information on bird species recently discovered throughout the world from 1992 to 2011. The spe-cies formally described by scientists during that period were not covered in the other 16 books in the series, which summarized and organized data on each member of the known bird fami-lies. This special volume is expected to cover 68 species initially, all of which have been formally described in papers published in scientific jour-nals over the past two decades, yielding an aver-age of fewer than four new species discovered each year. The extra book will ultimately cover 83 species including the 15 Amazonian species, the scientific descriptions of which will appear in the book on an exceptional basis. The group’s thinking in choosing to reveal the nine species in a single work was to call attention to the impor-tance of preserving the biodiversity of the Ama-zon region where two-thirds of the bird species in Brazil are found. “If we published each paper

separately in different journals, it wouldn’t have the same impact,” Silveira says.

The act of looking for birds in nature calls to mind an image of an ornithologist wearing Ber-muda shorts, a t-shirt and a hat, carrying binocu-lars and perhaps a camera. One item not men-tioned, however, is absolutely mandatory for an ornithologist: a recording device. Most of the 15 new species were initially identified by their song, which to a specialist’s ear has a different or unfamiliar sound. “You don’t need to be highly gifted to recognize a different song. It’s a matter of training,” Whitney says. “It’s like recognizing a new song by your favorite band when you hear the first chord.”

Only two decades ago, the description of a new bird species, as was true for most living creatures, was based only on the uniqueness of its anatomy and outward appearance. If the plumage and bone structure of a specimen sig-nificantly differed from the features found in already known species, the animal could be la-beled as a member of a new species. Today, in addition to morphology, two additional basic criteria are used to propose the existence of a new bird species: analysis of its vocalizations and its genetic material. “Some researchers now propose a new bird species even when

Brazil has the second highest number of known bird species in the world, approximately 1,840

Bird songgraphs demonstrate the differences between the vocalizations of similar species of the genus Herpsilochmus (at right)

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only one of those three parameters is shown to be different from that of other known spe-cies,” Silveira notes. “We are conservative in our work, and we have proposed a new species only when we found differences in at least two of the three criteria.”

Aided by special software, the recorded song of each candidate for a new bird species was compared with homologous vocalizations of similar species. At times, only a few seconds of comparison were enough to confirm the first impression perceived by the trained ears of the ornithologists: the sound frequencies emitted by the new species differed from the songs produced by related birds, even for some species that were physically very similar. For each new discovery, the researchers also sequenced a few thousand pairs of gene bases present in nuclear DNA and in mitochondria, which are cell organelles that are responsible for energy production and have their own independent genome that is frequently used for studies of phylogeny.

This genetic material was compared with the DNA of already-known species to verify their uniqueness and, whenever possible, to establish kinship relations or a phylogenetic tree for the new species. “For many of the new birds we are describing, the confirmation that it was a different species was actually obtained from the genetic component of the analysis,” Aleixo comments. “This reinforces the impor-tance of obtaining genetic material as part of scientific specimen collection—a process that unfortunately is not yet in practice at a num-ber of museums and collections across Brazil.”

Genetic studies can provide valuable informa-tion about species origins. The evolutionary his-tory of two of these newly described birds—two antwrens (chorozinhos) of the genus Herpsiloch-mus—is a good illustration of the inroads possible with this approach. The two species are nearly identical morphologically, but their vocalizations are clearly distinct. One of the birds inhabits a stretch along the right-hand side of the Madeira River, and the other lives only on the left bank. In this case, the Madeira, the banks of which can be as much as 10 kilometers apart at some points, functions as a natural barrier between the two bird populations, which have no contact with one another. The long-term separation of the two groups of chorozinhos has led to an evo-lutionary process that biologists have termed speciation: the emergence of a new species—in this case, two—created by the fragmentation of a common ancestral population that now occurs in environments that have no communication (vicarious effect). Despite enormous morpho-logical similarities among the two populations of chorozinhos, genetic studies have revealed—shockingly—that they were separated by the Ma-deira two million years ago.

The role played by the major rivers of the Amazon in the emergence of new life forms through the creation of geographic barriers in-surmountable to many species is well known to science. What is new, ornithologists say, is that even waterways that are not as immense can play the same role in certain cases. At least three new species were discovered, for example, in the re-gion between the Aripuanã and Machado rivers in the southern Amazonas State and northern Rondônia State: one of the chorozinhos men-tioned above, the choquinha-do-rio-roosevelt and the cantador-de-rondon (these are the popular names for the birds). That area, which is also traversed by the Roosevelt River, served as a refuge for minor bird species that became “cap-tive” and, over the years, developed their own features within the territory between the river banks. “Some rivers in Amazonia have changed their course through evolutionary history,” Sil-veira notes. “Sometimes this process of riverbed accommodation separates populations of birds that once lived in the same environment.” The many rivers that wind through the greater tropi-cal forest are an abundant source of biodiversity within and around their waters. n

Bico-chato-do-sucunduri (above). New species of the family Bucconidae (at right)

Projectsystematics, taxonomy and biogeography of Neotropical birds: The Cracidae as model (2007/56378-0); Grant mechanism Regular Line of Research project Award. Coord. Luís Fábio silveira (Mz-UsP); Investment R$86,928.28 (FAPEsP).

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How to boost science

IntervIew

neldson Marcolin and ricardo Zorzetto

When looking for a reference text, Professor Michel Pinkus Rabinovitch opens a folder on his computer a mong a

plethora of other folders, each relating to a subject of study or interest. The subjects are varied, and all refer to some area of science. When he granted the following interview earlier this year, he was studying a small molecule that is supposedly toxic to tumors, and at the same time, he was researching the lives of several scientists in order to write articles on the history of science. Intellectual curiosity, innate in every self-respecting researcher, remains strong in a professor who was much sought after by students interested in research at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine (FMUSP) in the 1950s.

Initially interested in hematology, Rabino-vitch graduated in 1949, received his doctor-ate two years later and became an assistant professor of histology and embryology in 1959. At the end of a 15-year career at USP, where he advised and trained a brilliant gen-eration of young students*, the scientist left Brazil in 1964 due to threats from the military

Michel Rabinovitch

Age: 87

SpecIAlty:Parasitology and cell biology

educAtIon:University of São Paulo (undergraduate and doctorate)University of Chicago (post-doctorate)

InStItutIonS:University of São Paulo Rockefeller University New York University CNRS/Pasteur Institute

current InStItutIon:Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp)

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regime and began a 33-year journey from one institution to another in the United States and France. He was a researcher and pro-fessor at the Rockefeller University and the New York University School of Medicine, where he trained the Brazilian research-ers Bernardo Mantovani, Momtchilo Rus-so and Clara Barbieri Mestriner, and at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he advised Silvia Celina Alfieri, Liège Galvão Quintão and Patricia Veras. He studied cell biology, protozoa and bacteria and met researchers such as Hewson Swift, Daniel Mazia, Zanvil Cohn, Rollin Hotchkiss and Ralph Steinman, among others.

In 1997, Rabinovitch returned to Brazil per-manently, working at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) in the city of São Paulo, where he once again trained researchers. To-day, he still advises students in conjunction with other colleagues and participates in sci-entific meetings in parasitology and micro-biology. At 87, Rabinovitch lives in an apart-ment that is within walking distance from the university and full to the brim with books. In this interview, he talked about his extensive, rich scientific journey in Brazil and abroad.

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You are well known for having been the advisor of researchers such as Ricar-do Brentani, Nelson Fausto, Thomas Maack and Sérgio Henrique Ferreira, among others. What led to your advis-ing such qualified individuals?

Several factors. In the 1950s, there were some excellent basic research groups at the Biological Institute, the Butantan Institute and the USP School of Philosophy. I myself attended the Fri-day afternoon meetings at the Biologi-cal Institute, chaired by Henrique da Rocha Lima. At that time, the scientific environment in the basic disciplines at FMUSP was limited to a few isolated excellent researchers, including Flo-riano Paulo de Almeida, Carlos da Sil-va Lacaz and Wilson Teixeira Beraldo. In a pioneering initiative at the end of the 1940s, little remembered today, the An-drea and Virginia Mataraz-zo Cancer Laboratory, di-rected by Piero Manginelli, was created on the fourth floor of the FMUSP building. Manginelli introduced tis-sue culture and oncology to the medical school, follow-ing in the footsteps of Rob-ert Archibald Lambert in the 1920s. The major changes mid-century in the basic sci-ences began with Luiz Car-los Junqueira, followed by Isaias Raw and Alberto Car-valho da Silva. Before that, there were few opportuni-ties for training students in experimental science. Stu-dents interested in clinical research headed for the Hospital das Clínicas, already staffed with high-level clinical researchers such as Michel Abujamra, my guru and lifelong friend; Helio Lou-renço de Oliveira; José Barros Magaldi; and Dirceu Pfuhl Neves. In this con-text, I was a non-authoritarian, infor-mal guide, a newcomer with excellent experience in the United States who was 10-12 years older than the students and interested in music, reading and the role of science in society. Additionally, my personal life allowed me to spend time with students inside and outside the lab. I believe these factors contrib-uted to that historic occurrence, which would be difficult to reproduce today.

Professor Brentani said in an inter-view that FMUSP students with a tal-ent for research were told by professors to “seek out Rabino.”

Ricardo was attracted to research and sought me out, and we worked together a lot—and had a lot of fun, too.

Was the Department of Histology the best at the school?

In 1946 or 1947, the Department of His-tology and Embryology was still focusing on microscopic anatomy, embryology and teratology; it was descriptive, traditional and pre-modern. We used microscopes, microtomes, dryers and dyes. I learned the techniques with the help of José dos Santos, a splendid technician. Medical students were taught the necessary tech-

niques to allow them to understand physi-ology and pathology. The same happened in other departments. Professor José Oria realized that change was needed. He even gave me a volume on nucleic acids from a 1947 symposium at Cold Spring Har-bor. In 1948, Junqueira passed the official examination for head of the department and took over and revolutionized it, now renamed the Department of Cell Biology. Even at the age of 28, he already had a doc-torate and teaching experience. Due to a lucky break, lightning-fast occupation of a large, available space on the second floor allowed him to build a large, airy labora-tory, richly equipped by the Rockefeller Foundation with a cold chamber, centri-fuges, electrophoresis, scales, spectropho-

tometers, a fraction collector, microscopy, microcinematography, a warehouse of dyes and products for histochemistry. In Junqueira’s opinion, research involved not just microstructure but also histophysi-ology, histochemistry, radioautography, the study of living cells and chemical and biochemical approaches, initially devel-oped by Hannah Rothschild and later by José Ferreira Fernandes and others. Gen-erously supported by Capes and CNPq, the department trained many students and postdoctoral fellows from São Paulo and other states. Some became members of the department, such as José Ferreira Fernandes and Ivan Mota; others, such as Chapadeiro and Tafuri (both from the state of Minas Gerais) and José Carneiro S. Filho, had brilliant careers. Junqueira

also brought high-level for-eign professors to FMUSP for short periods to give valuable short courses. Among them were Eleazar Sebastián Guz-man-Barron, Johanes Holt-freter and George Gömöri. It was the first revolution in the basic sciences at FMUSP, fol-lowed shortly afterward by metamorphoses in biochemis-try, physiology and parasitol-ogy led by Isaias Raw, Alberto Carvalho da Silva and Samuel Pessoa’s colleagues, such as the Deane couple, Luiz Hil-debrando Pereira da Silva and the Nussenzweig couple.

Why did you choose to study medicine?

I lost my parents early. My mother died from acute leukemia, and my father died from a renal tumor. They were 46 and 47 years old. That’s why I studied medicine. Before that, I was planning to study engineering, my father’s profession. I became interested in hematology because of my mother’s leukemia, and I chose Oria and then Mi-chel Abujamra as mentors. One of my first articles was titled “Cytochemical aspects of the leukemic cell.” I entered university in 1944 and graduated in 1949. My father went to university in Laus-anne, Switzerland, where he met the Brazilian artist Antonio Gomide, who insisted that he move to Brazil. So, he came. He moved first to Rio Grande do Sul and then settled in São Paulo. There

I lost my mother to acute leukemia and my father to a kidney tumor. that is why I decided to study medicine


are still buildings here built by a firm at which my father was a partner. He met my mother in São Paulo, after she arrived from Odessa, Ukraine, in 1910.

Your mother’s family immigrated earlier?The first to arrive in Brazil, at age 18,

in 1888, was my great-uncle on my moth-er’s side, Jacob Zlatopolsky, who came here alone. He worked in a printing shop in the Brás neighborhood, became the owner of the business and opened a sta-tionery store at Rua São Bento, 21A, in downtown São Paulo. I still remember the smell of Faber German pencils, that cedar smell that dominated the room. In 1910, he sent for his family, who was liv-ing in Geneva. He ended up marrying a niece, Genia, who had no children and with whom my brothers and I lived after my parents died.

You started your research career while still an under-graduate?

My first article was in 1947, when I was in my fourth year of university. I cut class to work in the lab, knowing I would be a researcher. I have never delivered a baby in my life. My first article was pub-lished in French in Revista Brasileira de Biologia (Brazil-ian Biology Journal). It was on the sexual dimorphism of the submaxillary gland of the mouse, a model that was later extensively used by Junqueira and his colleagues. The topic had been suggest-ed to Junqueira by the French radiobiol-ogist A. Lacassagne, who discovered the sexual dimorphism of rat submaxillary glands during World War II; he visited us at FMUSP, probably in 1946.

When did you go to Chicago?From September 1953 to September

1954, I received a grant from the Rock-efeller Foundation to study at the Uni-versity of Chicago. I started working in Isidore Gerch’s electron microscopy laboratory. He was an excellent scien-tist. He was developing a method for electron microscopy of ultra-thin, fro-zen, dissected tissue. I realized that it was not for me, and with the consent of the Rockefeller Foundation, I went to

work in the Department of Medicine at the same university with Eleazar Sebas-tián Gusman-Barron, who at that time was advising Hannah Rothschild, one of Junqueira’s colleagues.

The researchers also went abroad?Yes. This was the case for Hannah; me;

and later Ferreira Fernandes, Ivan Mota and others. Gusman-Barron proposed that I verify if the pancreatic ribonucle-ase molecule had a free sulfhydryl group, as Belgian researchers believed. Barron asked me to use inhibitors and measure enzyme activity. I did, and we published a paper together on the results. In Chi-cago, I also had the opportunity to meet the remarkable biologist and man Hew-son Swift, from the Zoology Department.

And from there you went to California?I went to the University of California,

Berkeley, at the invitation of Daniel Ma-zia. I was bored in Chicago and decided to take a course on cell physiology at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, near Boston, in the summer of 1954. James Watson and George Wald were among the professors. Coincidentally, Hewson Swift and Daniel Mazia were also there. Daniel was another biologist who trained generations of researchers. After the course on cell biology, we could remain for the rest of the summer if we wished. I stayed in a room they let me use. I set up an experiment that attempt-ed to study the synthesis of rhodopsin in

toads’ eyes. It came to nothing, but Mazia liked me and invited me to work in his laboratory at Berkeley. The Rockefeller Foundation authorized the move. It was only four months, but it was worth it.

Why was this period important?Because I joined an extremely interest-

ing project. Mazia had brought together three high-level scientists: Walter Plaut, who was a master of high-resolution ra-dioautography techniques; David Prescott, an excellent cell biologist; and Lester Gold-stein, specialized in the micromanipula-tion and microsurgery of cells under the microscope. They obtained the first solid proof that RNA leaves the nucleus and enters the cytoplasm. In order to do this, they marked the nucleus of an amoeba

with radioactive phosphate. The marked nucleus was transferred to another amoe-ba, whose nucleus had been removed. The passage of the isotope into the cytoplasm was demonstrated through ra-dioautography. Initially, they thought that the isotope was associated with the DNA. Be-cause I had worked in Hew-son’s laboratory, I knew a very simple way to determine if the isotope was in the DNA or the RNA. I showed them that the phosphate was in the RNA and that it was the RNA that migrated into the cytoplasm.

You published with them?I published an article with

Plaut in 1956 about what hap-pened when the marked nucleus was transplanted into a nucleated cell. We became friends. Afterward, Plaut moved to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He came to Brazil twice and taught class-es at USP. In Wisconsin, Plaut thought he had discovered DNA synthesis in the cy-toplasm of amoeba and thought it might be mitochondrial DNA. Visiting the labo-ratory, I demonstrated that isotope in-corporation was due to the presence of symbiotic bacteria in the amoeba that he used. Plaut was convinced and published two articles about this in the Journal of Cell Biology. In another study, we dem-onstrated that the symbionts multiply in an uncontrolled manner in the enucle-ated amoeba.

In college, I cut class to work in the lab, knowing I would be a researcher


This work was done in the United States. Were you able to do something similar in Brazil?

Many years later, back in São Paulo, at Unifesp, I began to infect enucleated cells with various pathogens.

What was it like when you returned to Brazil after that first trip abroad?

I returned in 1955. That was when all of those talented students came to study with me. I told them I had worked with ribonuclease [a type of enzyme that catalyzes the breakdown of RNA] in Gusman-Barron’s laboratory. Then, we asked ourselves: do we have ribonu-clease in our blood? Yes. And in blood serum? Why don’t we try to figure out where the ribonuclease in the serum comes from? Sergio Dohi, Thomas Maack, Brentani and Nelson Fausto worked on this line of research. Ex-periments involving the re-moval of the kidneys from different species of animals suggested that the kidney filters the ribonuclease. In cooperation with colleagues in nephrology, we demon-strated that serum ribonu-clease activity is also ele-vated in patients with renal insufficiency. The kidney filters and breaks down the enzyme. In a classic experi-ment suggested by the ne-phrologist Israel Nussenz-weig, from USP, the urine in the ureters of a dog was diverted into the venous sys-tem. In this case, the animal developed uremia, but the serum ribonuclease lev-el did not increase.

Who invited you to go to the University of Brasilia, UnB, in 1964?

I was interested in the fantastic plans for UnB, and I volunteered. I wrote to Professor Maurício Oscar da Rocha e Silva, then in charge of Biology. I went to Brasilia twice to meet with Antonio Cordeiro and some others. On April 1, 1964, I was appointed to a professor-ship in Brasilia. However, I never went.

You were appointed but did not take the post?

If I had taken the post, I would not

have been able to leave Brazil, and I would have been imprisoned. I engaged in very little political activity, but many of my students were Trotskyists, and others were Communists, and I was ac-cused of being their mentor. But I was never a member of the Communist Party. I do not like the power of a few or politi-cal parties; I’m an anarchist.

Suddenly, you found yourself unem-ployed, without a position at USP or UnB.

Yes, I was. I was not affected by In-stitutional Act No. 5 [a decree giving al-most absolute power to the military dic-tatorship] because I left the country. On April 1, a Commission of Inquiry was es-tablished at USP and started investigat-ing me. The school’s repression repre-

sentative was Prof. Geraldo de Campos Freire, and I sought him out to ask him why I was being investigated. He replied that my conscience should know. They imprisoned Thomas Maack. During a meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science, in the city of Ribeirão Preto, police appeared to arrest Luiz Hildebrando [Pereira da Silva] and me. Hildebrando, like a good commu-nist, went ahead, surrendered and went to jail. Mauricinho [Rocha e Silva, son of Mauricio Oscar da Rocha e Silva] told me they were looking for me and took me to São Paulo in his Volkswagen Beetle. I never saw my Ford Willis jeep again. It was intended to carry men and baggage from São Paulo to Brasilia. I took refuge

in the house of my cousin, José Mindlin, where I was visited by friends, but not by the police.

How long did you remain hidden?About 10 days. Walter Plaut, who

knew what was happening, wrote me that he had a job for me in Madison. It was an option, but I preferred to go to the Rockefeller University because I was interested in Cohn and Hirsch’s work on lysosomes [cellular organelles].

Why didn’t you return when amnesty was granted?

Because by then I already had a wife and daughters. Moreover, when they killed Vladimir Herzog, I became so enraged that I turned my passport in to the Bra-

zilian consulate in New York and was nationless. I thought they’d never end those atroci-ties. I had to request United States citizenship. Do you re-member Friar Tito [Alencar de Lima], imprisoned and tor-tured by the military? I trans-lated his article into English for publication in Look maga-zine in 1970. We did what we could to help. When I came back to Brazil, Fernando Hen-rique Cardoso was president and gave me back my Bra-zilian citizenship, and José Goldemberg, then President of USP, gave me a retirement package. And now I am an emeritus professor. Nice, eh?

Were you investigated?Yes, but I was abroad. Prosecutors ap-

pealed three times, and I was acquitted ev-ery time. That was in the military police in-quiry, which continued in my absence. My lawyer was Mário Simas, who helped a lot of people on the left. The irony is that I owe my career abroad to the military dictator-ship. I spent 16 years in the United States and 15 in France and returned 17 year ago.

Why did you go to France?In 1980–1981, I spent a sabbatical year at

the Pasteur Institute Experimental Parasi-tology Unit in order to study Leishmania with Jean Pierre Dedet in the laboratory directed by Luiz Hildebrando. I returned to New York and started the projects on the parasitophorous vacuoles of infected

when they killed vladimir Herzog, I became so enraged that I turned in my Brazilian passport


macrophages. In 1984, I received an offer to work at the Centre National de la Re-cherche Scientifique (CNRS) at the Pas-teur Institute. I couldn’t refuse.

Was your second wife American?She was Swiss, named Odile Levrat, but

lived in New York. I have two American daughters. The oldest, Miriam, lives in Paris and, with Serge, gave me my on-ly granddaughter, Eleanor, now 4 years old, the small greatest love of my life. My youngest daughter, Caroline, lives in New York. She has a degree in cinema and would like to be a writer.

Why did you return to New York after Paris?

My first stay at Rockefeller generated longtime friends. One was Jim Hirsch, who was initial-ly interested in tuberculo-sis and then in neutrophils, macrophages, chemotaxis and phagocytosis. Jim died in 1987. Zanvil Cohn was a lov-er of macrophages and their multiple functions. When Cohn found out I intended to retire from the Pasteur Insti-tute in 1994, he wrote me and invited me to spend a year at Rockefeller. Unfortunately, Cohn left us suddenly. His successor, Ralph Steinman, made sure the invitation re-mained open. That’s how I spent another year at Rocke-feller before returning to Bra-zil. During that year, I worked in Gilla Kaplan’s laboratory, co-infecting cells with phase II Coxiella burnetii, Mycobacterium avium and My-cobacterium tuberculosis. But Ralph also died. He was replaced with the Brazilian Michel Nussenzweig [Ruth and Victor’s son], who was my student at the New York University School of Medicine.

In addition to these bacteria, you also studied Leishmania?

Yes. In the case of Leishmania, there are species that inhabit large vacuoles [vesi-cles] that are similar to phagolysosomes. Others occupy vacuoles with little free space. When I worked at the Pasteur In-stitute, I knew that the bacterium Coxiella burnetii, the agent of human and animal Q fever, also occupies large vacuoles with

lysosome [another type of vacuole] char-acteristics similar to those of Leishma-nia. I compared the fusion capacities of Leishmania and Coxiella vacuoles with small phagosomes containing inert par-ticles. I wrote an article on this subject with Denise Mattei and Patrícia Veras, who was my postdoctoral researcher in Bahia. One day, I was taking a shower, and an idea came to me. In the lab, I had two pathogens that lived in lysosomes. What would happen if the same cell were infect-ed by both? Would they remain in separate compartments, or would they share the same vacuoles? I tried it out right away. On the same day, we infected cells already infected with Coxiella with L. amazonensis, too. The next day, many leishmanias were found in Coxiella vacuoles. Even more in-

teresting, the leishmanias divided in the borrowed vacuoles and reversibly trans-formed themselves into flagellated pro-mastigotes. However, the reverse experi-ment did not work. If you infect the cells with Leishmania first, wait a day and then infect them with Coxiella, the two organ-isms each remain in separate vacuoles. That was in 1995 and represented the cre-ation of what I called the construction of chimeric vacuoles, which do not exist, except in our imagination. Patricia then repeated the experiment with Trypano-soma cruzi. In this case, the trypanoso-mas swam, circling the periphery of the Coxiella vacuoles, as if they were looking for a way out. We made some magnificent videos that impressed some biologists.

Later, I demonstrated that mycobacteria in small vacuoles may also penetrate the vacuoles occupied by Coxiella in this way. This model, however, has not yet been studied to the extent that it should be.

How did you decide to return to Brazil and choose Unifesp?

I had colleagues and friends at the Unifesp São Paulo School of Medicine who knew me well and invited me to join them. I do not regret it.

Do you have a formal position there?I am retired from USP and am an emeri-

tus professor at Unifesp. Unifesp does not pay me a salary, but they gave me a labora-tory, and I have a small office there that I still use. I attend seminars, participate in

meetings in two areas and ad-vise students and others, when requested. From time to time, I am called upon to give some seminars on science history, so-ciology and policy, for example.

Let’s close this interview with the same topic we started with: what is the best way to train scientists?

My experience and that of others has shown me that one need not be a great sci-entist to motivate students to do good scientific research. The best educators and train-ers of scientists convey their enthusiasm for science and emphasize the importance of curiosity and the need to play with ideas. There is a differ-

ence between starting scientific research and development as a professional sci-entist. I do not think I did great science. The most important thing is that I was part of a community that wanted to learn from each other.

Given your career, it seems that you also did good research.Yes, I did some, but not at the beginning. The best reward, however, is to help train someone who is a better scientist than you are. n

one need not be a great scientist to motivate students to do good scientific research

* Sergio R. doni, Jacob Kipnis, Nelson Fausto, Ricardo Renzo brentani, Thomas Maack, azzo Widman, bernardo liber-man, José Gonzales, Sergio henrique Ferreira, J. F. Terzian, Mauricio Rocha e Silva (Filho) and Waltraut helene lay.

Company laboratories in university parks

enrich students’ education and respond

to new research and development demands

Shared challenges

The role of the university as a catalyst for innovation and development is taking on new dimensions in Brazil through initiatives such as the construction of

the University of Campinas (Unicamp) Science and Technology Park, for which the infrastruc-ture began to be delivered last month. Situated in a 100,000-square-meter area nestled on the university campus, the park will house innova-tive laboratories where corporate researchers, Unicamp professors, and students will work in the same setting. The model, which has only recently begun to spread in Brazil but exists at several foreign universities, has the ability to enrich the education of students and the work of scientists by bringing them in close contact with the demands of businesses. The model also has the ability to increase investment in uni-versity research. “The Unicamp laboratories will produce technological developments but will also make important contributions to basic research. They will also lead to student disserta-tions, theses, patents, and publications from the undergraduate to the post-doctoral level,” says

Fabrício Marques

A New INcubATor

The new headquarters of the Unicamp Technology Company Incubator will occupy a 2,600-square-meter building and will house up to 48 new companies

SAMSuNg

At least 25 professors and students from the Unicamp Institute of Computing work in the lab that Samsung created in partnership with the university. It operates in the Center for Innovation in Software (Inovasoft) building, which also houses centers established in partnership with Banco do Brasil and the company MC1

PUBlIShed In APrIl 2013

políTIcA c&T InfrASTrUCTUre y

18 z Special iSSue october 2013

lIb

The Biofuels Innovation laboratory

(lIB) is located in a 1,600-square-meter

building and provides space for research

on ethanol, biodiesel, and bio-kerosene

eMbrApA

(Brazilian Agricultural research Corporation)

fifty researchers and technicians from embrapa

and Unicamp will work at the Joint Center for Genomics

research Applied to Climate Change, an investment

of r$50 million. The building will be erected

on a 2,500-square-meter parcel of land

TecNoMeTAl

A 500-square-meter laboratory in

partnership with a solar panel manufacturer

involves researchers from the Institute of

Physics and the School of Mechanical

engineering. The projects are related

to the manufacture of silicon wafers

and solar cells

An innovation enclave The Unicamp Science and Technology Park occupies an area of 100,000 square meters on the university campus

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lAbrISerSponsored by Petrobras, the experimental laboratory for Production risers in Ultra deep Waters and Maritime Production Systems (labriser) will have a tank capable of simulating the conditions to which underwater structures are subjected in ocean oil production

cAMeroN do brASIl

The manufacturer of equipment for oil and gas exploration

will invest US$6 million in a 1,000-square-meter

laboratory. The partnership involves the School of Mechanical

engineering and the Center for Petroleum Studies

lacTAdThe Central high Performance Technologies laboratory (laCTAd), a Unicamp facility inaugurated in March, brings together modern equipment for research in genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, and cell biology under one roof



Fernando Ferreira Costa, president of Unicamp. “It is not just to provide a service or to solve problems but to improve the education of our students, who can then use that experience out-side of the university to contribute to innovation, national development, and the establishment of technology-based companies.”

IMMedIATe beNeFITSFor companies, establishing laboratories at uni-versities brings immediate benefits, such as the ability to use the expertise of good researchers in commercially sensitive areas, as well as other long-term benefits, such as the opportunity to interact with other companies and research-ers working in the park and to recruit talent-ed students to work as entry-level researchers. Companies such as Tecnometal, in the mining and renewable energy sector, and Cameron do Brasil, which provides technology and services to the oil and gas industry, have already signed agreements to create laboratories on campus. The park will also house the Embrapa Unicamp Joint Center for Genomics Research Applied to Climate Change, an unprecedented partnership model for a research firm, in which researchers from the two institutions will search for agricul-tural varieties that are more tolerant of the ef-fects of global warming. Inovasoft, the Unicamp Center for Innovation in Software, which houses start-ups and laboratories and was established in partnership with IBM, Samsung, and Banco do Brasil, is already operating in the park. The building that will be occupied by the Biofuels In-novation Laboratory is under construction; this

Laboratory will operate by attracting business laboratories, in a manner similar to Inovasoft. “Unicamp has a long history of working with industry, and the Science and Technology Park will raise this to a new level,” says Ronaldo Pilli, Unicamp Dean of Research. There is a rule re-stricting negotiations for new laboratories in the park: only initiatives that include partnerships with Unicamp research groups are allowed. “The goal is to do competitive research. The company needs to recognize that Unicamp will be a stra-tegic partner,” says Pilli.

According to Roberto de Alencar Lotufo, di-rector of the Unicamp Inova Innovation Agency, which acts as a liaison with companies, the park allows the university to propose and plan the construction of new collaborative laboratories with companies. “Until now, when an oppor-tunity arose to build a new laboratory, its loca-tion did not follow a plan, and this resulted in the installation of various buildings scattered around the campus,” says Lotufo. “The Science and Technology Park will organize and present a plan for the construction of new laboratories for collaborative research, creating a multidisci-plinary, synergistic environment. The park will function like a ‘condominium’, in which compa-nies pay for space and share infrastructure and security expenses.”

Companies that participate in the park will use various types of funding to build their labo-ratories. In the case of Cameron do Brasil, the laboratory will be built with the company’s own resources—Unicamp offered 10 years’ exemp-tion from the occupation fee in exchange for

Company centers in the rio de Janeiro Technology Park: the fruits of UfrJ’s specialization in oil research

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the company’s construction of the building. The agreement was signed in 2011, and the compa-ny’s laboratory should have already been under construction. But Cameron decided to postpone construction by one year, after the recent reduc-tion in Petrobras investments. The partnership involves a collaboration with the School of Me-chanical Engineering (FEM) and the Center for Petroleum Studies (Cepetro) in research projects involving subsea equipment and processes for oil processing and production, with an emphasis on the subsalt layer. Cepetro, created in 1987 in partnership with Petrobras, helped to increase

Unicamp’s expertise in petroleum engineering research, which is now attracting the attention of other companies. In 2015, for example, the facili-ties for the Laboratory for Production Risers in Ultra Deep Waters and Maritime Production Sys-tems (LabRiser) will be completed. These facili-ties consist of an experimental tank, which is the only one of its kind in the world able to simulate the conditions to which underwater structures are subjected in ocean oil production, such as the force of marine currents. The 30-meter deep tank and the laboratory building will cost R$ 6 million (US$ 2.5 million), and the laboratory will need experimental equipment, laboratory and analysis instruments, and computer equipment,

and all of these will be sponsored by Petrobras “Because our oil is offshore, Petrobras has al-ways focused on developing research in ocean drilling and ocean oil production and has found that ability at Unicamp,” says Celso Morooka, a professor at the School of Mechanical Engineer-ing and CEO of LabRiser.

There are also partnerships that utilize non-reimbursable financing mechanisms provided by the Brazilian National Economic and Social De-velopment Bank (BNDES) through the Technol-ogy Fund (Funtec). An example is the 500-square-meter laboratory that Unicamp is building in

partnership with Tecno-metal. The project ob-tained R$12 million from Funtec to construct the building and purchase equipment. Tecnometal’s contribution was equiva-lent to 10% of the total cost of the project. The com-pany has a photovoltaic panel factory in Campi-

nas (SP) and has been working in conjunction with researchers from the Unicamp School of Mechanical Engineering and the Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics on research related to the purification process for metallurgical-grade sili-con, the manufacture of solar-grade silicon wa-fers, and solar cell manufacturing. The Unicamp Inova Agency is currently in advanced talks with at least three companies interested in participat-ing in the park using Funtec resources.

bIoFuelSThere is also a third type of funding, which is used by the Biofuels Innovation Laboratory (LIB). The construction of the 1,656-square-meter build-ing was sponsored by the Brazilian Innovation Agency (Finep) through the CT-Infra program. The goal now is to find companies interested in participating in joint projects with Unicamp researchers involving the ethanol, biodiesel, and bio-kerosene production chains.

A fourth model is used by the Embrapa Uni-camp Joint Center for Genomics Research Ap-plied to Climate Change, which will be jointly funded by Embrapa and the university. Ten re-searchers from the two institutions are already working on the project, which will involve ap-proximately 50 researchers and technicians with-in three years. An estimated R$50 million will be invested in infrastructure and operations. “The five-year goal is to have drought-tolerant genet-ics-based technology applicable to important Bra-zilian crops, such as corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and wheat,” says Embrapa president Maurício Antônio Lopes. “Embrapa has had an important

The principal goal of the partnerships is to conduct competitive research, says ronaldo pilli, dean of unicamp

petrobras has invested

$ 2.5million in the experimental tank at unicamp


role in the adaptation of crops such as soybeans, rice, and wheat to tropical conditions. Now, the challenge is to remain competitive in the seed and biotechnology market, which is increasingly complex. The innovative nature of genomics ap-plied to genetic improvement requires a basic research basis, and this led Embrapa to seek out the University,” he says.

Allelyx’S experIeNceAccording to Lopes, Unicamp was the natural choice because Embrapa has a computational bi-ology center at Unicamp. Lopes emphasizes the importance of having Paulo Arruda, Professor of the Institute of Biology, as the project leader at the university. Arruda was one of the founders of Allelyx, a biotechnology company that was es-tablished based on the sequencing of Xylella fas-tidiosa and that has now merged with Monsanto. “Professor Paulo Arruda is known in Brazil and abroad as a scientist, and he also has experience setting up a pipeline in the private sector. He will work with some researchers who worked at Alle-lyx and are now at Embrapa,” says the president of Embrapa. According to Arruda, the focus of the center is to ensure the sustainability of agri-cultural production in Brazil. “Brazil had agri-cultural losses of R$5.4 billion last year due to bad weather. We need a strategy to sustain the production of corn, soybeans, and wheat, which are our staples,” he says. “We will work at the Joint Center and use a pragmatic business vision, in a for-mat similar to that of drug develop-ment in the pharmaceutical indus-try,” he says. The benefits to Uni-camp, according to Arruda, will be many. “Undergraduate and doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers will have unprecedented opportunities. They will dive into the world of technological development, with its demands, goals, and deadlines. This will increase their employability and contribute to creating a critical mass of knowledge in a subject of great interest to Brazil.”

One of the most complex tasks of the Unicamp Inova Innovation Agency in creating the park is to find research groups at Unicamp who are suitable for meeting the needs of the partner company and to promote an agreement between the two parties. “We are now working on a partnership with Schreder, a public lighting company based in Valinhos. The first thing is to identify the re-search groups that can help, but that is not all. We have to ensure that the researchers have time to help the company and, above all, are inter-ested in the collaboration,” says Roberto Lotufo. The agency maintains a database, known as the

knowledge bank, with updated information on research groups. Inova operates on several fronts. It helps university researchers file patents. It manages Unicamp’s intellectual property. It acts as a liaison with companies that are interested in licensing technologies. It coordinates the activi-ties of an incubator for technology-based compa-nies. Last, it encourages entrepreneurship among researchers and undergraduate and graduate students. According to Lotufo, the Science and Technology Park will be one more tool to fulfill the agency’s mission of encouraging innovation and its transfer to society. “This is what happens at the world’s major research universities. When we receive foreign delegations, the heads of uni-versities always ask us about our incubator, our technology licensing, and our technology park. They are links in the same chain,” he says.

On a reduced scale, the ambitions of the Sci-ence and Technology Park are already being re-alized in the Inovasoft building, the Unicamp Center for Innovation in Software. This building houses laboratories in partnership with several companies, in addition to functioning as an in-cubator for information technology companies. Since late last year, Inovasoft has housed a labo-ratory set up by Samsung, where researchers and

“undergraduate and doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers will have unprecedented opportunities,” says paulo Arruda


students from the Unicamp Institute of Com-puting (IC) are working. Agreements involving investments of approximately R$3 million have focused on research and development in various areas related to mobile computing platforms; Samsung is a leader in the mobile phone sector. The partnership began with three projects, and two new projects are being incorporated. One of the main benefits identified by project par-ticipants is the opportunity to obtain resources and research infrastructure. Samsung has set up a laboratory with computers, tablets, and smart-phones that the researchers use in their work and is funding scholarships for students involved in the project. Sandro Rigo, an IC professor head-ing one of the projects, stresses the importance of the opportunity for students and researchers to work in areas of great interest to companies. “Graduate students in the United States often intern at large companies, but it rarely happens here in Brazil,” he says. Yeun Bae Kim, Samsung Vice President of Research and Development, says that the company’s goal is the joint devel-opment of new technologies in the medium and long term. “The objective is to produce results with a high technological impact, to obtain sig-nificant improvement in the state of the art in research areas of interest to Samsung,” he stated when he participated in the laboratory’s official inauguration in January.

Another Inovasoft laboratory houses a col-laborative research project started in 2011 by the Unicamp IC with Banco do Brasil. The focus is the study of and support for the implementa-tion of solutions for computer registration and authentication for Banco do Brasil customers us-ing the Internet portal to access their accounts.

“The bank gave us freedom to suggest solutions. We proposed both a new solution and a modifica-tion to make the system they already have more robust,” says Ricardo Dahab, IC professor and leader of one of the Banco do Brasil projects. “It was an important project because the require-ments were very sophisticated. It provided work for three doctoral students, and good academic articles were published.” The project involved three professors and eight students, including graduate (PhD and MS) and undergraduate re-search assistants.

According to MC1, a São Paulo-based soft-ware and services company, the recently signed partnership with researchers from the Institute of Computing seeks more than just innovative solutions. “We’re not simply seeking informa-tion and scientific and technological upgrades

TeCnOPUC headquarters (below), in Porto Alegre, model of the new park building (above, left) and computer company innovation centers: the park leveraged resources for research

embrapa and unicamp invested r$50million in the joint center

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for our company. One of our goals is to hire the individuals participating in the project,” says Kayo Hisatomi, software development coordi-nator at the company. The company has already signed agreements with other universities in the past, but this is the first time it has invested in its own laboratory. “We learned about this format and decided to invest in it,” says Hisatomi, who majored in computer engineering at Unicamp in 1998 and still maintains contact with the uni-versity. The project leader is IC Professor Luiz Fernando Bittencourt, who will coordinate a team of 15 researchers and students in develop-ing a platform that enables the company to offer its solutions to several clients at the same time using cloud computing resources. “The goal is to create a software architecture that allows the company to offer its software without having to create a customized copy for each client,” he says. MC1 is investing about R$170,000 in the project.

One of the main inspirations for the more than 900 technology parks around the world is the pioneering experience of Stanford Uni-versity in the early 1950s, when the relation-ship between the university, microelectronics companies, and research institutions gave rise to Silicon Valley, the most important enclave of technology companies in the world. In the early 1970s, Japan enthusiastically embraced the idea of technology parks, creating 25 “technopoles.” Among the major parks embedded in universi-ties around the world, the ones that stand out are at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Purdue University in the United States and the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in the UK.

SIlIcoN VAlleyBrazil decided to invest in this model later than other countries. One of the largest Technology Park developments in Brazil is in Rio de Janeiro. Established 10 years ago on the outskirts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) cam-pus, its emphasis is on research and development in oil and gas, based on the work that UFRJ has been conducting in this area for decades (es-pecially at its Alberto Luiz Coimbra Institute - Graduate School and Research in Engineering (Coppe)) and on partnerships established with the Petrobras Research and Development Center (Cenpes). The park occupies an area of 350,000 square meters and will house the research and development centers of more than 20 large and medium-sized companies by 2015. Between 2003 and 2014, R$1 billion is expected to be invested. The French company Schlumberger, the Amer-ican companies Baker Hughes, GE, and FMC Technologies, and the Brazilian company BR Asfaltos, owned by Petrobras, are already oper-ating at its centers. Centers for the Siemens and Halliburton companies are expected to begin operations later this year. “The park was cre-ated 10 years ago, but its history began long be-fore that,” says Maurício Guedes, director of the park. “Similar to Unicamp, UFRJ is an example of a university with an entrepreneurial culture. UFRJ also has experience with company rela-tionships, through Coppe, for example, which alone has signed over 3,000 agreements with Petrobras. We have had a very successful rela-tionship with Petrobras for more than 40 years, since the establishment of Cenpes on the UFRJ campus,” says Guedes.

The Unicamp Science and Technology Park is one of the pre-certified São Paulo Technol-ogy Parks, which includes 27 initiatives spread across various cities in the state of São Paulo, several of which have close ties to universities such as the Botucatu Park (which is linked to the

1 Aerial view of the Stanford research Park, an inspiration for technology cities in the United States and in various other countries

2 The São José dos Campos Technology Park, one of the most advanced of the 27 initiatives in the São Paulo State system

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Universidade Estadual Paulista) and the Ribeirão Preto Park (which is linked to the University of São Paulo). One of the earliest—and the first to receive official certification—was the São José dos Campos Technology Park, an initiative pro-moted by the city to bring together innovation centers in the areas of health, information tech-nology, aerospace, energy, and water resources. The park operates with anchor companies such as Embraer, Vale, Ericsson, and Sabesp and has partners such as the Technological Institute of Aeronautics (ITA), the Polytechnical School (Po-li-USP), and the USP-São Carlos Engineering School, in addition to the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) and the São Paulo Institute for Technological Research (IPT).

The task of creating a technology park within a university is far from trivial. “One common ob-stacle is space. Few universities have the land to create parks. Even great institutions, such as Har-vard and MIT, have this limitation,” says Roberto Lotufo, who participates in the annual meet-ing of the Association of University Research Parks (AURP), an entity created in 1986 whose members include the 32 science and technology parks owned by US universities. According to Lotufo, in Brazil, there is also the legal difficulty of maintaining an enclave within the campus

that follows rules that are differ-ent from those that govern pub-lic universities. A park linked to a community university epitomizes the benefits that such initiatives can provide to both companies and the academic environment. The Technology Park of the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio Grande do Sul (TECNOPUC), in the city of Porto Alegre, currently consists of 101 innovation centers that bring together companies and institu-tions of various sizes and employ 4,800 people. The park was estab-lished in 2003 as part of PUC-RS’s strategy to qualify as a research in-stitution. “There was an imbalance between PUC’s established tradi-tion in teaching and the institu-

tion’s research that needed to be resolved, and there was also difficulty in raising funds to invest in research because our source of funds—student fees—was intended mainly to fund teaching,” says Roberto Moschetta, director of TECNOPUC.

Full pArk Initially the TECNOPUC park focused on infor-mation technology and communication, with Dell and HP as anchor laboratories, and sought to attract private funding for research at the in-stitution. Today, the park includes centers for companies such as Microsoft and TOTVS and has expanded its research areas into the fields of energy and health, with agreements with the National Health Surveillance Agency and Petro-bras. There is no more space for new initiatives—the 15-hectare lot next to PUC, bought from the Army, is full. Park expansion will take place in a large area 12 kilometers from the university campus. “Of course, not all company centers are developing high-tech research. Some companies seek the university’s expertise for simple appli-cations,” said Moschetta.

The results of the initiative exceed expecta-tions. The director notes that TECNOPUC infor-mation technology graduate courses offer schol-arships, funded by companies located in the park, to almost all students. “It’s a virtuous circle. We are able to attract highly qualified students, and our courses gain even more prestige,” he says. “The coexistence of the companies in the parks also generates unexpected interactions. Partner-ships and exchanges of experiences that could not be foreseen at the beginning of the project occur. The environment is synergistic and acts as a catalyst. The energy you see in the park en-vironment is due more to the connections that form than to the environment itself,” he says. n

“The coexistence of the companies in the parks generates unexpected interactions,” says roberto Moschetta

the rio de janeiro technology park obtained r$ 1 billion in investments in 10 years

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The Unicamp facility combines modern equipment

for research in genomics, proteomics,

bioinformatics and cell biology under a single roof

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The University of Campinas (Uni-camp) has set up a laboratory that features state-of-the-art equipment designed for research

in genomics, bioinformatics, proteomics and cell biology. Located in the Science and Technology Park of the university and modeled after university research facilities abroad, the Central High Per-formance Technologies Laboratory (LaC-TAD) seeks to ensure a high level of qual-ity in the research conducted at Unicamp and in the state of São Paulo; the facilities are made available to researchers from other institutions. “The university has signed two significant agreements as a result of the laboratory’s existence. This unit will be very useful for research into the proposed areas and will give a major boost to Brazilian science,” asserted the president of Unicamp, Fernando Ferreira Costa, at the inaugural ceremony. p

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FAPESP has invested approximately R$5.5 million into the purchase of labo-ratory equipment under the Multi-user Equipment Program (EMU), whereas the construction of buildings and the hir-ing of staff were left to the university. “It is notable that Unicamp has invested al-most as much as FAPESP and that LaC-TAD has a well-demonstrated cost struc-ture and institutional support critical to hiring employees in bioinformatics and technical support staff with doctorates,” said Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, the scientific director of FAPESP, who at-tended the opening of the laboratory on March 1st. The proposed creation of LaCTAD was submitted as part of the request for proposals of the Multi-user Equipment Program of FAPESP in 2009. In 2011, services began to be offered from temporary facilities in the teaching and research units.

Three modern sequencers have been acquired to perform work in the field of genomics, including two models. One is the Illumina HiSeq 2500, which enables complex sequencing studies through its ability to produce a large number of ge-nome sequences for bioinformatics anal-ysis. The other model is the ABI 3730XL DNA Analyzer from Applied Biosystems, which does not produce as many se-quences as the former model but is able to map a larger number of base pairs. “It’s not easy to find a scientific study in the life sciences published by a leading journal that does not contain some ele-ment of gene sequencing or changes in the genome and that doesn’t use such data to design research or plan experi-ments,” says Ronaldo Pilli, Unicamp’s Dean of Research. “This equipment is improving the quality of research carried out at Unicamp.” Providing bioinformat-ics services, another goal of LaCTAD, is supported by a collection of computers that includes IBM servers and HP ma-chines. “We have invested in the training of human resources by offering bioin-formatics courses every semester,” says Dean Pilli. Approximately 160 students have already been trained.

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Illumina sequencer, which complement the sequences we determined with the Roche 454 sequencer. We have one 454 at USP, but not an Illumina, hence the importance of the services they pro-vide,” says Professor Mendes de Souza. Paulo Arruda of the Institute of Biology at Unicamp has also used the LaCTAD services. A project of his doctoral stu-dent, Vagner Katsumi Okura, involves constructing and sequencing the bacte-rial artificial chromosome (BAC) library of sugarcane. BAC libraries are funda-

EpIlEpSyOne of the projects currently underway at the facility is led by Professor Iscia Lopes-Cendes of the Department of Medical Genetics at the School of Medi-cal Sciences at Unicamp. She is using one of the LaCTAD sequencers to study the molecular mechanisms in the develop-ment of epilepsy, seeking to identify gene expression from brain tissue samples of rats. Selected neuronal networks from the hippocampus in animal models in-duced to present this disease are sub-jected to deep sequencing to search for transcripts (messenger RNA) that may be used to differentiate between the patho-logical and normal states. “As this [work] involves deep sequencing, we needed a fast sequencer, and we even helped to upgrade its software with funding from our research project,” she said.

Professor Gláucia Mendes de Sou-za of the University of São Paulo (USP) Chemistry Institute, who conducts re-search and is one of the coordinators of the Program for Research on Bioenergy (BIOEN) at FAPESP, also made use of the Unicamp facility to sequence a sug-arcane reference genome. “LaCTAD is providing sequences obtained using the

laCTAD has invested in training human resources by offering courses in bioinformatics

lacTad is equipped with an isothermal titration calorimeter (1 and 2) a chromatograph (3) and a confocal microscope (4)

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mental tools used to characterize chro-mosomal regions that contain genes of interest. A second research project, by doctoral student Pedro Barreto, involves investigating how plants regulate mi-tochondrial biogenesis. The mitochon-drion is an organelle responsible for cell bioenergetics. “There is a reasonable knowledge base about mitochondri-al biogenesis in mammals, but little is known about it in plants,” says Arruda, whose work encompasses sequencing plant RNAs that overexpress the mito-chondrial uncoupling protein (UCP1).

In the field of proteomics, LaCTAD of-fers liquid chromatography equipment, which can be used to analyze and purify proteins, and a calorimeter, which can be used to determine the thermodynamic parameters of biochemical reactions. A mass spectrometer (model Xevo Q-TOF MS) belonging to the Chemistry Insti-tute at Unicamp will be made available to LaCTAD users until the laboratory is able to purchase its own equipment. Within the field of cell biology, the labo-ratory is equipped with a Leica confocal microscope that is capable of producing high-resolution fluorescence images of a variety of biological samples. Another piece of equipment is a Bio-Rad multi-plex immunoassay instrument, which can quickly and accurately measure dos-ages of hormones or cytokines, the mol-ecules involved in the signals emitted between cells during immune respons-es. “We are organizing an international workshop on cell biology to be held in May. We’re going to hear from outside experts who are conducting the same type of work in the life sciences in a cen-tral laboratory, so that we can exchange experiences and improve our services. The idea is to generate greater momen-tum for LaCTAD in cell biology,” says Dean Pilli. n Fabrício Marques


FAPESP’s new Research, Innovation, and Dissemination

Centers embolden Brazil’s science and enhance its impact

The expansion of knowledge

In one of the biggest investments ever made in a research program in Brazil, FAPESP an-nounced the creation of 17 new Research, In-novation, and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) that will bring together 535 scientists from the

state of São Paulo, Brazil, and from 69 other coun-tries to work in fields on the frontier of knowledge. During an 11-year period, US$680 million will be invested, of which US$370 million will come from FAPESP, and US$310 million will be provided in the form of salaries paid by the host institutions to researchers and technical personnel. “Large-scale long-term financing enables us to be bolder in setting research objectives; ensures stabilization of the teams; and, at the same time, increases the scale of science and technology research in the state of São Paulo,” says Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, scientific director of FAPESP.

The selection process lasted 20 months, from the submission of 90 pre-projects to the selection of the 17 centers. The effort involved 250 Brazilian and foreign reviewers and an international commit-tee composed of 11 invited scientists, in addition to the internal committees at FAPESP. The submitted proposals were evaluated based on scientific merit, boldness, originality, international competitiveness, and the qualifications of the teams and their lead-ers. Each RIDC will have an international advisory committee. Each will be evaluated by FAPESP in the 2nd, 4th, and 7th years to determine whether the center should continue its work.

From October 2000 to December 2012, FAPESP financed an initial group of 11 RIDCs p

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Targets for the RIDCs include research projects on inequality in metropolitan areas, the human genome, the therapeutic potential of toxins, and optics

(known in Brazil by their Portuguese acronym, Cepid), investing a total of R$260 million. “The Foundation intends to commission an evaluation of that period, but we can already say that the contributions by several of those centers were remarkable,” says Hernan Chaimovich, Coor-dinator of the RIDC program. “Some leaders received significant international recognition; for example, Professor Marco Antonio Zago has been applauded for his research on cellu-lar therapy in diabetes, and physicist Vanderlei Bagnato was recently selected by the National Academy of Sciences.” Eight centers represent the continuation of initiatives contemplated in the first round. Several retain the same name and purpose: for example, the Center for Met-ropolitan Studies, the Center for the Study of Violence, and the Center for Cell-Based Therapy (CTC). Others have updated their mission but have retained their leaders. Nine centers are new and address topics such as foods, obesity, inflammatory diseases, neuroscience, biomedi-cine, applied mathematics, computer science, and vitreous materials.

For the centers that were selected during the first round, the possibility of continuing in the program for another 11 years has advantages but also poses challenges. “While in 2000, we had a vague idea of what these centers could be like, today, we understand their potential enough to have more audacious and speculative ambitions—and here, I’m talking about all of the approved centers, not just the one I head,” says Marco

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Antonio Zago, a professor at the Ribeirão Preto School of Medicine and Coordinator of the CTC. “One important result of the first round of the RIDC program was its ability to align the work of a series of researchers who had been doing high-level research independently.” The center will now adopt a more practical approach. “Our RIDC was successful in conducting clinical tests of a diabetes therapy, but now, we are looking to perfect that treatment method so it can also be used for leukemia by using stem cells,” says Zago, who is Dean of Research at USP. The center’s team has been rejuvenated. “We have attracted researchers who were trained in an environ-ment in which cell-based therapy was already a reality,” he says. One of the goals is to generate Brazilian lines of stem cells for use in preclinical studies focusing on diseases such as dyskeratosis congenita (which causes premature aging), he-mophilia A, and Parkinson’s disease.

“While in the first round, we took some time to get off the ground, this time we’ll start at full speed,” agrees Vanderlei Bagnato, a professor at USP’s São Carlos Institute of Physics and Coor-dinator of the São Carlos Optics and Photonics Research Center (CePOF). “We are faced with the challenge of coming up with original problems and assuming international leadership,” he says. Bagnato’s group is recognized for its contribu-tions, one of which was in the field of quantum turbulence, a phenomenon first demonstrated by the São Carlos group in 2009 (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue Nº 177). That line of research is related to the so-called Bose-Einstein condensate, the name given to a group of atoms (or molecules) that begin to behave as a single entity when cooled to extremely low temperatures. The center will conduct research on three fronts: cold atoms (such as those of the Bose-Einstein condensate), plas-monics (work that could result in optical com-puter processors when applied), and biophotonics (the use of light as a tool for research in the life sciences). One of the emphases in the new phase of the CePOF is innovation. “The objective is not only to obtain patents but also to generate proj-ects with companies,” says Bagnato, whose center collaborated on the introduction of 25 products.

Inspired by the Science and Technology Centers established in 1987 by the National Science Founda-tion (NSF) in the United States, the RIDCs encour-age the establishment of multidisciplinary, topic-based teams whose characteristics are well defined. “What we want is multidisciplinary research that meets international standards and works on the frontiers of knowledge, an effort that identifies new directions for that research, rather than simply accompanying the state of the art,” says Chaimov-ich. The centers should also produce innovation and transfer knowledge to the productive sector

$680 million will be invested in the 17 centers during an 11-year period

or provide support for the formulation of public policies. “There’s an important third component, which is skills building. The centers need to have an instructional arm that disseminates the knowl-edge that was produced,” says the coordinator, referring to courses offered to students and the development of educational resources.

ThE FRoNTIER oF KNoWLEDGEThe updates to the goals to be followed by certain RIDCs, which have technically turned the RIDCs into different centers, were driven by the emer-gence of new topics at the frontier of knowledge. A center devoted to research on genetic diseas-es, for example, now includes the study of stem cells in its name and scope. “That had already happened in the trajectory followed by the first RIDC, in 2005, when we introduced the study of stem cells as a tool for understanding genetic expression and the differences among genetic diseases and evaluating the cells’ therapeutic potential,” says Mayana Zatz, a professor at the USP Biosciences Institute and Coordinator of the Human Genome and Stem-Cell Research Cen-ter. “That is one of the advantages of an RIDC. It can update its course of action in order to keep itself always on the frontier,” she says. Another new element is the inclusion of the study of ag-ing, degenerative diseases, and factors that may contribute to those processes. The center has developed a project in which it will compare genomic variation and brain function between healthy Brazilians over the age of 80 and a group of people over the age of 60 who have been fol-lowed for more than 10 years.

The Center for Innovation in Biodiversity and Drug Discovery grew out of the Center for Structural Molecular Biotechnology. Its pur-poses are more directed toward applied science.

1 e 2 mass spectrometer (1) and preformulation laboratory (2) at the Butantan Institute

3 laboratory at the human genome and Stem-Cell Research Center at uSP

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Whereas the RIDC approved in 2000 studied the structure and function of molecules of bio-technological interest, the current center aims to develop drugs based on compounds found in the diverse Brazilian ecosystem, as well as syn-thetic substances. Led by Glaucius Oliva of the São Carlos Institute of Physics, who is the cur-rent president of the National Council for Sci-entific and Technological Development (CNPq), the center has joined forces with the Center for Natural Products Bioassays, Biosynthesis, and Eco-physiology (NuBBE) of the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) in Araraquara, led by researcher Vanderlan Bolzani and the Chemical Synthesis Group at the University of Campinas (Unicamp). The NuBBE has assembled a collec-tion of compounds isolated from plants, fungi, microorganisms, and other sources (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue Nº 200). “We learned a lot by do-ing high-quality research in structural biology, and now, it’s time to use that knowledge to de-velop new drugs,” Oliva says. The center brings together researchers from the Federal University of São Carlos and USP’s Ribeirão Preto School of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

VIoLENCE IN METRopoLITAN AREASIn the case of the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM), the new phase will focus more on the role

of the State and public policy in the reduction of inequalities. “We know that there has been a con-sistent reduction in income inequality in Brazil. However, people’s well-being does not depend on income alone but also—and critically so—on access to services,” says Marta Arretche, a profes-sor at USP and Coordinator of the center, which is housed at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap). “Our goal is to system-atically examine what has been happening with regard to inequality in access to public services, such as water and sewer service, employment, education, and health, and to what extent public policies affect people’s quality of life,” she says. Another central area of interest to the center is the functioning of institutions that are beyond the reach of the State, situated on the peripheries of urban areas: notably, safety and the real estate market. Many families have unreliable access to housing. “Brazil is noted for having areas where the government does not govern. This makes it important to study the activities of organized crime and the real estate business in the urban peripheries. There is then another dimension that interests us, which is the flourishing on the peripheries of association membership, civic life, and cultural expressions,” she states. The new phase of the CEM will seek to deepen the inter-nationalization of its research agenda. “We will make an effort to promote co-authorships with foreign authors and to expand our connections with researchers who are on the cutting edge,” Arretche says. One of the projects that the CEM started to develop in 2000 was the production of georeferenced data (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue Nº 193). The current plan is to offer a distance-learning course on georeferencing that would be tailored to policymakers and researchers.

The Center for the Study of Violence will con-

“What we want is research that meets international standards and identifies new directions for science,” says hernan Chaimovich

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duct a major study in the city of São Paulo, hoping to make progress in answering questions raised during the earlier project. In this project, sce-narios of violence in Brazil were mapped, and issues such as the causes of persistent violence and the nature of the political culture that sup-ports human rights were investigated for the first time. “We observed that the public has a hard time believing that laws and institutions have the power to promote social justice and reduce conflicts that otherwise tend to be resolved with violence,” says Sérgio Adorno, a professor at the USP School of Philosophy, Language and Litera-ture, and the Humanities and the principal re-searcher at the center. “We want to understand how an individual’s relationships and ties work with regard to obeying laws, respecting author-ity, recognizing the institutions responsible for enforcing laws and preserving rights,” he says.

The starting point, Adorno says, is the observa-tion that the relationship between the citizens of neighborhoods and the public services charged with ensuring their rights—such as schools, local police stations, and health centers—is conflicted. In that regard, the research project will examine the fundamental legitimacy of the democratic order. One population group will be followed over time at successive moments. “We plan to observe the changes that occur between the governors and the governed, between citizens and public services,

“The impact on the ability to produce quality science is significant and does not result only from the volume of funds,” says Fernando Cendes

and to understand the possibilities for strengthening policies of respect for the laws and institutions,” Sér-gio Adorno says. The professor also says that methodology will have to be developed for observing the city. “Violence is not evenly distributed. In order to do longitudinal research, we have to have a representation of that territorial and social diversity,” he says. The study is integrated into an international network. Research-ers from countries such as Colombia, Mexico, the United States, South Af-rica, and India will perform stud-ies along the same lines, several of which will do so by select a series of snapshots. All the while, these stud-ies will produce results comparable with those obtained in Brazil.

hEALThTo researchers and program participants, the impact on their ability to produce quality science is remarkable—and not just quality in terms of the volume of funds. “By being assured of long-term funding, we can work calmly, without hav-ing to spend time trying to raise new funds,” says Fernando Cendes, a professor at the School of Medical Sciences at Unicamp and Coordinator

of the Brazilian Institute of Neu-roscience and Neurotechnology (English acronym: BRAINN). “Collaboration flows when all researchers know that they will be able to conduct a bold project. It may take four years to gather data so that they can then per-form complex analyses,” he says. A virtuous circle is formed. “The group guarantees a level of pres-tige that makes it possible to re-cruit the best students and to ob-tain additional investments and a good infrastructure.”

The RIDC led by Fernando Cendes is the fruit of another investment by FAPESP and is known as the Inter-Institutional Cooperation to Support Brain Re-search (CInAPCe). Between 2007 and 2012, this network brought together 30 research groups who studied the mechanisms of epi-lepsy, as manifested among Brazil-ians (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue Nº 124). The new center will fo-cus on technological research and development related to epilepsy, 1


a condition that affects three million Brazilians, and cerebral vascular accidents (CVAs), which are responsible for one in every nine deaths in Brazil. The cooperation involves researchers in health and biology, computational graphic design professionals, engineers, physicists, and medical physicists. The objectives are to interfere with the development of epilepsy and to improve the rehabilitation of stroke victims by developing new methods for diagnosis and intervention, including products that feature electrodes with microcircuits, robotic interfaces, and warning systems coupled to cellphones.

As with BRAINN, the search for an under-standing of diseases that afflict a large percent-age of people and for new therapies to address these diseases is a common denominator among several RIDCs. In the case of the Obesity and Co-Morbidities Research Center, a collabora-tion between nine researchers from Unicamp, four researchers from USP, and nine researchers from other countries, the plan is to make prog-ress in identifying and describing the mecha-nisms at the cellular and molecular levels that contribute to the development of obesity. “Only by understanding the origin of the problem from a molecular standpoint can we find therapeutic solutions,” says Licio Velloso, a professor at the School of Medical Sciences, Unicamp, and the principal researcher at the center. The prevalence

of obesity, which affected approximately 5% of the world’s population in the 1970s, is rising and may well exceed 25% of the population in this decade. The incidence of associated diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes, CVA, and heart attack, are rising and killing increasing numbers of people, not to mention the impact on health care costs. “There is no efficient treatment for obesity,” Velloso says. Each researcher at the cen-ter will work on a disease or a specific research topic. “By joining forces, we want to advance in knowledge and therapeutics. We have one re-searcher in the field of chemistry who will work on developing drugs from the potential targets that we hope to find,” he says.

The Center for Research on Toxins, Immune Response, and Cell Signaling will concentrate on studies on the biochemical, molecular, and cellular mechanisms of toxins that have thera-peutic potential. Headquartered at the Butantan Institute, the center grew out of the Center for Applied Toxinology, which operated between 2000 and 2012. “During the center’s first phase, the objective was to discover new toxins in the venoms and secretions of various animals, such as snakes and arachnids, by isolating them, charac-terizing them in chemical terms, and promoting the synthesis of peptides and biological tests to verify the activity of the toxins,” observes Hugo Armelin, a professor at USP’s Chemistry Institute, a researcher at the Butantan Institute, and Co-ordinator of the center. “Now the goal is to work with the mechanisms of the molecular actions of selected toxins,” he explains. Ten researchers from Butantan, in fields such as immunology, biochemistry, cellular biology, systemic biology, and computer science and all affiliated with the institution’s laboratories, will work on topics including protein structure, DNA sequencing, and protein production in bacteria. The Pain and Signaling Laboratory will work on developing analgesics and perform biological testing with rodents. Studies on zebrafish, a fish that serves as a model in research associated with the immu-nological response to toxins, are being conducted in a laboratory that was recently established for this purpose. “Using toxins means working in a cell signaling network. The toxins are chemical substances with extremely high specificity and serve as tools for studying signaling pathways within the cells,” says Armelin.

The twenty years of experience in basic and clinical studies of a group of researchers at USP’s Ribeirão Preto School of Medicine lend support to the Center for Research on Inflammatory Diseases, which will investigate the mechanisms involved in the genesis of inflammatory diseases of autoim-mune origin and infectious and metabolic diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis,

1 Inequality in access to public services in cities will be investigated by the Center for metropolitan Studies

2 Development of vitroceramics at uFSCar, which is home to a new center for vitreous materials

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sepsis, leishmaniasis, and atherosclerosis. The studies are looking for new targets with which to develop therapies for these diseases. Under the leadership of Professor Fernando Queiroz Cunha, the group has already made important contribu-tions to the study of arthritis. For example, the researchers studied the mechanisms that keep certain patients from responding to an important medication used to treat arthritis and have exam-ined the reasons that smokers suffer from more serious arthritis. The group has also contributed to the study of inflammatory pain and sepsis. Sep-sis is characterized by a systemic inflammatory response that results from an infection, formerly known as septicemia, and is fatal for more than 30% of its victims. One concern of the group is to understand why certain patients who survive the acute crisis of sepsis die a short while later from other infections or from apparently unrelated diseases, such as cancer and cardiovascular prob-lems. “We are going to use our experience and to bring in other groups from the basic and clinical areas in order to increase the variety of diseases being studied,” the professor says. “When we find a biological target that has potential in treatment development, we will examine it to see whether it is relevant to the other diseases being investi-gated.” The research will also involve a search for new natural molecules in plants and in the saliva of insect vectors of diseases. Meanwhile, the Center for Research on Redox Processes in Biomedicine is looking for effective antioxidant strategies and biomarkers of oxidative stress that have potential technological applications. Under the leadership of Professor Ohara Augusto, from USP’s Chemistry Institute, the center will have a central laboratory that will supply the research-ers with analytical tools.

A new element in the results of the second RIDC request for proposals was the selection of two

centers headed by mathematicians. The need for mathematical models capable of analyzing the complex mass of data generated by experimental neuroscience sparked the creation of the Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Center for Neuro-mathematics (NeuroMat). “The center’s mission is to conduct pure research in mathematics and statistics, starting with fundamental questions raised by basic and clinical neurobiology. Neuro-science is experiencing a situation of disequilib-rium between a high capacity for producing ex-perimental data and an insufficient capability for theoretical comprehension,” says Antonio Galves, a professor at the USP Institute of Mathemat-ics and Statistics and Coordinator of NeuroMat. “Overcoming that imbalance means developing a new domain of mathematics at the interface be-tween the theory of probabilities, combinatorics, statistics, and computer science. The objective is to construct a conceptual framework suited to rigorous formulation of the problems of neuro-biology,” he says. Mathematicians from several specialized fields will work together with com-puter scientists, neuroscientists, and clinicians. The principal technological transfer activity will be the development of open-code computational tools for basic and clinical research and an open access neurobiological database.

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1 obesity and overweight status, which now afflict 25% of the population, are the targets of an RIDC based at unicamp

2 magnetic resonance of the brain: equipment based in Campinas will be used to study epilepsy and CVAs

3 Study of nanoparticles seeks to develop materials with new functions at the unesp center in Araraquara

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Another initiative is in the field of mathematics applied to industry. “Brazil does not have a tradition of using mathematics as a tool for industrial development, but that is a common practice in other coun-tries,” says José Alberto Cuminato, a professor at the Institute of Math-ematical Sciences and Computa-tion (ICMC) at USP in São Carlos and Coordinator of the Center for Research in Mathematical Scienc-es Applied to Industry. The cen-ter’s ambitions include but are not limited to transferring knowledge to industry. “We need to imagine that the problems of industry can lead to new research approaches for mathematics,” says Cuminato.

“When a mathematician considers an academic problem, he formulates a conjecture and tries to prove it. If he does not succeed, he reformulates his hypotheses, simplifying them. However, if I have to simulate the flow through a 15-cm diam-eter pipe, I cannot reduce the size of the pipe to 10 cm. The problem is a real one,” he says. The RIDC will look for solutions for areas such as fluid mechanics, aeronautical engineering, com-putational intelligence, optimization, operational research, and risk analysis for banks. “We want to work primarily on problems for small com-panies,” he notes.

INTERDISCIpLINARITYOne ambition that is shared by all 17 RIDCs is to bring together researchers from different disci-plines to multiply the impact of their scientific production. The Center for Computational Science and Engineering is gathering specialists in chem-istry, physics, biology, mechanical engineering,

and computational and applied mathematics to develop advanced computational modeling tech-niques. “We are bringing together scientists who have different backgrounds in multidisciplinary topics but whose focal point is the application and development of computationally intensive meth-ods,” says Munir Skaf, a professor at the Unicamp Chemistry Institute and Coordinator of the center. Skaf cites the example of computational geophys-ics, which needs to analyze gigantic quantities of cyclical data, such as series of seismographic sig-nals, to obtain information about the geophysics of a site. “A new approach is needed for treating large volumes of data in the emerging field known as eScience. We’re going to use that approach to deal with problems in materials engineering, bioinformatics and biotechnology, the molecular sciences, agriculture, and—who knows—perhaps ultimately in climate sciences and social sciences that involve large volumes of data,” he says.

Multidisciplinarity also shapes the Food Re-search Center (FoRC), an initiative undertaken by a group of researchers from fields such as food science, food engineering, nutrition, medicine, and veterinary medicine. “Our objectives are to inter-vene throughout the chain of production of foods and to produce basic and applied science that is relevant to agribusiness, consumers, and regula-tory agencies,” says Bernadette Dora Gombossy de Melo Franco, a professor at the USP School of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Coordinator of the RIDC. The center will focus on four specific areas. In the first, foods will be characterized by their biodiversity and their composition in terms of macro- and micronutrients and other compounds that are beneficial to health using ‘omic’ tools. In the second, the center will study the impacts of food components on the nutritional status of the population and on the reduction in the risks of acquiring diseases. In the third, food safety will be evaluated in relation to the risks resulting from biological and chemical pollution. The fourth and final focus will be directed toward technologies for improving the quality, safety, and nutritional value of foods and to the study of the environmen-tal impacts of food processing. The FoRC began to mature three years ago, when USP encouraged the formation of Research Support Units (NAPs) that gather specialists around a multidisciplinary topic. “After the inauguration of the Support Unit for Research in Foods and Nutrition, when the RIDC request for proposals went out, we were ready to set up the project,” Gombossy de Melo Franco says.

Three cities in the interior of São Paulo State—Araraquara, São Carlos, and Ribeirão Preto, situ-ated at a distance of 100 km from the state capi-tal—are home to seven of the 17 RIDCs, a sign of the vigor of research institutions in that re-p

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The search for an understanding of diseases and for new treatments is a common denominator among several teams of researchers


The new RIDCsThe 17 FAPESP Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Centers

RIDC CooRDINAToR pREVIoUS EXpERIENCE INSTITUTIoNS INVoLVED

Center for Research and Innovation in Biodiversity and Drug Discovery

glaucius oliva – IFSC/uSP

Center for Structural molecular Biotechnology (2000-2012) uSP (hQ), unesp, unicamp, uFSCar

Center for Research on Toxins, Immune Response, and Cell Signaling

hugo Armelin –Butantan Institute

Center for Applied Toxinology (2000-2012)

Butantan Institute (hQ), uSP, Albert Einstein Research Institute, unesp, uFmg, national Academy of medicine in the united States, and universities of glasgow, Cardiff, Stanford, Virginia, Toyama, montpellier, Berlin, and lausanne

Center for Cell-Based Therapymarco Antonio Zago – FmRP/uSP

Center for Cell-Based Therapy (2000-2012)

uSP (hQ), hemotherapy Center of Ribeirão Preto, unesp, uFSCar, and universities of montreal, guelph, oxford, king’s College, California, Southern California, northwestern, Feinberg, munich, Paris, and leiden

optics and photonics Research Center

Vanderlei Salvador Bagnato – IFSC/uSP

optics and Photonics Research Center (2000-2012)

uSP (hQ), unicamp, uFSCar, uFPE, Embrapa, Barretos Cancer hospital

Center for Metropolitan Studies marta Arretche – Cebrap

Center for metropolitan Studies (2000-2012)

Cebrap (hQ), uSP, unicamp, Inpe, Insper, uFSCar, king’s College

Center for the Study of Violence Sérgio Adorno – FFlCh/uSP

Center for the Study of Violence (2000-2012)

uSP (hQ), Seade, El Colegio Del mexico, latin American Social Sciences Institute, Indian Institute for human Settlements, Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation-Johannesburg, and universities of Columbia, California, and Cape Town

Center for Research and Development of Functional Materials

Elson longo – IQ Araraquara / unesp

multidisciplinary Center for the Development of Ceramic materials (2000-2012)

unesp (hQ), uSP, unifesp, uFSCar, uFABC, IPEn, CnPEm, FacTI

human Genome and Stem-Cell Research Center

mayana Zatz – uSP

human genome Research Center (2000-2012)

uSP (hQ), unifesp, Albert Einstein hospital, Fleury S.A., Zerbini Foundation, InCor, university of utrecht

Food Research Center

Bernadette Dora gombossy de melo Franco – FCF/uSP

Support unit for Research in Foods and nutrition – uSP uSP (hQ), unicamp, unesp, Ital, ImT

obesity and Co-Morbidities Research Center

licio Velloso – FCm/unicamp

national Institute of Science and Technology on obesity and Diabetes (2009-2013)

unicamp (hQ), unesp, InCor

Center for Research, Teaching, and Innovation in Glass

Edgar Dutra Zanotto – uFSCar uFSCar (hQ), uSP

Center for Research in Mathematical Sciences Applied to Industry

José Alberto Cuminato – ICmC/uSP

uSP (hQ), unicamp, unesp, DCTA, uFSCar, PuC-RJ

Center for Research on Inflammatory Diseases

Fernando Queiroz Cunha – FmRP/uSP

uSP (hQ)

Center for Research on Redox processes in Biomedicine

ohara Augusto – IQ/uSP

uSP (hQ), unesp, unifesp, Butantan Institute, A.C. Camargo Cancer Center, InCor, CnRS, national Institute of Aging, Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission, and universities of harvard, milwaukee, Boston, Rochester, de madrid, Emory, liverpool John moores, koç, Aarhus, and university of the Republic (uruguay)

Center for Computational Science and Engineering

munir Skaf – IQ/unicamp

unicamp (hQ), Biocelere Agroindustrial, and universities of Texas, Yale, Buenos Aires, and graz

Brazilian Research Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology

Fernando Cendes – FCm/unicamp CInAPCe Program (2007-2012)

unicamp (hQ), unifesp, CTI, unesp, uFABC, CnRS, and universities of montreal, Erlangen, Phillips, and College of london

Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics

Antonio galves – ImE/uSP

Support unit for Research in Stochastic modeling and Complexity – uSP

uSP (hQ), unicamp, uFABC, Impa, Regional Council of Statistics-SP, uFRJ, uFRn, harvard medical School, Watson Research Center, CnRS, and universities of, memphis, Rockefeller, San Andrés, Buenos Aires, and university of the Republic (uruguay)

Successors to the first-round RIDCs of 2000-2012 (new centers)


Researcher at the neuromathematics Center at uSP: seeking equilibrium between high volumes of data and the ability to understand them

gion. Research on the nucleation and crystallization of glass in São Carlos, which is some of the most productive in the world, gave rise to the Center for Research, Teaching, and Innova-tion in Vitreous Materials (English acronym: CeRTEV). Under the lead-ership of Edgar Zanotto, a profes-sor at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) and a supervisor of the Vitreous Materials Laboratory (LaMaV), the RIDC will unite 14 re-searchers in materials engineering, physics, and chemistry from UFSCar and the USP campus in São Carlos, plus 20 collaborators abroad and 10 in Brazil. “Our group has won inter-national recognition, but there are aspects that need to be strengthened, and the experts in physics and chem-istry will be able to contribute significantly,” Za-notto says. Among the topics on which the RIDC is hoping to make progress, Zanotto emphasizes the development of vitroceramics for use in or-thopedic and dental prostheses and as substitutes for marble and granite, of materials for ballistic protection of automobiles and aircraft, and of sup-ports for catalyzers in the production of ethanol.

The Center for Research and Development of Functional Materials, based in Araraquara, evolved from the Multidisciplinary Center for the Development of Ceramic Materials, an RIDC that focused on research on materials synthesis. The new center intends to develop nanostruc-tured materials, fashioned to solve problems related to renewable energy, health, and the environment. “We will continue with what we were doing, but take it in a different direction,” explains Elson Longo, Coordinator of the RIDC and a professor at Unesp’s Araraquara Chemis-try Institute. “We want to create multifunctional materials. We have studied the entire range of

properties of a material and have analyzed how they can be used as elements of a new mate-rial. The reserves of certain compounds have been depleted. We need to optimize the use of raw materials and to improve their perfor-mance.” Energy and health are two important focal points for the center. “We are develop-ing bactericidal and fungicidal materials, both to reduce hospital infections and to clear pollution from lakes and rivers,” he says. The center wants to encourage the rise of new technological com-panies. “At the international level, we will increase our interaction with universities and high-tech-nology complexes in order to forge partnerships with companies from our own industrial centers.”

The RIDCs are also responsible for promoting extension activities aimed at students and the gen-eral public. The CePOF at São Carlos has a TV channel that broadcasts distance courses for high school students. “Now, we are going to set up cours-es on the Internet for stu-dents all over Brazil,” says Vanderlei Bagnato. “We offered educational games for students on an Inter-net portal and obtained got more than 4 million hits,” says Elson Longo, whose center also posted videos with mini-lectures by scientists on YouTube. An initiative that several centers have joined de-

velops science experiment kits that encourage adolescents to enjoy research. “We distributed kits among schools in São Paulo, and the impact on the students was enormous,” recalls Mayana Zatz. Other centers will offer courses, develop software and videogames, and organize the col-lections of science museums. “A good idea would be to coordinate the distribution activities of all of the RIDCs, while maintaining each group’s autonomy, in order to create one big program for the dissemination of science in the State of São Paulo,” suggests Marco Antonio Zago, whose RIDC launched the House of Science program in 2001, featuring activities aimed at students and teachers in schools in the Ribeirão Preto region.

“In the previous round, there was an ob-vious increase in the intellectual, social, and economic impact of the RIDCs. That is why our expectations are so high with respect to the 17 selected for this new round,” says the scientific director of FAPESP, Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz. n Fabrício Marques Ju

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“A good idea would be to coordinate the RIDCs to create one big program for the dissemination of science,” Zago says


Zoologist Paulo Vanzolini was one of the brains behind the

creation of the FAPESP and the author of a theory on the origin

of species in South America, as well as an icon of São Paulo samba

The sage of biodiversity

through crowded bars, but you’re not there). In addition to composing, he would also sometimes take to the stage. One of his last appearances was at the Sesc Pompeia pub in São Paulo in Janu-ary 2012, where his wife, singer Ana Bernardo, performed his songs while he sat at a table on stage, regaling the crowd with stories of his life.

His accomplishments will stay with us because he blazed new trails, not only in biology but also in building Brazilian science. “Vanzolini took part in the movement of professors and researchers who proposed the creation of FAPESP, and un-der the Carvalho Pinto administration, he made a vital contribution to the institution’s structural design and to the organizational model that is still in place at the foundation today,” said Celso Lafer, president of FAPESP. “I am deeply sad-dened by his death. Vanzolini was someone for whom I had great admiration.”

Vanzolini participated in the first meetings to discuss the creation of FAPESP, shortly after the enactment of the Constitution of 1947, which au-thorized the establishment of a research funding

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science OBITUARY y

PubliShEd in JunE 2013

i revere nature. And I had a rewarding career. I can say I’m a fully realized researcher,” said São Paulo biologist Paulo Emílio Vanzolini to Pesquisa FAPESP in 2010 upon the release of his book Evolução ao nível de espécie – Répteis

da América do Sul (Evolution at the species level: the reptiles of South America). This 704-page tome is a collection of his 47 most important scientific articles. These papers, published from 1945 through 2004, helped expand the scope of Brazilian zoology. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, the field had been focused on isolated descriptions of species, but based on Vanzolini’s work, it shifted toward searching for the mecha-nisms underlying the formation of new species from biological, evolutionary, and environmen-tal perspectives.

Vanzolini, who died of pneumonia on April 28, five days after his 89th birthday, had another pas-sion, second only to zoology: writing sambas. His greatest hit was the now classic Ronda, written in 1951 (it begins with the following lines: I wander the city at night, vainly searching for you. I prowl


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identification cards for the stored animals, re-calls Miguel Trefaut Rodrigues, a biologist who earned his doctorate under Vanzolini. Rodrigues was later hired as a professor at USP and became one of the leading herpetologists (reptile experts) in Brazil, alongside Vanzolini. Rodrigues eventu-ally succeeded Vanzolini as director of the mu-seum, which today holds one of the largest and most valuable neotropical zoological collections.

BEtwEEn thE wAr And BohEmIAVanzolini was familiar with both USP and mu-sic from a young age, as his father was an elec-trical engineer and professor at the Polytechnic School at USP, and his mother and sister were both musicians. A visit to the Butantan Institute at the age of 10 sparked his interest in the study of reptiles, and at 14, he did an internship at the Biology Institute of São Paulo. During World War II, as a medical student at USP, he enlisted in the Brazilian Expeditionary Force with the inten-tion of fighting in Italy, but the war ended before he shipped out. He preferred studying animals

1 The Anolis chrysolepis, the basis for his formulation of the refuge theory

2 and 3 Vanzolini in 2012 and on one of his trips to northern brazil

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agency in São Paulo. In 1960, he was responsible for drafting both the law that instituted FAPESP and its Articles. Together with Antonio Barros de Ulhôa Cintra, president of University of São Paulo (USP) and chair of the Board of Trustees for the new foundation, he assisted in select-ing the first directors and advisors. He was “one of FAPESP’s binding forces,” science historian Amélia Império Hamburger wrote in her book FAPESP 40 anos: abrindo fronteiras (FAPESP 40 years: blazing trails).

Vanzolini was a member of the Board of Trust-ees during three separate periods (1961-1967, 1977-1979, and 1986-1993). Oscar Sala was the scientific director from 1969 to 1975, and whenever he had to travel, it was Vanzolini who coordinated the evaluation of applications for research funding and fellowships.

As director of the USP Zoology Museum from 1962 through 1993, Vanzolini expanded its collec-tion from little over 1,000 catalogued specimens to the current holdings of more than 300,000 specimens. He personally typed up labels and

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to treating people, so after graduating from medical school in 1947, Vanzolini went to Harvard University to earn his doctorate and continue listening to good music, now in American bars.

Few doctorates have influenced Bra-zilian science as much as the one he completed at Harvard University. After working alongside biologists who were exploring the formation and diversifi-cation of species from an evolutionary perspective, Vanzolini returned to Brazil in 1951 advocating concepts that revolu-tionized Brazilian zoology and continue to be used to understand biodiversity to-day. Vanzolini argued that it was vital to study species not only through isolated specimens, which was the accepted ap- P

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proach at that time, but also by looking at the distribution of populations of a single species across time and space. He later proposed that the marked diversity of animal species in the Amazon Region was the result of the geographic isolation of animal populations prompted by cli-mate changes that took place thousands of years ago. According to Vanzolini, dur-ing eras when the climate was colder and drier, forests would fragment and form islands of plant life, called refugia, where animals were able to survive and form new species.

Although this perspective, like any other, has revealed its limitations over time, it can still be useful. “The refu-gia alone were not responsible for these

patterns of biological diversity,” under-scores Célio Haddad, professor at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) in Rio Claro. In his opinion, phyloge-netic, climatic, and geological processes should generally be examined jointly to properly understand the formation and diversification of species. “The same idea or hypothesis can be used in different contexts,” says biologist João Alexan-drino, professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). In early May of this year, one of Alexandrino’s students began analyzing the genetic diversity among populations of a species of tree frog found in the Atlantic Forest and in the fields of southern Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. After examining the di-versity patterns suggested by prelimi-nary findings, Alexandrino advised the young man to read an article published by Vanzolini in 1981, in which Vanzolini proposed the concept of vanishing refu-gia, which explained that forest islands could suffer fragmentation and thereby force less specialized species to adapt to open environments.

Large rivers can favor the isolation and differentiation of species


1 Sketch of the wooden structure of the lindolpho R. Guimarães, by Paraguassú Éleres

2 The lindolpho ready for installation of the propeller shaft and rudder (Vanzolini in canoe)

3 Support team with the first load of the belém-brasília collections in May 1967

4 both boats docked in Oriximiná in 1966 (right: Heraldo Britski, of the Zoology Museum)

5 A page from one of Vanzolini’s travel diaries

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cies of toucans in areas that had received more rainfall. Three years earlier, the British ornithologist Reginald Moreau had highlighted the influence of climate changes and refugia on the distribution and differentiation of bird populations in Africa, but he did not go much farther. Around the same time, Vanzolini and a former Harvard colleague named Ernest Williams performed a study on the geo-graphic variation and distribution of a species of lizard of the genus Anolis in the Amazon Region, which could be ex-plained by climate variations; they pub-lished their paper one year after Haffer. In an interview with Pesquisa FAPESP in 2012, Vanzolini reported that his and Williams’ research was “a practical ex-ample of what Haffer had posited from a theoretical perspective. It’s nothing more than a [conceptual] model that can in fact be replicated in other regions.”

AppLIcAtIonS And LImItAtIonS “You can’t deny that the refuge model, as he preferred to call it, applies to some of our fauna,” says zoologist Miguel Tre-faut Rodrigues. Today, brejos de altitude, Caatinga moist forest enclaves found on hilltops surrounded by open fields (es-pecially in the Northeast), are “the most consistent evidence of refugia,” he says. These brejos de altitude remain areas of climatic stability, favoring the diver-sification of species. “Each brejo has a unique set of fauna, but being a brejo is not enough to make it a refuge.” In 1980, on the only expedition that Rodrigues and Vanzolini took together, the former (then a doctoral candidate) and the lat-ter (his advisor) went to northern Bahia to gather specimens in the municipality of Caatinga do Moura, which Vanzolini believed had been a refuge. “It was only 10 years after this trip,” says Rodrigues, “that I realized that the area of climate stability was really in the highlands near the Diamantina Plateau.”

Vanzolini enjoyed traveling, but he hardly ever engaged in field collec-tion, arguing that he wasn’t any good at it. But in his own way, he was always adding precious material to the collec-tions held by the museum. Whenever he went somewhere, he would spread the word that he had a bag full of coins with him and was interested in buying animals. “Among the 400 lizards of the genus Tropidurus that he bought from

“The refugia approach was innova-tive at the time it was presented, and it guided several generations of research-ers,” observed Hussam Zaher, director of the USP Zoology Museum, which Van-zolini headed for three decades as the tenured director after being appointed by former São Paulo governor Carvalho Pinto. “Refugia were talked about for a long time,” says Zaher. The director says he believes that Vanzolini’s great-est merit as a scientist was that he intro-duced Brazil to the “modern synthesis,” consolidating the works of Theodosius Dobzhansky in genetics, Ernst Mayr in zoology, and George Simpson in pale-ontology, and encouraged its adoption in Brazil. Vanzolini studied under Mayr and Simpson at Harvard, which was al-ready a center for modern science at that

The Zoology Museum, FAPESP, and research centers in belém and Manaus joined forces to investigate unexplored areas of the Amazon

pioneer travels

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time. Dobzhansky, who also spent time at Harvard, traveled to Brazil four times and played a valuable role in training the country’s first geneticists. Vanzo, as he liked to be called, was accustomed to keeping company with intellectuals; his great-grandfather translated the six books of the Roman poet Lucretius’ De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) from Latin to Italian, and his grandfather regularly sent interesting Brazilian ani-mal species to museums in Europe. In an interview given to zoologist William Ronald Heyer, Vanzolini said he learned English by reading Shakespeare’s plays.

The so-called refuge theory was intro-duced by German geologist Jürgen Haf-fer in the journal Science in 1969. Haffer showed that there was a higher concen-tration of populations of different spe-


"what distinguishes Vanzolini is that his musical thinking is based on contradiction," says Sonia marrach


a bunch of kids in Cocorobó, Bahia, I found six specimens of a new species,” says Rodrigues.

From 1967 to the mid-1980s, through the Ongoing Expedition to the Amazon Region, Vanzolini and other research-ers from Brazil and abroad visited un-explored areas along the main rivers of the region, sailing in two boats that were the first to be funded by FAPESP: the 11.5-meter-long Lindolpho R. Guimarães and the 18-meter-long Garbe.

thE FrEEdom oF thE BohEmIAnWhen asked in an interview about his dual role as scientist and composer, Pau-lo Vanzolini explained with irritation that no one could do just zoology or just music full time. But the journalist in-sisted, asking which of the two activities occupied more of his time. He replied,

“How do you think I make a living? As a zoologist.” As Luiz Tatit, professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Univer-sity of São Paulo (USP), says “In fact, he really liked his lizards. Composing was something done late at night, for fun, as a hobby. He was never a musician to forge a new path ahead of others. He said that university knowledge was enough.”

Researchers should not look for a samba revolutionary in Vanzolini. “He adapted the samba from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, similar to what the famous samba composers Adoniran Barbosa or Geraldo Filme did. Since he never need-ed to make a living through music, and composing was not his main concern, he ignored all of the musical movements that passed by, and the crises that samba faced. His universe was free and very specific,” notes Tatit. According to Regi-

1 Vanzolini with classmates and professors at harvard in 1951

2 Zoology Museum team, 1959-1962: (left to right, standing): helio Ferraz de Almeida Camargo, Eurico Alves de Camargo, Messias Carrera, Carlos Otaviano da Cunha Vieira, lauro Travassos Filho, Werner Carlos Augusto bokermann; (seated) Paulo Emílio Vanzolini, lindolpho Rocha Guimarães, and Carlos Amadeu de Camargo Andrade

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he hated the almost talking style of singing used in bossa nova, and he also disliked songs with exaggerated emotion. his samba was sophisticated


na Machado, professor at the University of Campinas (Unicamp) Art Institute, Vanzolini helped establish the urban samba of São Paulo.

“At the time that he started, there was no São Paulo samba, just samba break-ing out of Rio de Janeiro and reaching São Paulo and, with this first generation, of which Vanzolini was part, São Paulo samba took on some unique character-istics,” says Machado, author of A voz na

canção popular brasileira (The voice in Brazilian popular song) (Ateliê). One of the characteristics of this style was not the notes but rather the debate in which the São Paulo sambistas participated, af-firming their local cultural differences. In addition to pride in the progress of São Paulo, its samba highlighted the in-equalities and other ills of urbanization.

“This appears in Barbosa’s lyrics, which mention immigration, or Vanzo-

Francisca do Val's watercolors on the cover of Vanzolini's Cd Acerto de contas


Scientific articles

VAnZOlini, P.E. Paleoclimas e especiação em animais da América do Sul tropical. Estudos avançados. v. 6, no. 15, pp. 41-65, 1992.

PORTO, T.J. et al. Evaluating forest refugial models using species distribution models, model filling and inclusion: a case study with 14 brazilian species. diversity and distributions. v. 19, pp. 330-40, 2013.

TuRChETTO-ZOlET, A.C. et al. Phylogeographical pat-terns shed light on evolutionary process in South America. molecular Ecology. v. 22, pp. 1,193-213, 2013.


“What distinguishes Vanzolini in the panorama of Brazilian popular music is that his musical thinking is based on contradiction. For him, the essential character of life in its various aspects is the movement and the change that comes from denial and the transforma-tive conflicts that are both subjective and objective,” says Marrach. What is remarkable is that this contradiction is presented with good humor, with a comic outlook and with a willingness to see everything with a light touch.

Legend has it that it took him six months to decide between “shows” or “reveals” in the song Boca da noite (Early Evening). But melodically, the result was samba. “His sambas were like mine. But they were not the same. The themes he addresses are different; mine are those of common folk, whereas his were more intellectual because he is a professor, a zoologist, you know, a smart guy. But they are all sambas,” said Adoniran Bar-bosa. And Vanzolini’s sambas continued in that same vein, thanks precisely to what Tatit called “his lizards,” his work at the university. n

lini’s more autobiographical lyrics on his experience with bar owners or friends in ‘dives,’ themes that did not appear in Rio de Janeiro samba,” notes Tatit. Unlike the effervescence of Rio, samba jazz ses-sions in Sao Paulo took place exclusively at night, in bars and nightclubs. “Vanzo-lini, however, grew up listening to samba on the radio, especially Noel Rosa, with whom he identified. After all, Noel left medicine for music. But Vanzolini grad-

uated and became a scientist and com-poser. For him, a sambista did not need to be a scoundrel, and that word was never used in his songs. He liked to say he was hardworking and a bohemian,” says Sonia Marrach, author of Música e universidade na cidade de São Paulo: do samba de Vanzolini à vanguarda paulista (Music and the university in the city of São Paulo: from Vanzolini’s samba to the São Paulo vanguard) (Unesp Press).

Vanzolini never wanted to become a professional musician. He loved to tell stories. During shows, after he’d received much applause, his partner, Paulinho Nogueira, would turn to the audience and say: “You’re good people, but I dis-agree with your clapping for the only person who does not know the differ-ence between a major and a minor key.” He was “musically illiterate” by choice and not for lack of opportunities.

“On the one hand, he was evidence of the intuitive side of the popular musi-cian. On the other, his erudition enabled him to create very elaborate songs. His greatest contribution lies precisely in that combination of the popular universe with an intellectual bias. This influenced the works of Chico Buarque and Caeta-no Veloso a lot,” says Regina Machado. In his presentation of the record col-lection Acerto de contas (Settlement of accounts), Professor Antonio Candido (a critic and essayist) notes that Van-zolini gets maximum yield out of mini-mum work through his use of expressive words to create true poetic portraits of late night São Paulo.


Small RNA molecules control lateral

stem growth in sugarcane

planting a sugarcane crop does not involve seeds. Instead, pieces of the plant's stalk, known as the culm, are used. Each fragment

generates a new plant as its lateral buds develop. The genetics behind the archi-tecture of sugarcane is being unveiled by a group of researchers led by agri-cultural engineer Fabio Nogueira from Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) in the city of Botucatu, in partnership with bioinformaticist Renato Vicentini from the University of Campinas (Uni-camp). In a study reported in the Journal of Experimental Botany in May 2013, the researchers showed that small RNA molecules (sRNA) control gene silenc-ing and activation in these lateral buds, known as axillary buds.

“Each segment of the culm has one or two dormant axillary buds,” Nogueira explains. “When you cut the culm, the hormonal and metabolic balance chang-es, causing the buds to sprout and pro-duce a new plant.” The protagonists of this phenomenon are RNA molecules that serve as “on/off switches” for genes (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue No. 133). One example is microRNA 159, abun-dantly present in dormant axillary buds, which also contain large amounts of the plant hormone abscisic acid. This mi-croRNA blocks the plant's physiological

GeNeticS y

Ramifications of sugarcane

response to another hormone, gibberel-lic acid, which stimulates cell prolifera-tion. When the plant is cut, a signal (as yet unidentified) reduces the amount of abscisic acid in the axillary buds, which in turn reduces the effects of microRNA 159 and activates the gibberellic acid signaling pathway.

The origin of many of these small RNAs that can influence hormonal signaling and responses to stressful situations — such as drought — may be mobile fragments of plant DNA known as transposable ele-ments. Nogueira reached this conclusion when he compared the RNA sequences detected in his project with those in the database produced by the research group led by University of São Paulo (USP) bi-ologist Marie-Anne Van Sluys (see Pesqui-sa FAPESP Issue No. 198). According to Nogueira, transposable elements associat-ed with small RNAs increase diversity and control genome function. The association between the two genetic entities does not end there. “Some transposable ele-ments are negatively regulated by small RNAs, which serve as buffers to prevent DNA modification,” Nogueira notes. In the case of sugarcane, protecting DNA from change is important for maintain-ing the properties of commercial variet-ies developed to produce more sugar or to flourish in less rainy areas.

Maria Guimarães

“I sought basic knowledge with my project, but this understanding is also essential for the propagation and pro-ductivity of sugarcane,” Nogueira ex-plains. The plant's architecture is central to determining the intended purpose of a given plantation. Sugarcane culms with few ramifications are better for pro-ducing sugar, whereas plants with more lateral buds and more leaves generate more biomass, the raw material used for the manufacture of second-generation ethanol. Knowing the genetic players involved in controlling these charac-teristics makes it possible to develop markers for plant selection and can con-tribute to the improvement of commer-cial varieties. The importance of this work was acknowledged by the 2012 edi-tion of the Top Ethanol awards; second place in the academic works category was awarded to Fausto Ortiz-Morea for his master's thesis, which generated the paper recently published in the Journal of Experimental Botany. An additional publication by Nogueira's team, pub-lished in BMC Plant Biology in 2010, won second place at the same awards program in 2013.

Nogueira's work has yielded a cata-logue of active small RNA molecules (mi-crotranscriptome) from the axillary buds of sugarcane, and has made it available to P

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other researchers. In collaboration with a group from the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture (Esalq/USP), Nogueira is testing some of these RNAs on plant models in order to observe their effects on metabolism.

The researcher celebrates being the first to examine the genetic regulation of sugarcane architecture, but he is ac-tually the pioneer of a broader field. There are no studies on small RNA activity in the axillary buds of other plants because these structures are very small and difficult to isolate. With axil-lary buds that can be viewed with the naked eye, have measurable hormonal concentrations, and contain DNA and RNA that can be extracted, sugarcane has all the essential characteristics to become a model organism for plant ar-chitecture studies. n

Active axillary bud

Dormant axillary bud

development tissue

leaf precursor tissue

projectisolation and characterization of microRNAs and their target genes in sugarcane (no. 2007/58289-5); Grant Mechanism Young investigators Awards program; Coordinator:fabio tebaldi Silveira Nogueira (ib/unesp); Investment R$314,903.10 (fApeSp).

Scientific articleoRtiZ-moReA, f.A. et al. Global analysis of the sugarcane microtranscriptome reveals a unique composition of small RNAs associated with axillary bud outgrowth. Journal of experimental Botany. v. 64, n. 8, p. 2.307-20. may 2013.


Andes Paraná Basin

A continental profile: illustration showing variations in the relief (white line) and crust of South America

GeoloGy y

Seismologists propose

a new explanation for

earthquakes in Brazil

Igor Zolnerkevic and Ricardo Zorzetto

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Why the earth shakes in Brazil

on October 8, 2010, the earth trem-bled as never before in Mara Rosa, a city of 10,000 in the northern re-gion of Goiás State. The clock had just struck 5 p.m. that Friday, and

people were preparing for the weekend, when the ground shook so hard that it was difficult to remain standing. Trees quivered, walls cracked and tiles fell off houses. Less than a minute later, this magnitude-5 earthquake, one of the strongest on record in Brazil in the previous 30 years, had traveled 250 km and reached Brasília, where sev-eral buildings had to be evacuated. “Many people in Mara Rosa thought the earth was opening up and that the world was coming to an end,” says Lucas Barros, head of the Seismological Obser-vatory of the University of Brasília (UnB). In the weeks after the earthquake, Barros and his team installed seismographs in Mara Rosa and neigh-boring municipalities to track the reverberation of the tremor. Within six months, 800 addition-al, less intense earthquakes occurred and were used to determine the direct cause of the earth’s instability in this region. Below Mara Rosa, at a depth of approximately three kilometers, there is a wide crack in the earth’s crust, the most rig-

id and outermost layer of the planet. Along this fault, which is five kilometers long, rocks shifted and caused the earth to tremble. “We had to hold public hearings in Mara Rosa and Mutunópolis to explain to people what was happening and what they had to do to protect themselves,” says Barros.

The existence of this fault came as no surprise to the UnB group: Mara Rosa and other munici-palities in northern Goiás and southern Tocan-tins State are located in a geologically unstable region, i.e., the Goiás-Tocantins seismic zone, in which 10% of earthquakes in Brazil have been concentrated. Some geologists attribute the high frequency of earthquakes in this area—a seismic zone (one of nine demarcated in the country) 700 km long and 200 km wide—to the proximity of the Transbrasiliano Lineament, a long scar in the earth’s crust that crosses through Brazil and continues into Africa on the other side of the At-lantic. It is believed that the crust is weaker along the lineament with a concentration of blocks of cracked rock, which, under compression, may move easily and produce earthquakes.

However, not everyone agrees. In many cases the location of the tremor is removed from this series of faults, and along some stretches of the

PEsQuIsA FAPEsP z 49

PuBlIshEd In MAY 2013


lineament, no tremors have ever been detected. Those who doubt the direct influence of the lin-eament on earthquakes in this region believe that there are deeper causes, such as those identified by a group of researchers from the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sci-ences (IAG) of the University of São Paulo (USP), based on a recent survey of the thickness of the earth’s crust in Brazil.

In a paper published in February of this year in Geophysical Research Letters, seismologist Marcelo Assumpção and geophysicist Victor Sacek proposed a more complete, and for many researchers more convincing, explanation of the concentration of tremors in Goiás and Tocantins States. In certain areas of this seismic zone, the earth’s crust is thinner than in much of Brazil and is bended due to the weight of the mantle; in addition, the geological layer below the crust is denser. Measurements of the intensity of the gravitational field in these areas where the crust is thin indicate that the mantle is thickening in this region. The combination of these two lay-ers of rock—the crust and the upper region of the mantle, which physically behave as a single and rigid structure that geologists call the lith-osphere—causes them to slowly rupture like a bending tree branch. In this situation, the litho-sphere can break like a plastic ruler that bends when you try to make the ends meet (see info-graphic at right).

“The lithosphere tends to sink where it is more dense and to rise where it is not as dense,” explains Assumpção, who is the coordinator of the Brazil Seismograph Network that monitors earthquakes in the country. “These tendencies cause stress that produces faults and eventually cause earthquakes to occur.”

during a conversation in his office in ear-ly April, Sacek, co-author of the study, picked up a paperback book to illustrate

what occurs in the stretch of the Goiás-Tocan-tins seismic zone where Mara Rosa is located. “Let’s say that this book represents the litho-sphere of the region; there is an increase in the load inside the lithosphere because there is a higher proportion of mantle rocks [which are more dense], and this will cause it to bend,” he explained as he held the book horizontally and pressed on the sides, which caused it to bend downward as though a brick were stuck to the bottom cover. In this demonstration, the up-per part was subjected to forces of compres-sion, and the bottom to forces of distention. “Although it is rigid, the lithosphere has some flexibility and withstands distortion to some extent,” Sacek says. “But after a certain point it can bend and break.”

Source marcelo asssumpção – iag/usp

6,2 is the magnitude of the most intense tremor recorded in Brazil, in 1955

a survey shows the difference in thickness of the earth’s crust in Brazil and in the andes

Several years ago, while analyzing a map of earth-quake locations in Brazil, Assumpção realized that most occurred in the Goiás-Tocantins region, where in 2004 geophysicist Jesús Berrocal, a former USP professor, had identified a gravimetric anomaly. The gravitational field there is unusually high in Bra-zil for a plateau region with an average altitude of 300 to 400 meters. In these flat and relatively low lands—for example, there are no mountain ranges—there is no excess weight on the surface to account for the bending of the lithosphere. Therefore, As-sumpção concluded that this weight could only be located below the ground, most likely in deep regions such as the more superficial layers of the mantle, as the crust is only 35 km thick.

However, it was necessary to verify whether this concept made sense and if the thickening of

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The crust is stable where there are no geological faults and little variation

in thickness. The thickening of the mantle in the regions where the crust is

thinner may cause additional stresses that promote the occurrence of tremors

constAnt stREssThe planet’s lithosphere, formed by the crust and the upper

portion of the mantle, is divided into plates that move

and collide. The shock at the edges of the plates creates

stresses that spread through the continent’s interior

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coincided with the area where the majority of earthquakes in Goiás and Tocantins occur. Within this large block, which is 200 km wide and five km deep, the forces are so intense that they ex-ceed the limit of elasticity of the rocks, and these forces split the rocks. “This model even explains the depth of the earthquakes, which are generally less than five km from the surface,” says Sacek.

He and Assumpção believe that this mecha-nism—the bending in the area where the crust is thinnest—can also explain the high frequency of earthquakes in other regions of the country, such as the Pantanal Basin and the Porto de Gaúchos seismic zone in Mato Grosso State, where in 1955 the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Brazil occurred, at a magnitude of 6.2 on the Richter scale. Earthquakes with magnitudes greater than five are rare in Brazil and occur on average every five years. However, even minor earthquakes can frighten people who are unaccustomed to living with them and are unprepared for such events. There is a lack of information on how to pre-pare for tremors, and the weakest houses cannot withstand small earthquakes that would cause little damage to the buildings in a large city. On December 9, 2007, a 4.9 magnitude quake dam-aged several houses in the village of Caraíbas, located near Itacarambi in the northern part of Minas Gerais State. A wall collapsed and killed a child. “This is the only death ever recorded in Brazil that was directly caused by an earthquake,” says geologist Cristiano Chimpliganond of UnB.

The bending of the crust also explains the earthquakes in another seismic zone of Brazil: the margin of the continental shelf between Rio Grande do Sul and Espirito Santo States. At a dis-tance of 100 to 200 km from the coast, the seabed drops off suddenly. On this step, the ocean depth increases from 50 to 2,000 meters. The sediment that the rivers carry to the sea accumulates at the end of this step, increasing the weight on the

1

the mantle could in fact cause the lithosphere to arch. Assumpção then asked Sacek, a specialist in computer simulations, to develop a mathematical model that would represent the geological layers in this area of Goiás and Tocantins and would take into account all the forces acting on these layers. Sacek developed a model that included the effect of local forces originating a few dozen kilometers away from the earthquake region due to differences in relief, such as valleys, rivers and hills, as well as to variations in the thickness of the crust. In addition, the model considered the effect of regional forces on a global scale that oc-cur thousands of miles away on the edges of the blocks into which the lithosphere divides.

By combining these factors, Sacek identified an area in which the crust is weak; this region

earThQUaKe-prone reGIonreGIonSTaBle reGIon

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crust. Assumpção believes that this excess weight causes the earthquakes that are detected in this region, as a result of mechanisms similar to those that may be occurring in Goiás and Tocantins. The difference here is that the excess weight is not below the crust but above it.

In 2011, Assumpção and colleagues from Uni-versidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), the São Pau-lo Institute for Technological Research (IPT), and Petrobras studied an earthquake that occurred in April 2008, 125 kilometers south of the city of São Vicente, on the coast of São Paulo State. The quake was felt as far away as the city of São Paulo. The point of origin of the tremor was at the end of the step of the continental shelf, and the characteristics of its seismic waves seem to confirm the concept that the event was triggered by excess sediment.

the development of these models of the cause of the tremors in Brazil was made possible only through the discovery of vari-

ations in the thickness of the crust within its borders. Assumpção and colleagues from UnB, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) and the National Observatory (ON) col-lected information on the thickness of the crust at nearly a thousand sites in South America, both on land and at sea. Of this total, approximately 200 measurements were taken in the past 20 years with funding from FAPESP and the fed-eral government. On the map that summarizes these data, published in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences, the researchers indi-cated the regions where the crust is thicker or thinner. “The thickness of the crust is one of the most important parameters for understanding the tectonics [the forces and movements of the geological layers] of a region,” says seismologist Jordi Julià from UFRN.

This map is the most comprehensive and de-tailed compilation ever made for the Brazilian crust. The thickness at all of these points was obtained by combining data captured by three methods that use seismic waves to determine the structure of the geological layers through which they pass. The most accurate method, which is al-so the most costly, is seismic refraction, in which researchers record along hundreds of kilometers tremors caused by controlled explosions (see Pes-quisa FAPESP No. 184). The other two methods are based on the monitoring of earthquakes that occur throughout the world each year.

In general, the thickness of the crust in Brazil is similar to that in other continents, an average of 40 km, measured at sea level. However, there are some regions in the country where the crust thins out to less than 35 km. One of these areas—a 1,000-km strip that extends from the Pantanal

“Seismology cannot predict earthquakes, and even if it could, it would be unable to prevent them,” says Lucas Barros of the UnB

in Mato Grosso do Sul to Goiás and Tocantins—has not yet been well delineated because little seismic information is available about the region. In the northeast, where the team of Reinhardt Fuck from UnB performed most of the seismic re-fraction experiments, there is less uncertainty.

The province of Borborema, a rocky block on which almost all the states in the northeast sit, is the largest area in Brazil with the thinnest crust and has the highest frequency of trem-ors in the country. At some points in this region, the crust is thinner than 30 km. This thinning appears to have occurred between 136 million and 65 million years ago, when South Amer-ica separated from Africa.

One of the thickest regions is located under the Amazon forest on the border between Roraima, Amazonas and Pará States. The crust, which is up to 45 kilometers thick, is one of the oldest pieces in Brazil, at more than 2.5 billion years old. “These oldest regions tend to have thicker crust,” says Assumpção.

Where earthquakes occurearthquakes are concentrated in regions with thin crust, such as the northeast, the central west and the ocean shelf

Tremors with a magnitude equal to or greater than 3.5 that occurred between 1955 and 2012

Source marcelo asssumpção – iag/usp


However, the thickest stretch of crust in the country lies in a relatively new region, the Paraná Basin, which began forming 460 million years ago. In the interior of São Paulo, near the Paraná River, the crust is as thick as 46 km. Assumpção offers two possible reasons for this thickness. The first, suggested by several studies, is that under the Paraná Basin there may be a block of older crust, called the Paranapanema Craton, that is billions of years old. The second reason involves the intense volcanic activity in this area 130 million years ago. For some unknown reason, the mantle beneath the Paraná Basin became ab-normally hot, forming an area that geologists call a thermal plume. This plume may have partially melted the deep layers of the earth, producing basaltic magma that spilled over the surface and created one of the largest volcanic provinces on the planet. The rocks produced strips of red earth and very fertile soil. Some of the material produced in the process remained underneath, and when the mantle cooled, it fused to the low-er portion of the crust, increasing its thickness.

Together with researchers from Chile and Chi-na, Assumpção expanded the mapping of the crust to the Andes. Under this mountain range, the thickness of the crust ranges from 35 km on the border between Peru and Ecuador to 75 km on the Bolivian high plain. This maximum thick-ness is similar to the thickness observed in other relatively recent mountainous regions, such as the Himalayas. In general, there is a direct cor-relation between the altitude of land and the thickness of crust. “The higher the topography, the thicker the crust,” Assumpção explains. “For altitudes above 3,000 meters, it is normal for the crust to be as thick as 70 kilometers.”

But there are exceptions. In northern Argen-tina, where the Andes rise to more than 4,000 meters, the crust is less than 55 km thick. Again, researchers provide two possible explanations: Ei-ther the crust was already abnormally thin before the Andes were formed or four million years ago it became so thick and hot that it lost a portion of its deepest layers, an event called delamination.

On the border between Peru and Ecuador, where the altitude is greater than 3,000 meters, the thick-ness is only 35 km. In this case, the crust seems to be supported by the motion in the currents of the deeper layers of the mantle, which, although rocky, behave like a highly viscous fluid in geologi-cal time, with a flow of a few centimeters per year. The strength of these rising currents is capable of suspending the crust and pushes up the crust one to two kilometers in the mountains. The opposite can also occur: The downward flow can pull the crust down in some regions, as Sacek and Naomi Us-sami, a geophysicist at USP, observed in the Mara-ñon Basin between Ecuador, Peru and Colombia.

Despite two decades of work, research in this field in South America is still lagging. The United States and Europe developed detailed maps of crustal thickness in the late 1990s. “The state of mapping the crust varies with per capita income across countries,” says Assumpção. “We are only better than Africa.”

In Brazil, the major research institutions in the area joined forces two years ago and created the Seismograph Network of Brazil, which includes 50 seismic stations; the goal is to increase that number to 80. Thus, researchers hope to better monitor the country and increase the resolution of the map. As more earthquakes are observed, additional details of the thickness of the crust can be identified, and with greater detail, models can be produced to more accurately predict areas at risk for large-magnitude earthquakes. “Seismology cannot predict earthquakes, and even if it could, it would be unable to prevent them,” says Barros. “So we have to learn to live with them and protect ourselves from them.” n

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The andes range: This region has the thickest crust in South america, at up to 75 km thick

projectTectonic, climatic and erosional evolution in convergent margins: a numerical approach (no. 2011/10400-0); Grant mechanism post-doctoral research grant; coord. Victor Sacek - IaG/USp; Investment r$153,896.91 (FapeSp).

Scientific articlesaSSUmpÇÃo, m. and Sacek, V. Intra-plate seismicity and flexural stresses in central Brazil. Geophysical Research letters. v. 40 (3), p. 487-91. 16 February In 2013.aSSUmpÇÃo, m. et al. Crustal thickness map of Brazil: data compila-tion and main features. Journal of south American Earth sciences. v. 43, p. 74-85. april 2013.aSSUmpÇÃo, m. et al. models of crustal thickness for South america from seismic refraction, receiver functions and surface wave disper-sion. tectonophysics. 2013 (online).

CRITICAL MASS Galaxies with masses

of approximately 70 billion suns, such

as NGC 4047, form their stars in less than

three billion years, from the inside out

HIGH MASS Galaxies with masses

of more than 70 billion suns, such as

NGC 6411, form most of their stars in five

billion years, from the inside out

LOW MASS Galaxies with masses

of fewer than a few dozen billion suns,

such as UGC 9476, continue

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Survey identifies three

patterns of galaxy evolution

AStRONOMy y

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a pioneering study has begun to trace the evolu-tionary history of galaxies. Under the leadership of Spaniard Enrique Pérez of the Institute of As-trophysics of Andalucía, the study has identified

where and when the stars were formed in approximately one hundred galaxies that have emerged in the last 10 bil-lion years and are relatively close to the Milky Way, which is home to our Sun and the Earth. The study, published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters in January of this year, compared different types of galaxies and enabled scientists to understand how their stellar masses affect the rate of star formation within them. The research team included Brazilian astrophysicists Roberto Cid Fernandes of the Federal University of Santa Catarina—who, in 2005, developed Starlight, a software code that analyzes light emitted by galaxies to reconstruct the history of their stellar populations and conduct a kind of star archeology—and his doctoral student, André Luiz de Amorim.

The research confirmed that galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars and very high masses formed most of their stars more than five billion years ago from the inside out, and today, these galaxies are true star sanctuaries. Smaller galax-ies with only a few billion stars are old, but they continue to form stars in all their regions.

The study was based on data from the CALIFA survey (Ca-lar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area Survey), a collaboration of 80 researchers from 13 countries whose mission is to observe details of star formation in approximately 600 galaxies. The project, begun in 2010, uses a telescope at the Calar Alto Ob-servatory in Andalucía, Spain.

PUbLIShED IN JUNE 2013

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Igor Zolnerkevic

PESQUISA FAPESP z 55

the United States. However, while the SDSS analyzed light from galaxies as if each one were a point in the sky, the CALIFA survey uses a more costly and complex technique that divides each gal-axy into a thousand pieces and analyzes the light from each piece separately. The result is a map that reveals the differ-ences in the physical and chemical prop-erties of the various parts of the galaxy.

The CALIFA survey observes galaxies that are at relatively close distances—70

The sample of 105 galaxies, as de-scribed in Astrophysical Journal Letters, is insignificant when compared with the billions of galaxies in the visible Uni-verse. It is small, too, when compared with the total number of galaxies—ap-proximately one million—already ob-served by the largest astronomical survey ever conducted, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which was accomplished through the efforts of another interna-tional consortium using a telescope in IM

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DSS

Evolutionary profileGalaxy mass influences the rate of star formation

LUMINOSITY

CO

LOR

NCG 6411high mass and

early star formation

NGC 4047Intermediate mass and rapid

star formation early in life

105 galaxies between 70 million and 400 million light-years from the Sun have been analyzed in the project

higher-mass galaxies formed their stars earlier

and appear in reddish-yellow at the upper left.

Low-mass galaxies (bluish in color) are at the lower right

56 z special issue october 201356 z special issue october 2013

same distance, young galaxies are blu-ish, while older ones are reddish. Lumi-nosity serves as an indicator of a galaxy’s mass: the brighter it is, the more stars it contains. “The idea was to ensure a diversity of galaxies in order to have an overall view,” Fernandes says.

By analyzing the CALIFA data using Starlight, the researchers determined what combination of young and old stars contributed to the light from each piece of the galaxies. Following this method, the astrophysicists identified when and with what frequency the stars formed in various galactic regions.

The first difference confirmed by the study concerns the rate of star formation. Galaxies with a mass of more than 70 billion suns condensed all their gas into stars rapidly when they were young and formed most of their stars five billion years ago. Galaxies of the same age but less than 10 billion solar masses expel their gas sparingly. “The lower-mass gal-axies continue to form stars at a respect-able rate, while for the higher-mass gal-axies, the party’s over,” Fernandes says.

Another difference lies in the order of star formation. The low-mass galax-ies formed their stars more or less at the same time throughout, starting slightly earlier in their outer regions. In the high-mass galaxies, however, the opposite oc-curred: star formation began earlier in the center and moved outward. This pattern, in fact, appears to have occurred in the Milky Way itself, a galaxy of approximate-ly 60 billion solar masses. “The regions farther from the center of the Milky Way have fewer heavy chemical elements than the inner regions,” explains astrophysi-cist Hélio J. Rocha-Pinto of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who studies remnants of collisions between the Milky Way and dwarf galaxies. “This is indirect evidence that the stars in the inner region formed first and chemically enriched that part of the galaxy more rapidly.”

“The lower-mass galaxies continue to form stars, while for the higher-mass galaxies, the party’s over,” Fernandes says

This difference between the center and the periphery, however, does not increase with galaxy mass. It reaches its maximum in galaxies of approximate-ly 70 billion solar masses, in which the stars in the center were formed twice as quickly as those on the periphery.

“There is something special about that critical mass,” Fernandes says. However, no one knows exactly what that some-thing special is. Rocha-Pinto suggests that the critical mass is the mass beyond which galaxies do not grow in isolation. Scientists believe that the larger galaxies were formed out of mergers of smaller galaxies—events in which star formation increases in the centers of the recently formed galaxies.

Fernandes, however, calls attention to another possibility. Large galaxies have black holes at their centers that are so large that they would interfere with star formation. In small galaxies, fewer stars are formed because some of the gas is ex-pelled from the galaxy during supernova explosions. Both of these effects could be less operant in galaxies of critical mass and could increase star formation. “The question,” according to Rocha-Pinto, “is whether we can prove the effects we are proposing are of the magnitude to ex-plain what we are observing.”

Next year, the astronomers work-ing on the SDSS hope to begin a simi-lar study, called MaNGA, that will map 10,000 galaxies. “Increasing the sample by a factor of 100 will be transformation-al,” says astrophysicist Kevin Bundy of the University of Tokyo, Japan, who is coordinating the MaNGA study. “We’re going to test the CALIFA conclusions and much more.” n

million to 400 million light-years away—in the Milky Way. These galaxies are nei-ther distant enough to observe what they were like in the remote history of the Universe nor close enough to identify their stars individually.

CRITICAL MASS The most important selection crite-rion was to observe galaxies with the greatest variety of colors and luminosi-ties. When seen from more or less the

Scientific article

PÉREZ, E. et al. the evolution of galaxies resolved in space and time: an inside-out growth view. The Astrophysical Journal Letters. v. 763. Jan. 2013.

UGC 9476Low mass and continuing

star formation



A small agricultural-automation company

in São Carlos gains international recognition

B razil is getting ready this year to harvest its biggest ever crop of grains. But that is not the only good news from the country-

side. Enalta, an agricultural automa-tion company based in São Carlos, in the inland region of São Paulo State, was chosen as one of the world’s 50 most innovative companies by the U.S. technology magazine Fast Company. The only representative from Brazil on the list, which is headed by multina-tionals like Nike and Amazon, Enalta ranked 43rd, ahead of giants like Mi-crosoft (48th) and Tumblr (50th). In the South American sectoral ranking, the company captured first place. Accord-ing to Fast Company, Enalta earned its position for “supporting the biofuels industry in Brazil by introducing GPS sensors and software applications that monitor seeding and irrigation so that farmers can obtain a more abundant harvest.” This is the second consecu-tive year that Brazil appears in the ranking, which is published annually. In 2012, the start-up firm Bug Agentes Biológicos, from Piracicaba (SP), ap-peared in the 33rd spot (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue nº 195).

Profitable plots

“In the last two years, we have been recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in Brazil. Engineer Cléber Manzoni, Enalta’s owner, says “Our goal is to market two new solutions every year.” Founded in 1999, the company is one of the pioneers in the field of ag-ricultural automation in Latin Amer-ica. It specializes in developing tools to optimize production processes and in designing managerial software for agriculture that helps improve crop productivity. The main focus is on the sugar/alcohol sector, but the firm also provides equipment for the forest prod-ucts industry. Its portfolio includes au-tomatic controllers and pilots for pre-cision farming and onboard computers for agricultural machinery and vehicles. Those technologies are bringing about changes to the processes involved in planting, growing, cutting, harvesting and transporting various crops. José Carlos Hausknecht, an agronomist and director of the consulting firm MBAgro, in São Paulo, says Enalta’s innovations can help reduce costs and crop losses. “Automation is important, primarily in sugarcane growing where, histori-cally, the degree of mechanization has

been low,” he says. According to Enalta’s Manzoni, products sold by his com-pany can result in productivity gains as high as 15%.

Confident that demand for its prod-ucts by the sugar/alcohol industry will increase, Enalta estimates its sales will amount to R$15.8 million this year, 30% higher than the R$12.2 million in 2012. About 10% of sales are made to foreign customers, notably in Colombia. One in-dication that innovation is at the founda-tion of the company’s growth is the fact that 60% of the growth in revenues in 2012 came from products that had been introduced in late 2011. The company calculates that it will invest R$2.5 million in research and development this year, the equivalent of 16% of its forecasted sales for the period. Major sugarcane growers in Brazil, such as Odebrecht Agroindustrial, Grupo São Martinho and Grupo Nova América are on the list of Enalta customers, which includes about 60 companies.

Enalta’s flagship product is the on-board computer known as EES (Enalta Embedded System), used to manage agri-cultural machinery. When coupled to the e-Manager system, also manufactured

Onboard computers, sensors, and

systems installed on agricultural

machines permit greater control

of production

PubliShed in APril 2013

technology AGriCulTure y

PeSQUISA FAPeSP z 59

sponsoring agencies also played a deci-sive role. “In 2001, only two years after the founding of Enalta, we were able to move our headquarters from Catanduva to the business incubator at Fundação Parque de Alta Tecnologia de São Car-los (ParqTec) because we were granted approval of a FAPESP Innovative Re-search in Small Businesses Program (Pipe). The objective was creation of a system to manage crop spraying. That support was vital in enabling the com-pany to strengthen its position in the market,” says Manzoni. After that, En-alta had four more Pipe projects. In all, FAPESP invested more than R$1.2 mil-lion in the company.

Enalta also received funding from the Economic Subsidy Program adminis-tered by the Brazilian Innovation Agency (Finep), a federal government agency, for a project designed to fertilize cane field soil by controlled application of vinasse. In 2010, the company received financial support from the Criatec Fund, which specializes in providing seed capital to emerging and innovative companies. Francisco Jardim, representative of the Criatec Fund on the Enalta board of di-rectors, pointed out that “Enalta is the

edu

ar

do

ces

ar

Projects

1. System for management of “spraying” in agriculture us-ing automatic date-acquisition technology in the field (nº 1999/11662-5); grant mechanism innovative research in Small businesses Program; coordinator Cléber Man-zoni/enalta; Investment r$203,105.57 (FAPeSP).2. Development of a technological platform for precision irrigation in perennial crops (no. 2003/07998-5); grant mechanism innovative research in Small businesses Program; coordinator André Torre neto/embrapa; In-vestment r$399,054.49 (FAPeSP).3. Development of a sugarcane-productivity monitor to obtain productivity maps for self-propelled harvesters (nº 2004/08777-5); grant mechanism innovative research in Small businesses Program; coordinator domingos Guilherme Cerri/unicamp; Investment r$290,230.40 (FAPeSP).4. Development of a system for monitoring the cutting, loading, and transportation of sugarcane for fleet manage-ment (nº 2006/56606-0); grant mechanism innova-tive research in Small businesses Program; coordina-tor domingos Guilherme Cerri/unicamp; Investment r$328,866.32 (FAPeSP).

second company our fund has invested in that has appeared on the Fast Company list of innovative companies. Both are in the agricultural technology segment. This is clear recognition that Brazil is not an agricultural power merely because of its natural resources, but also because of the ability our entrepreneurs have for bringing high-impact innovations into the countryside.” n yuri Vasconcelos

Million is the anticipated

investment in r&d in 2013

Active customers

Forecasted growth

this year

Percentage of revenues

from sales to customers in

other countries

Products in its

portfolio

Million in sales in

2012

The crop productivity gain produced by its

software and systems

enalta by the numbersThe company plans to grow by 20% this year and to invest 16% of its sales in r&d

by this firm, the computer improves the productive performance of the cutting, loading, and transportation of raw ma-terials for agroindustry. Reading data from more than 20 sensors installed on tractors and harvesters enables the farm-er to trace a productivity map of a cane field. One of Enalta’s newest products is a voice-command software program that warns truck drivers about critical points along the shipment route, thereby preventing accidents and making farm work safer. That device is used on ve-hicles that transport cane seedlings, vi-nasse (liquid waste from cane process-ing used in cane field irrigation) and the cane itself as harvested from the field.

StrAtegIc AdVAnceS Enalta’s success is due in large part to partnerships forged with universities such as the University of Campinas (Uni-camp), from which it licensed a patent for a scale invented at the School of Ag-ricultural Engineering for use in the company’s sugarcane productivity sys-tem. In another partnership, with Em-brapa Instrumentação Agropecuária in São Carlos, it developed a precision ir-rigation system. Funding from research-

r$2,5

18 30%

15%

10%

56

r$12,2


In the midst of an industry crisis, companies are investing

in technology to increase ethanol production

Bruno de Pierro

From bagasse to innovation

In early February, ETH Bioenergia, which was founded in 2007 by the Odebrecht Organiza-tion, changed its name to Odebrecht Agroin-dustrial. The company also announced that it would make investments to extract 30%

more volume from the sugarcane processed in 2012/2013 and to produce two billion liters of ethanol—equal to 8.6% of Brazil’s current annual production of 23 billion liters. The R$1 billion investment will help to expand the growing area and support research into sugarcane varieties and new ethanol-production processes. To achieve these goals, the Odebrecht Agroindustrial innova-tion unit, which was created in 2010, must part-ner with universities and research centers, such as the Campinas Institute of Agronomy (IAC).

“We are building our innovation strategy at a time when Brazil is experiencing a sugarcane crisis,” says Carlos Calmanovici, Director of In-novation and Technology for Odebrecht Agroin-dustrial. Odebrecht is one of several large compa-nies, including Syngenta, Monsanto and Granbio, that have recently increased their investments toward research using plant-breeding techniques to obtain new sugarcane varieties or developing alternative ethanol-production methods using the leftover bagasse from sugarcane plants. sy

ng

enta

BIOFUeLs y

A combination of several factors explains the not-so-sweet deceleration of the sugar-energy industry since 2008, including the international credit crisis, weather events in three consecu-tive years from 2009 to 2011, and the lack of adjustments in the price of gasoline. However, a gap separates the sugarcane-production crisis from the status of research in the industry. The difference, says Calmanovici, is that research is based on a long-term perspective. One example of this strategic vision is the cooperation agree-ment that the company signed with FAPESP in 2011, which has resulted in 11 joint projects with universities in São Paulo State, such as the University of São Paulo (USP), the University of Campinas (Unicamp) and the Federal Univer-sity of São Carlos (UFSCar). These projects re-ceived R$20 million in funding, half disbursed by FAPESP and half provided by Odebrecht Agroindustrial. Many of these projects were initiated last year and involve developmental research on insect-resistant transgenic sugar-cane and on identifying and selecting plants whose genotypes (genetic makeup) are suit-able for the agroecological conditions of the Pontal do Paranapanema region, where sug-arcane productivity remains low.

PUBLIshed In JUne 2013


SYNGENTAhas developed the sugarcane variety

Cana Plene, which has resistance to

some sugarcane pests and eliminates

the need for nursery areas and for

the use of heavy harvesting

machinery, thereby preserving the

soil, according to the company.

GrANBIohas constructed an experimental

plant where second-generation

ethanol production will begin this

year and has developed a new

sugarcane variety called Cana Vertix,

which is resistant to pests and

diseases and has a high fiber content.

odEBrEchT AGroINdUSTrIAlhas funded research on new

sugarcane varieties, including

transgenics, to boost ethanol production

and expand cultivable areas.

cENTro dE TEcNoloGIA cANAVIEIrA (cTc)has mapped low-productivity

areas and is developing sugarcane

varieties for these regions

with a maximum time-to-market

of eight years (a process that once

required 12–14 years).

MoNSANTohas developed new sugarcane

varieties that are adapted to

mechanized harvesting and have

high germination rates in less-

favorable planting environments.

NoVozYMEShas developed enzymes

capable of breaking down

the lignin present in the pulp

cells of bagasse to produce

second-generation ethanol.

a seedling of a new sugarcane variety is manipulated in syngenta’s laboratory

Strategies to address the crisisCompanies are betting on new technological alternatives to increase sugarcane production

The Brazilian sugar-ethanol industry’s loss of momentum five years ago has led many analysts to forecast a “lost decade” for sugar and ethanol production. Investments reached US$6.4 billion in 2008 but declined to US$250 million in 2012, according to Eduardo Leão, the executive director of the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA). The current renewal of investment in the sector is predicted to take another five years, the time required for a complete revival of sug-arcane—a very different situation from the great leap forward between 2005 and 2010, after flex-fuel vehicles were introduced in Brazil in 2003. At that time, the United States and the European Union began to establish guidelines for the use of biofuels, with consumption targets for future years. These initiatives encouraged multinational corporations to enter the sector.

s ince 2012, the future outlook has improved. Ethanol production has recovered slightly, and the federal government has reacted to

the crisis with a series of incentives, raising the percentage of ethanol in blended gasoline from 20% to 25% and reducing taxes (PIS and COFINS). “It’s still not a profitable time for the industry, but gains in productivity combined with investments in technology and the resulting reduction in aver-age production costs have eased the financial prob-lems of some companies,” says Miriam Bacchi, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies in Economics of the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agri-culture (Esalq/USP). For example, some compa-nies, such as the Centro de Tecnologia Canavieira (CTC) and Granbio, estimate that they can achieve gains of approximately 50% using the new second-generation ethanol-production process, which is expected to enter the domestic market in 2014.

One possible milestone in the role of large companies in sugarcane research is Monsanto’s November 2008 purchase of two Brazilian com-panies, Allelyx and CanaVialis, for US$290 mil-lion. These two companies began in 2002–2003 as start-ups backed by a venture-capital fund of Votorantim Novos Negócios. Their founding followed the genome sequencing of Xylella fas-tidiosa, the bacterium that causes citrus varie-gated chlorosis disease in oranges, in a program financed by FAPESP. According to Paul Arruda, a professor at the Unicamp Institute of Biology and a founder of Allelyx, the Monsanto purchase spurred the development of this area of sugarcane research and boosted sugarcane biotechnology in Brazil. “There was a positive impact, including at other companies, such as CTC, which went on to modify its management process,” he says. In 2011, CTC ceased to be a Civil Society Organiza-tion in the Public Interest (Oscip) and became a Sociedade Anônima (SA). “Today we have to earn money from the technologies we develop here,” says Robson Cintra de Freitas, vice president of business and new technologies for CTC, which was formed in 1969 by Copersucar in the city of Piracicaba, São Paulo State.

Monsanto launched three conventional-ly bred sugarcane varieties in 2012 and aims to launch one more this year. The

company will not reveal its total investments in sugarcane research, but Gustavo Monge, the Mon-santo biotechnology manager in Brazil, says that of the US$1.4 billion invested by the company in research worldwide, “a significant portion goes to Brazil.” According to Monge, the sugar-energy industry is projecting a large increase in demand for sugar and ethanol.

Ups and downs of sugarcane in Braziltimeline of the domestic sugar-energy industry

IllU

STr

AT

IoN

aB

IUr

O

1973First oil crisis;

within five months,

the price of oil

skyrockets

by 300%

1975Creation of Proálcool

(national alcohol Program)

for the large-scale replacement

of petroleum-based

fuel with ethanol

2004embraer launches

the world’s first aircraft

powered exclusively

by ethanol and produced

on a commercial scale

2003Flex-fuel vehicles are

introduced; by 2012, the

use of flex-fuel vehicles

reduces CO2 emissions

by 160 million metric tons

1986Brazil goes through

an economic crisis,

and sales of

ethanol-powered

vehicles begin to fall


“In the research field, I cannot imagine bio-technology firms being affected either positively or negatively by the crisis because decisions are long-term, and they look for a market situation in which ethanol competitiveness increases as a result of innovation,” says André Nassar, an economist with the Agroicone consulting firm. According to José Maria da Silveira, a professor at the Unicamp Institute of Economics, “the in-crease in applied research is stimulated by public institutions partnering with the private sector.” As an example, he cites the FAPESP Program for Research on Bioenergy (BIOEN), which began in 2008 and now has 12 partner companies, includ-ing Odebrecht, Dedini, Oxiteno and Braskem. “There has been an evolution in the number of partnerships between the program and com-panies seeking increases both in conventional breeding and in the transgenic route,” says Glau-cia Souza Mendes, a professor at the USP In-stitute of Chemistry and a BIOEN coordinator.

Another institutional measure that favors re-search is the requirement that the harvest be

fully mechanized in São Paulo State—the heart of sugarcane production in Brazil, accounting for 52% of national production, according to Com-panhia Nacional de Abastecimento (Conab), a state-owned company linked to the Ministry of Agriculture. Mechanization ultimately requires innovative technologies in equipment and in new sugarcane varieties that are better suited to the process. Some of the varieties produced by Monsanto, for example, are readily adaptable to mechanical harvesting. In 2007, according to the state government, São Paulo State eliminated the burning of 5.53 million hectares and thus pre-vented more than 20.6 million tons of pollutants from being released into the atmosphere.

In its new phase, CTC has contributed an im-portant technological innovation in the field. The company has been able to reduce the time-to-market for new sugarcane varieties developed in its breeding program by at least six years. Until a few years ago, the time required to transfer a new variety from the laboratory to the market-place, which involves a series of tests and cross-

ed

Ua

rd

O C

esa

r

sugarcane seedlings are prepared in CtC’s laboratory in Piracicaba (left) before being transferred to the greenhouse (right) and then to nurseries at the production facility

2007agro-environmental

Protocol of são Paulo state

foresees an end to the

burning of cane straw

2008Launch of

BIOen-FaPesP;

height of the

credit crisis in the

United states

2005First new-energy auction;

today, electricity

produced from bagasse

supplies more than 2% of

Brazil’s consumption

2010the United states classifies sugarcane

ethanol as an advanced biofuel; the Brazilian

Bioethanol science and technology

Laboratory (CtBe) is created

2013reinstatement of 25%

mixture of anhydrous ethanol

in gasoline; launch of

federal-government incentives

for the sugar-energy industry



breedings, was 12 to 14 years; today, only 8 years are needed, says Mark Casagrande, CTC’s man-ager of product development.

s ince 2007, CTC has focused its attention on second-generation ethanol. Between July and August of 2013, it will begin to con-

struct a demonstration plant at Usina São Ma-noel with the capacity to produce three million liters of ethanol before moving on to the indus-trial stage. In 2008, CTC patented the process that it had developed to obtain cellulosic ethanol from sugarcane because its process represented a strategic difference from the methods used by other companies in the research race for second-generation ethanol in Brazil. The process of en-zymatic hydrolysis of the cellulose present in the bagasse and straw will be fully integrated into the existing structure of the production plant. In addition to reducing costs, this integration provides an alternative solution to the problem of excess fermentation and distillation capacity, two sectors of the plant that usually have ap-proximately 30% downtime, by giving the plant greater flexibility to alternate between sugar and ethanol production. “If second-generation etha-nol is added in a plant, it is possible to use this potential to obtain a cheaper fuel,” says Freitas. Earlier this year, the BNDES-Finep Joint Plan to Support Industrial Technological Innovation in the Sugar-Energy and Sugar-Chemical Sectors (Paiss) signed its first contract with a company (CTC), which received a credit of R$227 million from the Brazilian Innovation Agency (Finep) out of a total of R$2 billion that will be allocated to projects by mid-year.

Granbio, a Brazilian company founded in 2011, also sees new horizons for second-generation ethanol. This year, its synthet-

ic-biotechnology research center, located in the Techno Park complex in the city of Campinas, opened for the development of Brazilian yeasts used in industrial fermentation. In May, the com-pany opened a second-generation experimental station in Alagoas State with an investment of R$10 million. The company’s goal is to begin cellulosic-ethanol manufacturing by February 2014 at an investment of R$350 million, with an estimated production of approximately 82 million liters of second-generation ethanol, representing a 20% increase in biofuels production in Alagoas.

The new Granbio sugarcane variety, known as Cana Vertix, is being developed by crossing ancestral sugarcane types with commercial hy-brids. “We will have a more robust sugarcane, more resistant to pests and diseases, greater longevity, a higher fiber content and greater pro-ductivity than conventional plants,” says Alan

Hiltner, executive vice president of the com-pany. Gonçalo Pereira, a Unicamp research-er and the compa-ny’s vice president of technology, says that the new sugarcane va-riety will be used on-ly for Granbio’s own consumption. “The efficient photosyn-thesis of Cana Vertix will be reflected in the cost of the raw mate-rial. In the industry, the leader of the pack is the company with cheap and efficient sugarcane,” he says. By the end of 2013, 200,000 seedlings will be planted using seeds from Brazilian and worldwide germplasm (seeds and cells) banks. Currently, IAC and the Inter-university Network for the Development of the Sugar-Energy Industry (Ridesa) are performing the cross-breeding. In 2014, this work will also be performed at the Alagoas experimental sta-tion. Hiltner notes that one reason to invest in second-generation ethanol from bagasse and cane straw is the fact that the U.S. market re-wards the use of cellulosic ethanol, particularly in California, where there is an additional re-ward per metric ton of captured carbon.

The various initiatives for second-genera-tion ethanol have impacted the supply chain, which includes the suppliers of the enzymes

“There has been an evolution in the number of partnerships between BIoEN-FAPESP and businesses,” says Mendes


used to break down the lignin and hemicellulose of sugarcane cells to yield pulp and then glucose, thus enabling ethanol production via sugar fermentation. In 2007, for example, the Danish multination-al corporation Novozymes, which was founded in 1923, entered into its first commercial partnership to develop enzymes for ethanol pro-duction (with CTC).

Novozymes began supply-ing enzymes to Petrobras, which also has a research

program in second-generation eth-anol, in 2010 and entered into an agreement with Granbio in 2012. According to Pedro Fernandes, the president of Novozymes for Latin America, the sugar-energy industry crisis has affected the company because customers have reduced their demands for production and investments. However, research has continued apace. “Cri-ses always come and go, but research does not. If we stopped research today, a recovery from the setback would last longer than the crisis,” he said. Novozymes invests US$300 million in R & D across its research facilities worldwide, including enzyme research for ethanol produc-tion in Brazil. The Latin American division of the company represents 10% of Novozymes’ global revenue, which was $2 billion in 2012. Today, Novozymes employs 11 professionals working directly in research in Brazil, two with PhDs and the others with advanced degrees. The company has also formed partnership with

the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) to perform enzyme testing.

Another company that has become more in-volved in sugarcane research is the Swiss mul-tinational corporation Syngenta. In 2006, this company’s share of the sugarcane market was marginal, consisting only of sales of chemical pesticides. Beginning in 2008, the company shifted toward the adoption of new techno-logical strategies to increase sugarcane planting. For example, a bio-factory facility to perform plant-breeding procedures began construction in 2012. “The demand for sugarcane in Brazil by 2020 will be approximately 1.1 billion metric tons. The key to success for ethanol production is to increase productivity, which also requires research,” says Adriano Vilas Boas, Syngenta’s global director of sugarcane. UNICA estimates that ethanol production from the 2013/2014 crop will be 20% higher than in the previous year.

Today, Syngenta has established three pillars to support sugarcane re-search. The first is to multiply genetic mate-rial, which is done in the city of Itápolis, São Paulo State. At Itápolis, disease-free plants are generated by multiplying genetic material, thereby ensur-ing healthy plant materi-als because sugarcane has a high risk of contracting disease during breeding. “So we are multiplying clones of the same matrix in a controlled manner,” says Vilas Boas. To obtain thousands of samples, the sugarcane is managed in

the greenhouse environment, and the samples are multiplied, preserving their DNA, so that they can be directly planted in field nurseries. Biotechnol-ogy research aiming to increase the ability to de-velop genetically modified sugarcane varieties is now being performed at the company’s research stations in Brazil. Syngenta is investing more than $1.4 billion in research and development world-wide but has not disclosed its budget for sugar-cane in Brazil. Today, it employs more than 100 agronomists working on sugarcane and developing technology in the field, including a team dedicated exclusively to transgenic research. Its partner-ships with universities include the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) and Esalq/USP, which help to validate the technologies, and IAC, which participates in a joint project to improve sugar-cane breeding and processing methodologies. n

“Paralyzed research takes longer to recover from than the crisis itself,” says Fernandes

1 syngenta’s research Center in Itápolis, são Paulo, where the company multiplies genetic material.2 sugarcane greenhouse at granbio’s new experimental station in alagoas.

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1


MEDICINE y

A new contrast injector and a high-power MRI

help to ascertain causes of death

Full-body colored CT

images of cadavers

Marcos de Oliveira

Digital autopsy

The most celebrated portrayal of a human dissection is a 1632 oil painting by the Dutch art-ist Rembrandt. Known as The

Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the picture shows seven earnest medical students looking at the body of a crimi-nal stretched out on a table, with one of his arms sliced open and the inside exposed. Over the centuries, medicine has relied on the type of procedure that Rembrandt depicted not only as part of medical training—so that future doc-tors could learn about the workings of the human body and its diseases—but also as a means of determining cause of death when necessary. The current trend worldwide is to use standard medical equipment such as CT scans and MRIs to “see” the cause of death without needing to cut open the body of the deceased. However, the scientific foundations of these approaches are still limited. One of the most ambitious stud-ies in this realm is being conducted in São Paulo at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine (FMUSP). There,

under the coordination of Prof. Paulo Saldiva, head of the Department of Pa-thology, a group of researchers is testing ways to conduct an autopsy using im-ages obtained using tomography equip-ment. Working in conjunction with the company Braile Biomédica, located in São José do Rio Preto, state of São Paulo, the group has developed an injection pump that introduces contrast through an artery in the groin of a corpse; from there, the agent spreads through the body, producing high-quality images.

The researchers expect to take a large step forward in their studies in 2014, following delivery of a high-field mag-netic resonance scanner — the first in the Southern Hemisphere — purchased with funds totaling US$7 million from three sources: FAPESP, the São Paulo State Department of Health, and USP. “As medicine has evolved and as meth-ods have been adopted from biochemis-try and cell and molecular biology, along with imaging techniques, autopsies have become a thing of the past, even in the specialization of doctors,” says Saldiva.

PublisheD in June 2013

PesQuisA FAPesP z 67

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because USP is responsible for the Death Certification Service of the city of São Paulo (Svoc), which has been attached to the university since its creation by a state-level decree in 1939. The service processes all cases in the municipality of São Paulo that require medical autop-sies. “This is the largest medical autopsy service in the world,” Saldiva said. “No other has ties to a university; the Svoc is an agency like the Paulista Museum or the Institute of Tropical Medicine, at-tached to USP. Anyone who dies in São Paulo and doesn’t have a death certifi-cate is brought here.” More than 13,000 autopsies a year are performed at the Svoc, and many studies are conducted there as well, always with the approval of family members. Unclaimed bodies—for example, of indigents—are not autopsied. In 2012, there were 194 such cases. “We have all of these autopsies on hand, and with them we can further our research and develop new knowledge, in addi-tion to relying on the collaboration of all departments in the School of Medi-cine. Today there are questions about the role of the autopsy as a source of scientific knowledge. We want to prove that an autopsy can be extremely useful when it incorporates new technology,” Saldiva says.

DiscOvering DiscrePAncies In a scientific article published in the journal The Lancet in 2012, a group of researchers from Oxford University presented a study that analyzed 182 deaths, using CT scanning and MRIs alone, without any biopsies. “With the support of the Svoc, we are able to per-form 1,000 autopsies a year using im-ages and biopsies,” Saldiva explain. “We can do a minimally invasive autopsy and a conventional autopsy on the same body. We believe a minimally invasive autopsy is better than the conventional in some situations but not in others. We will be able to define these cases and fig-ure out where the new technique works and where it doesn’t.”

The scientific bases for using imaging studies have been established only in the case of violent death. Post-mortem imaging was developed in the sphere of legal medicine, with Switzerland leading the way. “You can see lesions, bruising, fractures, and where the bullet entered and what its trajectory was, without

“Autopsies are a lot of work; they can take up to three days to do, and they pay poor-ly.” He reports that medical autopsies have decreased worldwide in the case of death by natural causes. The situation is different in forensic medicine, which addresses violent deaths, such as those resulting from gunshots and stabbings. In these cases, a body must be processed at the Instituto Médico Legal (IML), where a forensic physician, who generally has police academy training as well as a de-gree in medicine, prepares reports for criminal investigations and legal pro-cesses. “Medical autopsies are for cases where people are found dead at home or in a public place, or who arrive at an emergency department DOA, for ex-ample, and the doctors don’t know what

cause to put on the death certificate,” Saldiva explains.

These ambitious studies on digital autopsies are made possible by new equipment at the School of Medicine. They are important

“We want to prove with these images that an autopsy can still be extremely useful and can offer new knowledge,” says saldiva

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1 Three-dimensional reconstruction based on a CT scan. organs are shown in red. Bones and the contrast inside blood vessels are shown in white to gray tones

2 Images of the heart

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device in Switzerland that cost €100,000, but the contrast was very expensive and would have to be imported. So we spoke to Domingo Braile [a surgeon and one of the owners of Braile Biomédica; see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue No. 176], and he offered us access to his team,” says Saldi-va. “We adapted the heart-lung machine that we use in cardiac or lung surgery so that it can inject the contrast. We added some controls, especially in relation to the flow of the liquid, which has to be well monitored so that no blood vessel is accidentally ruptured,” says Marcos Vinicius, an electronic engineer and the superintendent of testing at Braile.

sPeciAl shielDing The injected contrast not only yields better images but also makes it appar-ent whether a vein or artery has broken open. “The equipment is very capable and flexible in developing the function-alities that our projects demand,” says Prof. Luiz Fernando Ferraz da Silva, a member of Saldiva’s group. Brazilian technology offers another advantage: the design of software tailored specifically to this research. Together, the company and USP are analyzing the possibility of applying for a patent on the equipment, which should ultimately cost US$ 43,800 – US$ 65,600.

The injection pump developed by braile will work with the new Mri equipment

cutting open the body and then display-ing the images before a judge and jury,” Saldiva says.

A medical autopsy, according to Saldi-va, first serves to determine a person’s primary cause of death. It is then possible to identify an underlying illness that may have contributed to the death. It is also possible to ascertain whether any treat-ment that had been given was appropriate and if there were any complications stem-ming from it. “There’s room here for qual-ity control at hospitals,” he says. Saldiva remembers a study conducted at Mas-sachusetts General Hospital, which per-formed a comparative analysis of autopsy results over a 30-year period and found that serious mistakes had been made in 10% of cases, mistakes that would have altered the stated cause of death. “At the hospital connected to Harvard University, 11% of the autopsies presented errors, while a rate of 15% was found at Hospital das Clínicas in São Paulo. Of course, there is a bias towards selecting more compli-cated cases for autopsy, and this might lead to the discovery of more mistakes than usual,” he says.

“From a research perspective,” Saldiva adds, “autopsies have an unimaginable contribution to make. When it comes to analyzing brains in the case of age-relat-ed diseases such as Alzheimer’s, they’re an extremely important tool because there’s no way you can do a biopsy on a living person.” He believes that MRIs and other new imaging tools will help in the selection and analysis of brain tissue for the brain bank now being assembled at USP. However, he wants to go further by identifying and correlating deaths in each region of the city of São Paulo. “If there’s a concentration of young women with breast cancer in a certain region of the city, we can detect it. It’s a way of as-sessing the relationship between genome and environment,” he says. He dreams of collecting the data on the 13,000 autop-sies performed at the Svoc annually and studying each person’s habits—for ex-ample, determining their diet—and then mapping out diseases, especially those linked to air pollution.

In practical terms, the quality of re-search at the School of Medicine has been enhanced by the injection pump, which introduces contrast composed of iodine and polyethylene glycol, a vis-cous solution. “We’d been told about a

The injection pump is also being de-signed to work with the MRI machine that will be installed in a suite of rooms on the lower level of the School of Medicine. Oversight of the installation of the rooms and equipment is in the hands of Prof. Silva, who explains that heavy shielding around the room — made from 400 met-ric tons of iron — is needed to contain the emissions from the strong magnetic field. Without this shielding, people who have metal prostheses or pacemakers could have problems if they were too close to the equipment. The MRI has a magnetic field of 7 teslas (T). “Clinical machines, like those used in hospitals, for example, have 3 teslas,” Silva notes. “We were go-ing to purchase a 3-T, but at the request of the staff in radiology, we bought one that is more appropriate for research pur-poses,” says Saldiva. “Only Germany, the United States, England, Japan, Switzer-land, and France have this type of MRI, which has not been approved for use in clinical tests yet.”

Project

Image platform in the autopsy room (No. 2009/ 54323-0); grant Mechanism Multi-user Equipment Program (EMU); coordinator Paulo hilário Nascimento Saldiva - USP; investment R$3,000,000.00 (FAPESP), R$3,000,000.00 (USP), R$1,500,000.00 (School of Medi-cine Foundation), and R$3,000,000.00 (USP).

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Assis Chateaubriand’s evening newspaper

highlighted technology as part of an agenda

to overcome Brazilian “backwardness”

The sensationalist press and science

In the 1950s, when the term “UFO” had just entered the vernacular, flying saucers were reported to be seen soaring over Praça da Sé, the main public square in downtown

São Paulo. The arrival of a radium bomb “for the first time in South America, containing ten grams of the metal,” was presented with a bigger headline than that for an article about a civil servant strike against the eight-hour work day. Residents of the state of São Paulo were warned that “blood boils at an altitude of 63,000 feet,” a frightening prospect that would delay “the battle to conquer a new world.” In a country devoid of magazines specializing in science communication and where the radio was the leading means of mass communication, science enjoyed free run in the pages of Diário da Noite, a São Paulo evening newspaper that was one of the key publications of Diários Associados, Assis Chateaubriand’s powerful media empire.

“Like many others back then, Chateau–bri-and’s agenda was to achieve national union through the modernization of Brazil. He be-lieved that this necessarily demanded an end to the ‘ignorance’ of the masses, whether this might entail attacking spiritism and African-based religions – which he referred to as ‘voo-doo’ – or whether it would involve using sci-ence to overcome Brazilian ‘backwardness’,” explains historian Mariza Romero of the Pon-tifical Catholic University in São Paulo (PUC/SP). “Diário da Noite started featuring scientific information for lay readers who had no famil-iarity whatsoever with technology. What’s in-teresting is that the paper didn’t have a set page or supplement devoted to the topic but inserted

science in the middle of the police, political, and sports sections, and oftentimes pasted it in the headlines, too,” says Romero.

Romero, who first studied this sensationalist newspaper’s role in religious, social, and police matters in her book Inúteis e perigosos (“Useless and Dangerous”; Educ/FAPESP), has now ana-lyzed the paper’s scientific agenda in Divulgação científica e imprensa popular (“Science Commu-nication and the Popular Press”). “From 1950 to 1960, Diário da Noite managed to engage in science communication aimed at educating the public that was more comprehensive than many of the more formal, specialized supplements and sections that were appearing in the Brazilian press but reached only a very limited audience.”

Chateaubriand’s evening paper was tinged with sensationalism right from its start, in 1925. Financed by businessmen, captains of industry, and ranchers from São Paulo, by the 1950s the paper boasted state-of-the-art printing presses, experienced professionals, and international writers. It published heavy-hitting stories and first-hand news, but the police pages and tales of scandal got the spotlight. With a print run of 70,000 and two editions, its circulation vied with that of São Paulo’s top papers.

Romero explains, “Diário da Noite forged strong bonds with the poorer classes. Because of redemocratization and the growth of consump-tion, these sectors began to be seen as playing a leading role in political engagement on the one hand, and as classes that needed the guardian-ship of the government on the other.”

Accordingly, she points out that, while the paper declared itself to be the “people’s

Announcing the arrival of a radium bomb to staff at a hospital in São Paulo, and Brazilian scientists’ discussions about the hydrogen bomb

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science was seen as playing a vital role in leading Brazil toward progress and modernity

defender” through its support of popu-lar demands, it also maintained ties with upper-class sectors, who were worried about the emergence of the lowest classes. “Because of its alleged ties to the common people, Diário da Noite did not position itself openly against the struggle of the masses. But the paper regularly made it clear just who would have no place in the new day then dawning and who would be left out of modernity, even though they had been invited to join in.”

From the developmentalist perspective adopted by Brazil’s federal administration after the demise of the dictatorial Estado Novo, science was presented to society as a vital tool in the process of leading the country toward economic progress and the longed-for modernity. Furthermore, in 1950s Brazil, innovations such as home appliances, cars, and agricultural machin-ery were increasingly accessible to a bud-ding national consumer market. Science was at the service of humanity, as some advertisements said. “One thousand, nine-hundred highly skilled technicians have created the aerodynamic Vigorelli ‘super machine’ just for you,” boasted a sewing-machine ad that ran in Diário da Noite. In another ad, a new type of paint was hailed as a “thrilling discovery in chemistry,” and the reader was invited to “verify the new product’s remarkable features.”

“Under the Juscelino Kubitschek ad-ministration, Brazil was excited about developmentalist thinking, and this

broader ideological basis provided the underpinnings for the idea that techno-logical development would make it pos-sible to open the only path to true eco-nomic independence for Brazil,” observes Luisa Massarani, of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation’s Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, in her book Um gesto ameno para acordar o país: a ciência no Jornal do Commercio (1958-1962) (“A Gentle Gesture to Wake up the Country: Science in the Jornal do Commercio,” 1958-1962), published by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. Walter Oswaldo Cruz, coordinator of the Jornal do Commercio’s science section, stated in the first edition: “Brazil will not achieve development without technical person-nel, and technical personnel are the hu-man product of science.”

“Brazilian science communication has its singularities. The government never invested heavily in science and technol-ogy or in science education, which left to the media the task of introducing science to a public whose level of technological literacy was low,” explains Ana Maria Ri-beiro de Andrade, researcher at the Mu-seum of Astronomy and Related Sciences (Mast) in Rio de Janeiro and author of A dinâmica da ciência na sociedade (“The Dynamics of Science Within Society,” Hu-citec/Mast). “So, some individual efforts notwithstanding, sensationalism is the prime feature of this science communi-cation: the construction of scientific facts always comes wrapped in mystery, every discovery involves an act of genius, and history is almost always invisible.”

Romero points out that, in the case of Chateaubriand’s newspapers, there was a peculiar blend of sensationalism and valid science communication, as in the following front-page headline: “See the young man through the eyes of the dead priest.” As printed in huge letters – much like the headlines for the reports of miracles that were commonplace in the paper – it suggested that the article would be sensational. However, the ac-tual content of the story – which was told over the course of three days – revealed that the reporter had done his research and produced a well-written article con-taining precise information. What at first glance appeared to be the headline for a


frivolous story proved to be a good strat-egy for drawing in the reader.

ChildrenAnother headline announced that Brazilian scientists were going to discuss the effects of the hydrogen bomb. “Oddly enough,” Romero points out, “the headline was located right above a lead that said ‘children will suffer without milk,’ and back then the first story most certainly drew more attention than the local issue of mothers furious about the milk policy.”

The case of the hydrogen bomb also il-lustrates the paper’s ambivalent attitude toward science, which it viewed as both a magic bullet for solving the country’s troubles and a potential source of myriad dangers. The headline “A document by the astute Americans resonates among researchers” alerted readers to the pos-sibility that nuclear energy might have adverse effects, a concern that led the paper’s staff to speak with professors at the University of São Paulo (USP). Find-ing himself in an awkward position, the physicist Marcelo Damy stated, “The sub-ject lies outside my field of expertise” and, further, that he was “on the whole against the use of atomic weapons for the purpos-es of war.” According to the article, “José Goldemberg, of the São Paulo School of Philosophy spoke ‘briefly’ to reporters about the damaging effects of radioactiv-ity.” Romero explains, “Many scientists

ProjectSpreading scientific knowledge and the popular press. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in the1950s (2011/13246-2); Grant mechanism Scholarship abroad; coordinator Mariza Romero – PuC/SP; Investment R$22,266.26 (FAPESP).

by the complexity of their subject matter. “A huge wall stood between science and the reader, built by myths about scientific work, which, combined with the idealized image of scientists, did nothing to encourage Brazilians to study science,” Andrade says.

Romero says, “It is my belief that Diário da Noite, quite to the contrary, made sci-ence more accessible to the reader, pre-cisely because it used more popular jour-nalistic techniques. Unlike other means of science communication, it also gave voice to contemporary fears and anxiety about scientific development. It thus helped de-mystify science, which I believe is one of the distinguishing features of my research.”

In Romero’s opinion, because Diário da Noite defined itself as a voice for the lower classes, it intended to use science communication to raise the members of those classes out of their ignorance and to promote the ideals of comfort, well-being, and happiness that were so dear to Brazil in the 1950s, with science representing one of the portals to modernity. “At the same time,” she notes, “when the paper denounced its risks and dangers, science was demystified, and the paper also enter-tained the collective imagination when it addressed subjects like flying saucers in an ambiguous way.” n

didn’t like to see themselves associated with papers like Diário da Noite because they didn’t want to tarnish their reputa-tions.” Because of this fragile relationship between the scientific community and the paper, articles on such burning issues as developmentalism and the Cold War could take flights of fancy.

At times, the subject was literally a fan-ciful flight, as in the stories related to fly-ing saucers that often made the front page of Chateaubriand’s evening paper. “The Brazilian press failed to offer their readers enough information to recognize heaven-ly phenomena and routine flying objects. Lacking any background in science, many of them were susceptible to the specula-tions offered up by sensationalist papers,” observes historian Rodolpho Gauthier Car-doso dos Santos, who researched the top-ic for his book A invenção dos discos voa-dores: Guerra Fria, imprensa e ciência no Brasil (1947-1958) (“The Invention of Fly-ing Saucers: The Cold War, the Press, and Science in Brazil, 1947-1958”). As a result, the morning papers – including O Estado de S. Paulo and Folha da Manhã, which were basically aimed at the middle and upper classes – did not devote as much space to such subjects because the editors of those papers were more aware that matters of war might be involved.

Most papers usually conveyed the idea that science was something grandiose and inaccessible to the man on the street; it came cloaked in myths, with scientists isolated

Diário da Noite discussed how man might reach the moon and featured science even in its ads

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Lílian campesato in the work Conexões dispersas/dispersões conexas (Scattered connections/Connected scatterings), 2011


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Researchers from the Móbile project go on tour

to show the results of blending art with technology

and hearing movements

When the Móbile project was started in 2009, Fernando Iazzetta of the University of São Paulo’s School of

Communications and Arts (ECA-USP) described his intention to “combine the-oretical and artistic production, making it possible to develop creative work in our proposal.” Near project completion, Móbile researchers demonstrate their dedication to that promise by showcas-ing the Móbile project on an interna-tional tour from which they have just returned.

Five groups conducted presentations during the tour: the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland; the Seia Conservatory of Music and the University of Aveiro in Portugal; La Haceria in Bilbao, Spain; and Han-gar in Barcelona, Spain. “For the first

time, FAPESP funded a tour of musicians abroad. We saw that in addition to the published works, the artistic component generated by our research was as im-portant as the written results,” explains Iazzetta, author of Música e mediação tecnológica (music and technological mediation) from the publishing com-pany Perspectiva.

In addition to the project coordina-tor, Lílian Campesato, Michelle Agnes, Julian Jaramillo, Rogério Costa and Vi-tor Kisil comprise the members of Mó-bile. The professors and students who were not able to attend the tour were represented by the artistic production created as a result of their thematic re-search. The show, which was named Transparência (Transparency), consist-ed of six scenes in which “traditional” works were combined with instruments

seeing sounds


PubLished in May 2013


the combination of the music of other artistic models with various arts. “It is in this context that we are able to develop interactive music because the only way to access this new form is through the full sensory experience,” says Iazzetta.

REActIonThe basis of the project is a reaction

against technology as a solution to ev-ery problem without disregarding his-tory. This is the case with music. The term “electroacoustical music” empha-sizes the technology used by this genre. This notion was initially criticized in the 1980s. The idea is to remove art from its pedestal, which isolated it as something for the few and by the few, present it as an accessible and ironic game and make music and its creation compatible with daily life. Technological mediation fa-cilitated the connection between sound and visual elements.

“The audience at a concert, for ex-ample, looks on passively at something they are unable to do or fully understand, in total awe and from a distance. Even with a piano, people do not really un-derstand the complex mechanics,” states Iazzetta. Technology can compensate for this lack of virtuosity. It can positively forge a “new amateurism”: the ability for anyone to create music. The asym-metry between persons who create and persons who appreciate the work of art would disappear. Machines would re-place technique and experimentation would replace tradition. “Playing with machines is an experience in which art tends to stop being art. These are artistic

and sheet music. Three works employed improvisation, and the three works were based on an attempt to create interac-tion among music, technology and other types of art.

In the interactive scenes, the group used a black table on which a mini cam-era was installed and operated by Lílian Campesato. “She manipulates objects so there are variations in the projection of sound and images, for example. In an-other part, we show a film of a subway platform. On stage, Lílian appears to be tearing pieces of paper, which above her come to slowly reveal themselves as the image that goes with the film,” says Iazzetta. “We attempted to pass on this feeling of revelation by making the images transparent,” says the musician.

Móbile’s objective is to assemble re-searchers from the fields of music, vi-sual arts, performing arts, and comput-er and engineering science to develop new musical processes that focus on the integration of various unconnected sec-

tors. In particular, the project questions the obsession with technology, whereas the initial experimental models focused on studios and high-tech equipment. “There was a time in 20th-century music when exaggerated enthusiasm for nov-elty emerged. Technological advances were revered as if they were the stars of the show on their own. For us, what mat-ters is the result,” says Iazzetta. “Often, a lot of technology can even cause inter-ference. We took a low-tech approach and used the most efficient technology we could find in everyday life. The most complex link has to be artistic thought rather than engineering.”

The researcher cautions that although this concept may not be original, the mystification with advanced technol-ogy is prevalent even in major music re-search centers. He believes that the reas-signment of the role of virtuosity, which has divided creators and audiences into two separate groups, and a certain dis-tancing in terms of tradition results in

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1 Móbile ensemble at the show Por trás das coisas, (Behind things) october 2010

2 Móbile ensemble presenting a work at the ¿Música? 5 at the university of são Paulo, in 2012

3 Michelle agnes playing prepared piano music at the ¿Música? 3 event at the cultural center in são Paulo in 2011

4 cesar Villavicencio playing the hyperflute


achieved in the past by using graphics programs,” states Queiroz. He alludes to computer-generated simulations of acoustic spaces, in which a group can be heard in a room that does not even exist.

“Working on the Móbile project has been a unique opportunity for us. For the first time, we have succeeded in as-sembling an interdisciplinary team of scientists, artists, and technology, and art students working together on research in cutting-edge artistic production,” says Fabio Kon, also from the Department of Computer Science at USP and a member of the Móbile project. “Since the proj-ect began, we have sought to approxi-mate the artistic creation of cutting-edge production technology and exploit the synergies between these two forms of knowledge. This is no small feat because artists and technicians tend naturally to work in isolation, but this project has taken a first step towards changing this. We are pleased with the results, but there is still much to be done and the road ahead is long,” says Kon. He

proposals that leave technique behind and focus on the experience of playing with materials. In turn, art is increasing-ly immersed in the use of technological junk, and, paradoxically, the technique itself gets diluted,” notes Iazzetta.

However, these ideas derive from technology for the paradox to work. “Our work complements the musi-cians. We have many questions about the sound and they are objective, carry-ing no aesthetic bias. These are signals that are treated scientifically,” observes Marcelo Queiroz, professor of computer science at USP and a member of Móbile. In addition to technological knowledge, Queiroz has a degree in composition from ECA-USP. “But when I’m on the ‘other side’ I just work with the scien-tific variables in search of a horizontal partnership with the group’s musical research,” says Queiroz.

Queiroz indicates that this interaction occurs whenever an artistic question generates a technical challenge, such as the analysis of voice signals. “I prefer to see music and art as places where prob-lems of technical interest that require technical solutions arise naturally. Af-ter all, since computers are more flex-ible, they offer more opportunities to ex-pand upon and experiment with sounds and signals than by creating new instru-ments,” says Queiroz. For Queiroz, music and the visual arts of the past are follow-ing a similar trend. “From the standpoint of sound data, we are able to modulate human hearing and transpose it into a computational tool. We will soon have the same sound synthesis that has been

Project

Móbile: interactive Musical Processes (no. 2008/08632-8); Type Thematic Project; coord. Fernando iazzetta (usP); Investment R$515,936.56 (FaPesP).

technology helps to demystify the act of musical creation also notes that “this is a unique way to

produce and disseminate knowledge that does not fit into the traditional patterns of research funding.” According to Kon, everything transcends musical studies.

“There is much talk about technology and machines as the opposite of human beings, as though the soul of music was sold for a penny. But to imagine that a machine takes what is human in music is to forget that nothing is more repre-sentative of human beings than the ma-chines we make,” notes Iazzetta. Mu-sicians treat the relationship between music and technology in terms of depen-dency rather than in terms of symbiosis.

According to Iazzetta, today’s use of technology is no longer essential as in the early days of electroacoustical mu-sic. Instead, it has become incidental. Technology is no longer the focus and can be used as a tool to create inter-est and demystify the act of musical creation. n carlos Haag

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Workshop discusses potential of eScience

and affirms the important role of the humanities

For certain scientists, the Gordian knot in developing their theories is that they re-quire ever more data and that new ideas cannot be tested due to a lack of equip-ment or technology. For others, such as

genomics researchers and astronomers, their an-guish is due precisely to an overabundance: data are collected so quickly that they overwhelm the ability to analyze, validate and store the in-formation. To address this flood of information, eScience, a tool that aims to increase our ability to analyze the large volumes of data generated by research, involves creating software capable of handling the information collected.

FAPESP and Microsoft sponsored the 2013 Latin American eScience Workshop last month in São Paulo to discuss the development of this tool. “Space telescopes, genetic sequencing ma-chines, and particle accelerators are all generating unprecedented volumes of data. To deal with this phenomenon and allow scientists to manipulate and share data, we need various types of com-puter science technologies and tools that will allow us to carry out scientific research faster

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and with greater impact,” explains Tony Hey, Vice President of Microsoft Research.

“We have high expectations for eScience. If we learn how to use it properly, it can support major advances not only in research, but in how scientific research is carried out,” says Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, scientific director of FAPESP, at the opening of the workshop, when he announced that the institution intends to create a program to support eScience research soon. “We are convinced that one of FAPESP’s important roles is to be at the forefront of innovation and knowledge, and we believe supporting research in eScience is very important, not only because its application to areas such as the environment is unmistakable, but also because of its great po-tential in the humanities, for example,” says Celso Lafer, president of FAPESP. Proof of this concept is that the workshop was closed with a speech by historian Chad Gaffield, President of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), for whom the great question of the technological age is determining what makes us human.

publiShed in June 2013


Specialists believe that Brazil cannot remain on the sidelines of this movement, which seeks to transform research practices through com-putational thinking using scientific instruments driven by computers that transform the instru-ments into universal amplifiers. The idea might not seem so new: remember Darwin and his net-work of correspondents. However, whereas sci-entists worked alone or with a few colleagues in the past, the idea is that from now on, they can work on projects with hundreds of colleagues anywhere in the world in international networks of collaborators.

The attendance of a group of 54 graduate stu-dents from Europe, North America, Latin Amer-ica (including Brazil), Asia and Africa gave the workshop a youthful, globalized feel. The stu-dents, who were mostly master’s or PhD stu-dents, were chosen from among 240 applicants from around the world who participated in the event’s selection process. For example, the Indian bioinformatician Angana Chakraborty, a PhD candidate at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta, works on developing new algorithms capable of exploiting the “intelligence” of ma-chines to speed up the process of analyzing gene sequences.

This type of research, notes Hey, shows that we will need to restructure scientific culture to integrate biological, physical, and social sciences into engineering, creating an interdisciplinary movement that brings together the creation and use of knowledge. Amid all of this change, the researcher notes, the focus must be on issues such as ethics, privacy and cybersecurity. “Im-portant advances in science need to be placed in a larger social context by the humanities and the arts,” says Hey.

In the talk Big Data, Digital Humanities and the New Knowledge Environments of the 21st Century, Canadian Chad Gaffield defended the centrality of the humanities in these new times because these areas are responsible for the ideas, meth-ods and professionals that affect the industries whose primary input is the knowledge that comes from the “hard sciences.” “The new innovation model integrates technological invention in a social context and therefore increases the need for and value of research on individual groups and societies,” explains the researcher.

For this historian, understanding technology is understanding human thought and behavior, or why we do what we do and what makes us change or remain the same. According to him, research shows that technology is not just another tool, contrary to what Bill Gates said a decade ago. Technologies and cultures mingle and interact to determine economic growth and competitive-ness, social cohesion and engagement, as well as quality of life.

Gaffield warns that as a society, we have to recognize that we must understand the social and human implications of our discoveries, even if they appear to be primarily scientific or tech-nological. We have to understand the impacts of innovation, whether they are related to ethical issues, such as the use of stem cells, or human behavior, as in the case of the recent economic crisis, which was the result of individual, finan-cial and governmental choices.

“Recognizing this complexity is realizing that building the future is not a matter of magic pills, miracle drugs, technological fixes and easy so-lutions. The meaning of a technology now de-pends on its relationship with its environment. Society matters, and technology depends on the


context, which brings meaning to new ways of doing things,” the historian says.

Thus, he notes further, the Internet economy no longer belongs to the builders of the frame-work that made the digital age possible. The torch has been passed on: the future now belongs, at least equally, to those who use the technology, including creative people; content providers; servers; and everyone who has learned to share pictures, sounds, ideas and concepts digitally.

Gaffield explains, “Just look at the interdis-ciplinary collaborations between philosophers, biologists, engineers and artists to interpret the ethical, legal and aesthetic dimensions of bio-medical technologies; geographers, together with demographers and economists, rethinking agri-culture policies; entrepreneurs identifying critical issues to be researched by sustainable develop-ment scholars.”

The Canadian then proposed a new way of thinking about the technological age in which we live. “A new way to understand these pro-found changes is to rethink what it is to be hu-man,” he says. If the humanities are to assume this task, they must also be suited to the times. Gaffield argues that we must redefine teaching and research. In projects that he undertakes with his group, the old distinctions between pure and applied research and between strategic and pre-sumably non-strategic research are being aban-doned. His group also rejects any hierarchy of types of research activities in terms of prestige or importance.

The same applies to expanding academic con-tributions beyond the familiar emphasis on ar-ticles in scholarly journals or books, including various forms of knowledge mobilization on and off campus. According to the researcher, research must be redefined from an epistemology of spe-cialization to “multiple epistemologies”; the digi-tal humanities are now asking themselves how one can interpret 1 million books.

Until recently, notes Gaffield, humanities schol-ars thought that sharing their knowledge with non-experts amounted to lowering themselves. Today’s academics recognize that effective com-munication beyond specialized groups is a com-plex rhetorical challenge. New professors are specializing in using the potential offered by the digital age. Thus, in addition to writing for colleagues and students, more and more schol-ars now provide audiences with online courses, podcasts and social media content to dissemi-nate information, stimulate debate and advance knowledge.

The researcher believes that in the future, stu-dents will no longer see a dividing line between working in the humanities and technology. As a result of new networks and access to information,

undergraduate degrees are quickly becoming research degrees, at least at universities that want to prepare their students for the challenges of this century.

Gaffield believes that, until re-cently, the dominant global flow oc-curred in one direction, with former colonies and developing countries looking to metropolises to lead re-search efforts and educate their best students. Now, flows are multina-tional and not clearly distributed. The leaders of the old, prestigious institutions know that they can be left behind. At the same time, new talent and knowledge developing in other regions can help to build societies in the new era that are no longer subject to the old circuit of knowledge. In other words, accord-ing to Gaffield, the internationaliza-tion of education and research has become the central feature of national strategies in the twenty-first century.

The researcher stresses the observation made in the 2012 OECD Global Science Forum Report on Data and Research Infrastructure for the Social Sciences, entitled New Data for Under-standing the Human Condition: “The national research support agencies need to collaborate internationally to provide resources to research-ers in order to foster the necessary potential and develop new methods for understanding the opportunities and limitations offered by new forms of data and technologies, which will al-low them to keep up in important research ar-eas.” Among the key issues, insists Gaffield, is the discovery of what makes us human. “This is the question that has never been answered adequately and is at the center of this new era in which we live,” he warns. n Carlos Haag

For Chad Gaffield, one way to understand the new era

of technology is to question

what makes us human


Like old times

Feather pen and ink cross-hatching is a technique that has fallen

into disuse among artists of science illustrations. The above illustration

won first prize in the 2013 Margaret Flockton Award for Excellence

in Scientific Botanical Illustration international competition sponsored

by the Royal Botanic Garden of Sydney, Australia. Biologist

and illustrator Rogério Lupo drew this example of the species

Vellozia perdicipes, found in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.

The drawing will appear in a scientific article to be published

by Renato de Mello-Silva, from the Botany Department

of the Biosciences Institute of the University of São Paulo.

PUBLIShED In JUnE 2013

ART

international issue 2013 - edition 4

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