Ernesto Altshuler has a principle for doing science in one of the world's more challenging settings, Cuba. Faced with scant resources and a persistent brain drain, the University of Havana physicist says he became a “guerrilla scientist.”
That didn't mean toting a Kalashnikov. “My strategy to survive as an experimental physicist was to violate the boundaries of safe science,” Altshuler says, “invading zones where I was not a specialist, looking around for new phenomena with wider eyes, seeing scientific instruments in daily life objects, attacking and retreating from serendipitous findings like a guerrilla.” He has used ants to model how panicked people behave, for example, and has studied how bits of tea leaves seem to defy gravity by climbing a stream of tea into a pot's spout. In his studies of granular materials, Altshuler spent about $100 “to obtain the same quality of data” as other researchers who spend millions of dollars on microgravity experiments, says Thorsten Pöschel, a physicist at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. “This should have embarrassed some of our colleagues.”
If Che Guevara were alive today, the iconic guerrilla leader of the Cuban revolution surely would applaud how Altshuler and a handful of comrades have kept science alive by cunning and daring in an isolated nation trapped in a time warp. Here in Havana, '50s Chevrolets and Soviet sidecar motorcycles share the rutted roads with sleek Chinese limousine buses whisking tourists to beachside resorts. On a manicured bluff overlooking Havana Harbor behind the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, foreigners and well-heeled Cubans sip mojitos and puff cigars next to Bay of Pigs–era cannon emplacements.
For every expansive mind like Altshuler's, there are scores of researchers working with blinders to the outside world, producing little while being paid less. Cubans blame their penury on “the blockade”: the U.S. embargo in place for a half-century. “The embargo is like God. It affects every aspect of life,” says Sergio Jorge-Pastrana, foreign secretary of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba (ACC). It stymies the import of equipment and supplies made in the United States or with U.S. components, and it has turned Cuba into a cyber-backwater with excruciatingly slow Internet speeds. Meanwhile, U.S. travel restrictions hampered academic exchange between the two countries.
But at long last, Cuban science is poised to join the modern world. In a historic rapprochement, Cuban President Raúl Castro and U.S. President Barack Obama announced last December that their nations would strive to overcome mutual hostility and normalize relations. The overture stunned Americans and Cubans alike. “I almost fainted,” says ACC President Ismael Clark-Arxer. The pace of détente picked up in April, when Obama struck Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism, paving the way for the two nations to reopen embassies as early as summer. Revised travel rules ease visits to Cuba for U.S. scientists, and the U.S. Commerce Department now allows scientific equipment to be freely donated to Cuba, so long as it does not have potential military applications.
Reforms are taking root on Cuban soil as well. In early 2013, Cuba abolished exit visas and now permits citizens to spend 2 years overseas—up from 11 months—without losing residency rights at home. And in a critical way, Cuba is about to join the scientific mainstream. In the coming months, the government is expected to establish an agency akin to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) that will distribute research funds through competitive, peer-reviewed grants.
Few on either side of the Cuba-U.S. ideological divide anticipate a quick end to a rift that has lasted more than 50 years. Yet Cuba and the United States have shown that they can overcome political differences for the sake of science. A U.S. State Department official says that the United States will not link science engagement with Cuba to progress on human rights, such as free expression, that are still curtailed in Cuba. Already, joint efforts to assess Cuba's coral reefs and to combat Ebola in West Africa are under way. Science diplomacy, Jorge-Pastrana says, could help Cuba and the United States lay the foundation of a new relationship.
At the very least, says Luis Montero-Cabrera, a computational chemist at the University of Havana, “we don't want to be a pariah anymore.”
PEDRO VALDÉS-SOSA was a 9-year-old Cuban expatriate living in Chicago when Fidel Castro seized power in his homeland in 1959. The ferment filled him with pride. The next year, when his fifth-grade teacher explained that U.S. Army physician Walter Reed first hypothesized that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever, Valdés-Sosa could not contain himself. “I stood up and objected,” he says. “The true discoverer, of course, was Carlos Finlay,” a Cuban doctor. (Reed himself credited Finlay with discovering the vector.) In 1961, Valdés-Sosa's parents moved the family to Cuba to take part in the socialist experiment. Pedro and his fraternal twin brother, Mitchell, would both become influential neuroscientists here, while remaining lifelong White Sox fans.
Finlay is the founding father of Cuban science. A white marble bust of the epidemiologist sporting a bushy mustache and muttonchops sits on a 3-meter-tall pedestal in a garden across from ACC's headquarters in Old Havana. Finlay's key insight into yellow fever came in 1881, when Cuba still belonged to Spain.
After Cuban independence in 1898, however, intellectual life withered, and the island became known as a winter playground for fast-living U.S. celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, Ava Gardner, and Marlon Brando. A team from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development that visited Cuba in 1950 reported, “In the field of applied research and labs, there was no development at all in Cuba.” The country possessed just three agricultural research stations specializing in sugarcane and tobacco and a single higher education institution, the University of Havana.
Science became a priority again after Cuba's 1959 revolution. In a speech in January 1960, Castro declared, “The future of our country has to be necessarily a future of men of science, of men of thought.” Cubans were gobsmacked. “One-fifth of the population was illiterate. Everybody thought he was dreaming,” Jorge-Pastrana says.
In 1965, the government established the National Center for Scientific Research here, for applied science and engineering. Later that year, ACC, quiescent for decades, began opening institutes in natural sciences. Guevara, as industry minister, launched research centers in mining and metallurgy and in sugarcane byproducts. A stream of students headed overseas, mainly to Eastern bloc countries, for graduate studies.
In 1973, the first Ph.D. was awarded in Cuba, in neuroscience. Cuba now has 63 universities, and roughly one scientist for every 1800 people. Salaries have always been a pittance, but in the heyday of the Soviet bloc they came with scientific perks. High-powered specialists in geology, marine biology, and other fields beat a path to Cuba from the Soviet Union and other communist redoubts with robust scientific traditions. The visitors took aspiring Cuban scientists like Manuel Iturralde-Vinent under their wing.
As a youngster, Iturralde-Vinent loved to explore caves near his hometown of Cienfuegos, on Cuba's southern coast. In 1964, when he was 18, the high school dropout parlayed his amateur prowess in speleology into a job as a technician at the newly formed National Institute of Hydraulic Resources. After becoming a department head at the tender age of 22, Iturralde-Vinent turned to mapping water basins with a Russian field geologist. “I treasured him as a father I didn't have. We were speaking in my poor Russian, I was writing in Spanish about karst geology, and we were drinking vodka all the time.”
Iturralde-Vinent joined the Institute of Geology and Paleontology in Havana just as it was gearing up for a massive Eastern bloc effort to map Cuba's geology. Once that was complete, Comecon, the Sovietled economic assistance body, poured millions of dollars into an effort in the early 1980s to translate the newly acquired geological knowledge on Cuba into data on mineral resources, such as the country's prodigious nickel reserves. “We drilled like crazy,” says Iturralde-Vinent, president of the Cuban Geological Society. “For any other country at that time, it would have been impossible.”
In many fields Cuba was the junior partner to its socialist big brothers. But in one risky new field it set out to be a pioneer.
BIOTECH BEWITCHED FIDEL CASTRO. On a visit here in 1981, R. Lee Clark, president of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, met the fatigue-clad leader and bent his ear about the potential of interferon, an immune-modulating compound, to subdue cancer. Castro dispatched two bright young biologists to Houston in 1981 for a weeklong crash course on interferon in Clark's lab. The duo next did a stint at the State Serum Institute in Helsinki with Kari Cantell, who in the 1970s had been the first to isolate interferon from human white blood cells. Back in Havana, the government gave them a two-building compound to use for lab space; it had been expropriated from a Cuban family that had fled after the revolution. In short order “they isolated the first Cuban interferon,” Jorge-Pastrana says. “Within 2 years, they could produce interferon by genetic engineering.” Cuba used its interferon widely in the early 1980s to stem internal bleeding in dengue patients.
Emboldened by that success, Cuba decided to get into genetic engineering on the ground floor. “We were not going to miss the biology revolution,” Clark-Arxer says. The country spent about $1 billion on biotech in the 1980s and 1990s, he says. Cuba's state-owned biotech industry now employs more than 21,000 people at 32 institutes and enterprises managed by BioCubaFarma, a holding company. Biotech is now the country's second biggest source of revenue, after tourism, earning several hundred million dollars each year from exports of products such as recombinant epidermal growth factor for diabetic ulcers; recombinant erythropoietin for anemia; and a pentavalent vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis B, and Haemophilus influenzae B.
Biotech was one of the few areas of Cuban science to survive “the special period,” Cuba's existential crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main financial backer, in 1991. Within 4 years, Cuba's gross domestic product contracted 40%, sinking from third in Latin America to 23rd. “There was no petrol, so there were almost no cars on the streets. And there were food shortages,” even malnutrition, Jorge-Pastrana says. Outside of biotechnology, most scientists fell into indigent hibernation. “There was almost no research,” says Iturralde-Vinent, who in 1988 had moved to the Museum of Natural History, where he pillaged old data for insights into Caribbean plate tectonics.
Cuba began pulling out of its nosedive around 1996. But the isolation of Cuban science has continued. “The miracle is that we are still competent in some important fields,” Clark-Arxer says. One standout is the Cuban Neuroscience Center. In the dark days of the early 1990s, “it didn't have money for toilet paper,” says Mark Rasenick, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who collaborates with Valdés-Sosa. But the center kept its research going at a slow burn and today, Rasenick says, its brain mapping studies “are really among the best in the world.” Adrian Raine, a neuropsychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees. Research in his area, the biological roots of violence, “is being largely transported to countries like Cuba,” he says. “They seem to be well ahead of the United States.”
Another miracle is that there's anyone left in Cuba to do good science. “Our biggest problem is a massive emigration of young professionals,” Altshuler says. “We could be sucked dry.” The country's crumbling buildings and infrastructure tell young scientists that the odds are against a research career. Bright young science students decamp to universities from Argentina to Arkansas. And fewer go into science in the first place. Just 559 students in Cuba earned a B.S. degree in natural sciences and mathematics in 2007 to 2008: less than a sixth of the number who had enrolled in these areas 4 years earlier.
“Some people say the special period is still going on,” Iturralde-Vinent says.
UNLIKE MANY OF HIS NEATLY COIFED countrymen, Altshuler wears his wavy graying hair hippie-long. Ingenuity borne of dire straits has, he says, given him “an immense feeling of freedom.” A couple of years ago, he designed, for pennies, a system for studying how granular materials respond to different gravitational fields: a free-falling, sand-filled bucket. It plunges 15 meters while a Ping-Pong ball fitted with an accelerometer penetrates the sand. The out-of-this-world rationale, as described inGeophysical Research Letters online on 1 May 2014, was to test how spacecraft and other objects settle on granular surfaces in gravities different from Earth's. “In Cuba, we don't have much fancy equipment,” Altshuler says, “but we have tons of beautiful sand!”
Altshuler's observation of tea leaves flowing upstream into a teapot led to another case of bargain-basement physics. A few years ago, Troy Shinbrot, a physicist at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in New Jersey, was intrigued by Altshuler's account of the phenomenon. They collaborated on experiments confirming that bits of matter could climb a 1-centimeter waterfall and move upstream in a meters-long channel—all thanks to surface tension. “It's a pretty cool phenomenon,” says Shinbrot, who with Altshuler published their findings online on 3 July 2013 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
For the vast majority of Cuban researchers, however, the embargo is a scientific straitjacket. Strolling through the verdant south Havana campus of the Higher Polytechnic Institute José Antonio Echeverría (CUJAE), Cuba's top technical university, research vice-rector Orestes Llanes-Santiago recounts the university's early travails in computing. Barred from buying U.S. computers, scientists with CUJAE—then the technology faculty at the University of Havana—and colleagues formed a crack team to design Cuba's first computer from scratch in the early 1970s.
Cuban industry produced the computer, similar to Digital Equipment Corp.'s PDP-8, until 1990. By then the archaic machines were almost useless, and CUJAE set out to obtain a Sun Microsystems workstation. They got one through a chain of contacts in “five or six countries,” Llanes-Santiago says, “to erase the trace.” But whenever they tried downloading software or upgrades over the Internet, their Cuban IP address betrayed them. A message would flash on the screen—“You are in a forbidden country”—and the updates were blocked.
Few pieces of Cuba's lab equipment are state of the art. “It's tremendously difficult” to buy genuine reagents and other supplies, says Agustin Lage, director of the Center of Molecular Immunology here. Montero-Cabrera chafes at not being allowed access in Cuba to computational chemistry software. “It's insulting and discriminatory,” he fumes. “I'm treated as a terrorist.”
The restrictions are maddening, agrees Rasenick, who failed a few years ago to send a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine to Cuba. U.S. officials deemed it to have potential military applications. “I guessed if you dropped it on someone you could hurt them,” he says.
THE PROSPECT OF NORMALCY is intoxicating, even though Cuban scientists expect it will be slow in coming. “What Obama and Castro did was very gutsy,” Valdés-Sosa says. “This is the beginning of the end of an absurd situation.”
Freer travel will aid the handful of U.S. researchers who have used private money in recent years to nurture collaborations in Cuba. Last year, ACC and AAAS (Science's publisher) signed a memorandum of understanding seeking to expand such efforts in areas like neuroscience and infectious disease. One target is chikungunya, a mosquito-borne malady working its way through the Caribbean toward Cuba and the United States. “We have to face this virus together,” says Guadalupe Guzmán Tirado, an epidemiologist here at the Institute of Tropical Medicine.
As the awkward pas de deux takes shape, Cuba is seeking to bolster its own scientific capacity. Ever since the revolution, the government's unwavering policy has been to yoke science to societal needs: girding for the consequences of climate change, for example, or bolstering energy supplies. Researchers not pursuing such national priorities have had to fend for themselves. “You can study mathematics or basic science, but there's no money,” Llanes-Santiago says. “Everything is for applied science.”
That could change with the upcoming establishment of the Cuban NSF. Key details, including its budget and management structure, are still being worked out. But the science ministry has agreed that it will dole out a chunk of its R&D budget—a paltry 90 million pesos ($4 million) in 2015—on competitive grants for basic research. “It's essential to have this fund,” Valdés-Sosa says. While most of Cuba's R&D budget will continue to go to “national needs,” Clark-Arxer adds, “there must be space for creativity.”
Cuba remains a place of outsized ambitions. Castro's eldest son, Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, for example, is leading an initiative to build a nanotechnology research complex on Havana's southern outskirts. The Center for Advanced Studies of Cuba hopes to carve niches in, for example, drug delivery and solar cells. “We will never be a power in nanoscience,” Clark-Arxer acknowledges. “But we have to be proficient.” Seemingly defying poverty and the embargo, the center's labs are billed as having “ultralow vibrations without electromagnetic interference,” a “powerful computational infrastructure,” and “worldclass laboratories for nanocharacterization.” Work on a nanofabrication facility is slated to begin next year.
Cuba's precision strike into a field dominated by the United States and other powers sounds a lot like guerrilla science. But until the embargo fades, that's the way it has to be, Castro Díaz-Balart says. “This approach,” he says, “is consistent with the economy and possibility of Cuba.”
Source: AAAS, Full Article
