The Nobel Prizes arrive and, like every year, the media they are filled with reports on why Spain resists the great scientific awards of the contemporary world. And it is not a lie: the last Spaniard to win one in science, Severo Ochoa, did so 66 years ago. Being a relatively important country internationally, it is a real problem.
What we did not suspect is that the Karolisnka Institute was going to make it so clear how ‘real’ this problem is.
A little highlighted detail. At this point in the week, the history of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine It has been counted as active and passive; But there is a detail that is worth dwelling on.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Shimon Sakaguchi discovered a subset of T lymphocytes that did not attack anyone or anything. They were a kind of “riot police” of the immune system: they suppressed the activity of other T lymphocytes.
The discovery was momentous, but what came next was an enormous silence.
Silence? But they just gave him the Nobel Prize! They just gave it to him now, but it was not a bed of roses. Sakaguchi’s idea made sense, but no one was quite clear why that was happening. And, in fact, many people were vehemently against his theses.
It took almost a decade for two different teams to reach the same conclusion: the Japanese researcher was right and the key to everything. the problem was in the FOXP3 gene. It seems like a minor issue, but “this double discovery, the cellular discovery of Sakaguchi and the genetic discovery of Brunkow and Ramsdell, has completely changed the paradigm of immunology and has opened two great therapeutic avenues with immense potential.”
The relevant question in Spain. This is all very well, but the really relevant question for our country is why in 2020, when the Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded CRISPR, it did not follow the same logic.
Because yes, there are big differences between one discovery and the other: while the former rewarded the technological tool, this one has rewarded the discovery of the fundamental scientific bases. But it is not lost on anyone that the narrative of the award is not just an explanation: it is a framework that justifies inclusions and exclusions.
The “forgetfulness” of the 2020 Nobel Prize. Francis Mojica himself he explained to us that “when we discovered CRISPR, I said to myself: “this is going to be crazy in biology” and then absolutely nothing happened.” In fact, that “nothing” lasted for many years. Years in which CRISPR seemed like a scientific curiosity without much importance and working on the subject, as Mojica did, was seen as an eccentricity.
And finally, when the award came, it focused on “the development of a gene editing method (CRISPR-Cas9)” and was awarded to the two researchers who discovered that we could use the mechanism to our advantage; but no one remembered the person who discovered this mechanism.
And it would be naive not to ask ourselves why. Even if we cannot know what really happened (the prize selection process has been hidden for 50 years), it is a good time to compare the abysmal differences between the research policy of Spain and that of Japan.
While in the country of the rising sun, it has been investing in “scientific diplomacy” since the 90s; while Spain has made some isolated effort, yes; but insufficient.
This is not about creating intricate conspiracy theories. It is clear that we will not be able to say what would have happened if Francis Mojica were Japanese, but we can ask ourselves what extra-scientific factors intervene in this type of awards and what Spain is doing to value its contribution to current contemporary science.
That is, not only what resources are dedicated to research; but what is Spain’s ‘soft-power’, what resources does it put to make our researchers visible, to spread favorable stories or to amplify the work of our teams.
The answer to all this, I’m afraid, is “too little.”
Image | Ryan Faulkner | Daniel Prado
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