International Issue 2013 - Edition 4

Pesquisa FAPESP 2013_ edition 4

2013_ edition 4 www.revistapesquisa.fapesp.br

QUAKES

The 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

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

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2013_ edition 4 www.revistapesquisa.fapesp.br

6 COVER Fifteen species from the largest Brazilian ornithological discovery of the past 140 years are described PHoto léo ramos

12 INTERVIEW Michel Rabinovitch A parasitologist speaks about his career and his talent for training scientists

SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL POLICY

TECHNOLOGY

18 Infrastructure

A small agriculture-automation company in São Carlos gains international recognition

Company 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 Science SECTIONS 4 Letter from the Editor 82 Art

58 Agriculture

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

66 Medicin

FAPESP’s new Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Centers embolden Brazil’s science and enhance its impact

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

SCIENCE

HUMANITIES

38 Obituary

70 Media

Zoologist 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

Assis Chateaubriand’s evening newspaper highlighted technology as part of an agenda to overcome Brazilian “backwardness”

46 Genetics Small RNA molecules control lateral stem growth in sugarcane

48 Geology Seismologists propose a new explanation for earthquakes in Brazil

54 Astronomy Survey identifies three patterns of galaxy evolution

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

78 Big data Workshop participants discuss the potential of eScience and affirms the importance of the humanities

Letter from the Editor

São Paulo Research Foundation Celso Lafer President Eduardo Moacyr Krieger Vice-President Board of trustees Alejandro 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 Varela President director Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz Scientific director Joaquim J. de Camargo Engler Administrative director

issn 1519-8774

Editorial board Carlos 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 committee Luiz 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 coordinator Luiz Henrique Lopes dos Santos Editor in chief Mariluce Moura Managing editor Neldson Marcolin editors Fabrício 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 online Maria Guimarães (editor) Júlio Cesar Barros (assistant editor) Rodrigo de Oliveira Andrade (reporter) Radio Pesquisa Brasil Biancamaria Binazzi (producer) Contributors Abiuro, 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 FAPESP Rua Pio XI, no 1.500, CEP 05468-901 Alto da Lapa, São Paulo-SP – Brasil

DEPARTMENT FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SÃO PAULO STATE GOVERNMENT

4 z special issue october 2013

The birds of the Amazon and the science of São Paulo Mariluce Moura Editor in Chief

T

he cover story on page 6 of this fourth 2013 international issue of the magazine Pesquisa FAPESP reports on the simultaneous description of 15 new species of birds in the Brazilian Amazon in scientific articles published in June, 2013 in a special volume of Handbook of the birds of the world, a fundamental reference work for professional and amateur ornithologists. The work represents an extremely important Brazilian contribution to the understanding 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 published 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 Handbook of the birds of the world. Each species has been described in a scientific article identical to what would normally be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Although birds are the most studied vertebrates in biology, ornithologists say that there is still much to be learned about them. And Brazilian museums contain many specimens from different biomes including the Amazon forest that will certainly be described in the coming years.

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 interventions— in addition to the possibility of economic 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 institutions to the researchers and technical personnel 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 diverse areas as neuromathematics and mathematics applied to industry, neuroscience and neurotechnology, the development of new drugs and cell therapies, inflammatory diseases 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 decentralized, 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 committed to creating knowledge, to generating innovations derived from this knowledge that can be effectively used by society, and to disseminating this knowledge and these innovations to society. This is the role of the RIDCs in the best policies to increase Brazil’s scientific culture.

Note that these centers will initially hire 535 researchers from São Paulo and 69 other 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 begins on page 28.

Enjoy!

PHOTO Zig Koch

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

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6 z special issue october 2013 PHOTOS 1 LUCIANO MOREIRA-LIMA 2 MARIO COHN-HAFT

COVER

New birds of Amazonia Fifteen species are described in the largest Brazilian ornithological discovery of the past 140 years Marcos Pivetta Published in may 2013

B

razilian ornithology has not witnessed such a significant contribution to the expansion 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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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 Brazil, and four can also be found in Peru and Bolivia. 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 occurrence. 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 Amazonas. “This jay is threatened with extinction,” 8 z special issue october 2013

says Mario Cohn-Haft, curator of Inpa’s ornithology 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 indepth 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 Piciformes, which includes toucans and woodpeckers, 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 distant relative of the toucan, the book will describe five species of the family Thamnophilidae (which includes antbirds), four from the family Dendrocolaptidae (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 Polioptilidae (which has at least 10 species that are

PHOTOS 1 Fabio Schunck 2 Zig Koch MAP daniel das neves

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

existing and future biodiversity reserves.” Outside his academic life, Whitney is a partner in Field The 15 recently discovered species occur in three large regions of Amazonia Guides, an ecotourism company that takes people on birdwatching venezuela tours in various parts of the world, guiana francesa including the Amazon. guiana suriname Several of the dozens of AmaRR Boa zon expeditions over the last 10 Vista AP years that have led to the discov5 Colômbia species ery of new species were partially Between or fully paid for by a FAPESP-fithe Madeira nas Belém azo and Tapajós 8 Am nanced project that Silveira headrivers species ed. Other expeditions received Manaus West of the Madeira support from Brazil’s National River Council for Scientific and Technoa r i PA de logical Development (CNPq), the Ma AM MA Ministry of the Environment, the rus Pu Biodiversity Research Program of AC the Ministry of Science and TechPorto nology, state-level ministers, and Velho 2 Palmas even the National Geographic Sospecies Ri oM ro East of the ac ciety in the US. On one such expeha do Tapajós dition through the tropical forest River TO PERU last year, approximately twenty MT Bolívia researchers and post-graduate students from institutions participating in the project rented a boat for Not since commonly known as gnatcatchers). a month (for R$75,000) to look for new bird speIn numerical terms, the new Ama- cies as they cruised along the Sucunduri River, a the 19th century zonian species represent an increase tributary of the Madeira.

On other occasions, the scientists have even of nearly 1% in Brazil’s avian biodihas such a large versity. “We have the second highest needed armed protection to go into areas that number of known bird species in the could be home to new types of birds. A comnumber of new world, about 1,840,” says Luís Fábio mon locale of one of the new species, a scythebill Silveira, curator of the ornithology called the arapaçu-de-bico-torto, is the Altamira Brazilian bird department at the USP Zoology Mu- National Forest near Highway BR-163 in Brazil’s species been seum, one of the coordinators of the southern Pará State. The area is a conservation initiative. “Only Colombia has more unit managed by the Brazilian Institute of the described species than we do—approximately Environment and Renewable Natural Resources 1,900. But a decade from now, we’ll (IBAMA). “But to be able to work safely in the at once probably reach 2,000 known bird reserve, we had to be escorted by soldiers from species in Brazil. The country’s mu- the Brazilian army. There was an illegal gold seums contain a number of speci- mine operating inside the unit,” says Dr. Alexmens of unknown birds native to andre Aleixo of the MPEG ornithology departvarious biomes, and these will be ment. “The stress of working in that kind of place is considerable and, if it weren’t for the Army’s described in the next few years.”

Birds are the most extensively presence, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

In modern times, the process of describing restudied vertebrate group in biology, yet it appears that much remains to be learned, especially cently discovered species takes place on the pages in the Amazon, despite the fact that this region of scientific journals rather than in books. Howhas been the focus of a great deal of research over ever, because of the importance and singularity recent decades. “Biodiversity in general, even in of this group of new Amazonian bird species, the regard to the birds of this biome, is far from fully encyclopedia’s publishers and the authors of the evidenced,” says ornithologist Bret Whitney, a papers chose an alternate route. Each new speresearcher with LSUMNS and principal coordi- cies was the focus of a separate paper (a scientific nator of the endeavor. “There is still a long way article) written along the lines of what would be to go for Amazonia to be considered sufficiently prepared for an academic journal. The Handbook well known to enable us to plan and sustain the team hired the services of a group of specialists

Where the new birds live

Toca ntin s

Ta pa jó s

Ar ag ua ia

elt Rio Roosev

Aripuanã

u Xing

pESQUISA FAPESP z 9

Bird song Graphs demonstrate the differences between the vocalizations of similar species of the genus Herpsilochmus (at right) 4 3 2

Frequency (kHz)

1 0 4 3 2 1 0 4 3 2 1 0 0.5

1

1.5

2

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 species. 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 leadership 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 species 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 families. This special volume is expected to cover 68 species initially, all of which have been formally described in papers published in scientific journals over the past two decades, yielding an average 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 importance of preserving the biodiversity of the Amazon region where two-thirds of the bird species in Brazil are found. “If we published each paper 10 z special issue october 2013

2.5

3

Time (s)

Brazil has the second highest number of known bird species in the world, approximately 1,840 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 Bermuda shorts, a t-shirt and a hat, carrying binoculars and perhaps a camera. One item not mentioned, 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 significantly differed from the features found in already known species, the animal could be labeled 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

PHOTOS Fabio Schunck

Bico-chato-do-sucunduri (above).

New species of the family Bucconidae (at right)

only one of those three parameters is shown to be different from that of other known species,” 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 importance of obtaining genetic material as part of scientific specimen collection—a process that unfortunately is not yet in practice at a number of museums and collections across Brazil.”

Genetic studies can provide valuable information about species origins. The evolutionary history of two of these newly described birds—two antwrens (chorozinhos) of the genus Herpsilochmus—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 evolutionary 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 morphological similarities among the two populations of chorozinhos, genetic studies have revealed— shockingly—that they were separated by the Madeira 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 insurmountable 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 region between the Aripuanã and Machado rivers in the southern Amazonas State and northern Rondônia State: one of the chorozinhos mentioned 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 “captive” 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,” Silveira 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 tropical forest are an abundant source of biodiversity within and around their waters. n

Project Systematics, 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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Michel Rabinovitch

Léo ramos

Interview

How to boost science Neldson Marcolin and Ricardo Zorzetto Published in may 2013

W

hen looking for a reference text, Professor Michel Pinkus Rabinovitch opens a folder on h is 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, Rabinovitch graduated in 1949, received his doctorate 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 generation of young students*, the scientist left Brazil in 1964 due to threats from the military

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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 professor at the Rockefeller University and the New York University School of Medicine, where he trained the Brazilian researchers Bernardo Mantovani, Momtchilo Russo 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 permanently, working at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) in the city of São Paulo, where he once again trained researchers. Today, he still advises students in conjunction with other colleagues and participates in scientific meetings in parasitology and microbiology. At 87, Rabinovitch lives in an apartment 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.

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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You are well known for having been the advisor of researchers such as Ricardo Brentani, Nelson Fausto, Thomas Maack and Sérgio Henrique Ferreira, among others. What led to your advising 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 Friday afternoon meetings at the Biological 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 Floriano Paulo de Almeida, Carlos da Silva Lacaz and Wilson Teixeira Beraldo.

In a pioneering initiative at the end of the 1940s, little remembered today, the Andrea and Virginia Matarazzo Cancer Laboratory, directed by Piero Manginelli, was created on the fourth floor of the FMUSP building.

Manginelli introduced tissue culture and oncology to the medical school, following in the footsteps of Robert Archibald Lambert in the 1920s. The major changes mid-century in the basic sciences began with Luiz Carlos Junqueira, followed by Isaias Raw and Alberto Carvalho da Silva. Before that, there were few opportunities for training students in experimental science. Students 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 Lourenço de Oliveira; José Barros Magaldi; and Dirceu Pfuhl Neves. In this context, I was a non-authoritarian, informal 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 contributed to that historic occurrence, which would be difficult to reproduce today.

Professor Brentani said in an interview that FMUSP students with a talent 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 Histology 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-

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 histophysiology, histochemistry, radioautography, the study of living cells and chemical and biochemical approaches, initially developed by Hannah Rothschild and later by José Ferreira Fernandes and others. Generously 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 foreign professors to FMUSP for short periods to give valuable short courses. Among them were Eleazar Sebastián Guzman-Barron, Johanes Holtfreter and George Gömöri. It was the first revolution in the basic sciences at FMUSP, followed shortly afterward by metamorphoses in biochemistry, physiology and parasitology led by Isaias Raw, Alberto Carvalho da Silva and Samuel Pessoa’s colleagues, such as the Deane couple, Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva and the Nussenzweig couple.

I lost my mother to acute leukemia and my father to a kidney tumor.

That is why I decided to study medicine

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niques to allow them to understand physiology 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 Harbor. 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 doctorate 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 laboratory, richly equipped by the Rockefeller Foundation with a cold chamber, centrifuges, electrophoresis, scales, spectropho-

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 Michel 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 Lausanne, 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

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 mother’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 stationery 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 living 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 undergraduate?

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 published in French in Revista Brasileira de Biologia (Brazilian 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 suggested to Junqueira by the French radiobiologist A. Lacassagne, who discovered the sexual dimorphism of rat submaxillary glands during World War II; he visited us at FMUSP, probably in 1946.

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

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.

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 ribonuclease 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 Chicago, I also had the opportunity to meet the remarkable biologist and man Hewson Swift, from the Zoology Department.

Why was this period important?

Because I joined an extremely interesting project. Mazia had brought together three high-level scientists: Walter Plaut, who was a master of high-resolution radioautography techniques; David Prescott, an excellent cell biologist; and Lester Goldstein, specialized in the micromanipulation 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 amoeba, whose nucleus had been removed. The passage of the isotope into the cytoplasm was demonstrated through radioautography. Initially, they thought that the isotope was associated with the DNA. Because I had worked in Hewson’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.

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

When did you go to Chicago?

From September 1953 to September 1954, I received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study at the University of Chicago. I started working in Isidore Gerch’s electron microscopy laboratory. He was an excellent scientist. He was developing a method for electron microscopy of ultra-thin, frozen, dissected tissue. I realized that it was not for me, and with the consent of the Rockefeller Foundation, I went to

And from there you went to California?

I went to the University of California, Berkeley, at the invitation of Daniel Mazia. 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 attempted to study the synthesis of rhodopsin in

You published with them?

I published an article with Plaut in 1956 about what happened 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 classes at USP. In Wisconsin, Plaut thought he had discovered DNA synthesis in the cytoplasm of amoeba and thought it might be mitochondrial DNA. Visiting the laboratory, I demonstrated that isotope incorporation 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 demonstrated that the symbionts multiply in an uncontrolled manner in the enucleated amoeba. pESQUISA FAPESP z 15

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 ribonuclease 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. Experiments involving the removal of the kidneys from different species of animals suggested that the kidney filters the ribonuclease. In cooperation with colleagues in nephrology, we demonstrated that serum ribonuclease activity is also elevated in patients with renal insufficiency. The kidney filters and breaks down the enzyme. In a classic experiment suggested by the nephrologist Israel Nussenzweig, from USP, the urine in the ureters of a dog was diverted into the venous system. In this case, the animal developed uremia, but the serum ribonuclease level did not increase.

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 accused of being their mentor. But I was never a member of the Communist Party.

I do not like the power of a few or political parties; I’m an anarchist.

Suddenly, you found yourself unemployed, without a position at USP or UnB. Yes, I was. I was not affected by Institutional Act No. 5 [a decree giving almost absolute power to the military dictatorship] because I left the country. On April 1, a Commission of Inquiry was established at USP and started investigating me. The school’s repression repre-

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 Brazilian consulate in New York and was nationless. I thought they’d never end those atrocities. I had to request United States citizenship. Do you remember Friar Tito [Alencar de Lima], imprisoned and tortured by the military? I translated his article into English for publication in Look magazine in 1970. We did what we could to help. When I came back to Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso was president and gave me back my Brazilian citizenship, and José Goldemberg, then President of USP, gave me a retirement package. And now I am an emeritus professor. Nice, eh?

When they killed Vladimir Herzog, I became so enraged that I turned in my Brazilian passport

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 professorship in Brasilia. However, I never went.

You were appointed but did not take the post?

If I had taken the post, I would not 16 z special issue october 2013

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 communist, 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

Were you investigated?

Yes, but I was abroad. Prosecutors appealed three times, and I was acquitted every time. That was in the military police inquiry, 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 dictatorship. 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 Parasitology 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

macrophages. In 1984, I received an offer to work at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at the Pasteur 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 only 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 initially interested in tuberculosis and then in neutrophils, macrophages, chemotaxis and phagocytosis. Jim died in 1987. Zanvil Cohn was a lover of macrophages and their multiple functions. When Cohn found out I intended to retire from the Pasteur Institute 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 remained open. That’s how I spent another year at Rockefeller before returning to Brazil. During that year, I worked in Gilla Kaplan’s laboratory, co-infecting cells with phase II Coxiella burnetii, Mycobacterium avium and Mycobacterium 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.

lysosome [another type of vacuole] characteristics similar to those of Leishmania. I compared the fusion capacities of Leishmania and Coxiella vacuoles with small phagosomes containing inert particles. 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 infected 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-

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

In addition to these bacteria, you also studied Leishmania?

Yes. In the case of Leishmania, there are species that inhabit large vacuoles [vesicles] that are similar to phagolysosomes.

Others occupy vacuoles with little free space. When I worked at the Pasteur Institute, I knew that the bacterium Coxiella burnetii, the agent of human and animal Q fever, also occupies large vacuoles with

teresting, the leishmanias divided in the borrowed vacuoles and reversibly transformed themselves into flagellated promastigotes. However, the reverse experiment did not work. If you infect the cells with Leishmania first, wait a day and then infect them with Coxiella, the two organisms each remain in separate vacuoles.

That was in 1995 and represented the creation of what I called the construction of chimeric vacuoles, which do not exist, except in our imagination. Patricia then repeated the experiment with Trypanosoma cruzi. In this case, the trypanosomas 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 emeritus professor at Unifesp. Unifesp does not pay me a salary, but they gave me a laboratory, and I have a small office there that I still use. I attend seminars, participate in meetings in two areas and advise students and others, when requested. From time to time, I am called upon to give some seminars on science history, sociology 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 scientist to motivate students to do good scientific research.

The best educators and trainers of scientists convey their enthusiasm for science and emphasize the importance of curiosity and the need to play with ideas. There is a difference between starting scientific research and development as a professional scientist. 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 * Sergio R. Doni, Jacob Kipnis, Nelson Fausto, Ricardo Renzo Brentani, Thomas Maack, Azzo Widman, Bernardo Liberman, José Gonzales, Sergio Henrique Ferreira, J. F. Terzian, Mauricio Rocha e Silva (Filho) and Waltraut Helene Lay.

pESQUISA FAPESP z 17

política c&T Infrastructure y

Shared challenges Company laboratories in university parks enrich students’ education and respond to new research and development demands

Fabrício Marques Published in april 2013

T

he 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 infrastructure began to be delivered last month. Situated in a 100,000-square-meter area nestled on the university campus, the park will house innovative 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 university research. “The Unicamp laboratories will produce technological developments but will also make important contributions to basic research. They will also lead to student dissertations, theses, patents, and publications from the undergraduate to the post-doctoral level,” says

18 z special issue october 2013

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

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

Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation)

An innovation enclave

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

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

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

LabRiser Sponsored 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

LaCTAD The 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

Illustrations daniel bueno

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

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

pESQUISA FAPESP z 19

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 outside of the university to contribute to innovation, national development, and the establishment of technology-based companies.”

Immediate benefits

For companies, establishing laboratories at universities 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 researchers working in the park and to recruit talented 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 agricultural varieties that are more tolerant of the effects 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 Innovation Laboratory is under construction; this 20 z special issue october 2013

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 restricting 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 strategic partner,” says Pilli.

According to Roberto de Alencar Lotufo, director 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 opportunity arose to build a new laboratory, its location 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 multidisciplinary, synergistic environment. The park will function like a ‘condominium’, in which companies pay for space and share infrastructure and security expenses.”

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

Photo genilson araújo

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

and all of these will be sponsored by Petrobras “Because our oil is offshore, Petrobras has always 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 Engineering and CEO of LabRiser.

There are also partnerships that utilize nonreimbursable financing mechanisms provided by the Brazilian National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES) through the Technology Fund (Funtec). An example is the 500-squaremeter laboratory that Unicamp is building in partnership with Tecnometal. The project obtained R$12 million from Funtec to construct the building and purchase The principal goal of the partnerships equipment. Tecnometal’s is to conduct competitive research, contribution was equivalent to 10% of the total cost says Ronaldo Pilli, Dean of Unicamp of the project. The company has a photovoltaic panel factory in CampiUnicamp’s expertise in petroleum engineering nas (SP) and has been working in conjunction research, which is now attracting the attention of with researchers from the Unicamp School of other companies. In 2015, for example, the facili- Mechanical Engineering and the Gleb Wataghin ties for the Laboratory for Production Risers in Institute of Physics on research related to the Ultra Deep Waters and Maritime Production Sys- purification process for metallurgical-grade silitems (LabRiser) will be completed. These facili- con, the manufacture of solar-grade silicon waties consist of an experimental tank, which is the fers, and solar cell manufacturing. The Unicamp only one of its kind in the world able to simulate Inova Agency is currently in advanced talks with the conditions to which underwater structures at least three companies interested in participatare subjected in ocean oil production, such as ing in the park using Funtec resources. the force of marine currents. The 30-meter deep tank and the laboratory building will cost R$ 6 Biofuels million (US$ 2.5 million), and the laboratory will There is also a third type of funding, which is need experimental equipment, laboratory and used by the Biofuels Innovation Laboratory (LIB). analysis instruments, and computer equipment, The construction of the 1,656-square-meter building 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 UniPetrobras camp Joint Center for Genomics Research Aphas invested plied to Climate Change, which will be jointly funded by Embrapa and the university. Ten researchers from the two institutions are already working on the project, which will involve approximately 50 researchers and technicians withmillion in the in three years. An estimated R$50 million will be invested in infrastructure and operations. “The experimental five-year goal is to have drought-tolerant genetics-based technology applicable to important Bratank at zilian crops, such as corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and wheat,” says Embrapa president Maurício Unicamp Antônio Lopes. “Embrapa has had an important the company’s construction of the building. The agreement was signed in 2011, and the company’s laboratory should have already been under construction. But Cameron decided to postpone construction by one year, after the recent reduction in Petrobras investments. The partnership involves a collaboration with the School of Mechanical 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

$ 2.5

pESQUISA FAPESP z 21

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 applied to genetic improvement requires a basic research basis, and this led Embrapa to seek out the University,” he says.

Allelyx’s experience

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 activities of an incubator for technology-based companies. 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 universities 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 Science and Technology Park are already being realized 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 incubator for information technology companies.

Since late last year, Inovasoft has housed a laboratory set up by Samsung, where researchers and

According to Lopes, Unicamp was the natural choice because Embrapa has a computational biology 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 established based on the sequencing of Xylella fastidiosa 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 Allelyx and are now at Embrapa,” says the president of Embrapa. According to Arruda, the focus of the center is to ensure the sustainability of agricultural production in Brazil. “Brazil had agricultural 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 “Undergraduate and doctoral work at the Joint Center and use a students and post-doctoral pragmatic business vision, in a format similar to that of drug developresearchers will have unprecedented ment in the pharmaceutical industry,” he says. The benefits to Uniopportunities,” says Paulo Arruda 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 research 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 interested in the collaboration,” says Roberto Lotufo.

The agency maintains a database, known as the 22 z special issue october 2013

Photos tecnopuc

students from the Unicamp Institute of Computing (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 participants is the opportunity to obtain resources and research infrastructure. Samsung has set up a laboratory with computers, tablets, and smartphones that the researchers use in their work and is funding scholarships for students involved in the project. Sandro Rigo, an IC professor heading 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 development of new technologies in the medium and long term. “The objective is to produce results with a high technological impact, to obtain significant 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 collaborative research project started in 2011 by the Unicamp IC with Banco do Brasil. The focus is the study of and support for the implementation of solutions for computer registration and authentication for Banco do Brasil customers using the Internet portal to access their accounts.

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

“The bank gave us freedom to suggest solutions.

We proposed both a new solution and a modification 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 requirements 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 research assistants.

According to MC1, a São Paulo-based software 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 information and scientific and technological upgrades

Embrapa and Unicamp invested

R$50 million in the Joint Center pESQUISA FAPESP z 23

One of the main inspirations for the more than 900 technology parks around the world is the pioneering experience of Stanford University in the early 1950s, when the relationship 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 universities 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.

1

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

for our company. One of our goals is to hire the individuals participating in the project,” says Kayo Hisatomi, software development coordinator 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 university. The project leader is IC Professor Luiz Fernando Bittencourt, who will coordinate a team of 15 researchers and students in developing 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.

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Brazil 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) campus, 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 (especially 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 American companies Baker Hughes, GE, and FMC Technologies, and the Brazilian company BR Asfaltos, owned by Petrobras, are already operating at its centers. Centers for the Siemens and Halliburton companies are expected to begin operations later this year. “The park was created 10 years ago, but its history began long before 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 relationships, through Coppe, for example, which alone has signed over 3,000 agreements with Petrobras. We have had a very successful relationship 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 Technology 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

Photos 1 Aerial Archives / Alamy / Glow Images 2 pqtec sjc

Silicon Valley

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 promoted by the city to bring together innovation centers in the areas of health, information technology, 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 (Poli-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 obstacle is space. Few universities have the land to create parks. Even great institutions, such as Harvard and MIT, have this limitation,” says Roberto Lotufo, who participates in the annual meeting 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 different from those that govern public universities. A park linked to a community university epitomizes The Rio de the benefits that such initiatives Janeiro can provide to both companies and the academic environment. The Technology Technology Park of the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio Grande Park obtained do Sul (TECNOPUC), in the city of Porto Alegre, currently consists of 101 innovation centers that bring together companies and institutions of various sizes and employ billion in 4,800 people. The park was estabinvestments lished in 2003 as part of PUC-RS’s strategy to qualify as a research inin 10 years stitution. “There was an imbalance between PUC’s established tradition in teaching and the institution’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.

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Full park

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

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Initially the TECNOPUC park focused on information technology and communication, with Dell and HP as anchor laboratories, and sought to attract private funding for research at the institution. 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 Petrobras. 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 applications,” said Moschetta.

The results of the initiative exceed expectations. The director notes that TECNOPUC information technology graduate courses offer scholarships, 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. Partnerships 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 environment is due more to the connections that form than to the environment itself,” he says. n pESQUISA FAPESP z 25

Infrastructure y

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The Unicamp facility combines modern equipment for research in genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics and cell biology under a single roof Published in april 2013

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he University of Campinas (Unicamp) 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 Performance Technologies Laboratory (LaCTAD) seeks to ensure a high level of quality 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.

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FAPESP has invested approximately R$5.5 million into the purchase of laboratory equipment under the Multi-user Equipment Program (EMU), whereas the construction of buildings and the hiring of staff were left to the university. “It is notable that Unicamp has invested almost as much as FAPESP and that LaCTAD has a well-demonstrated cost structure 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 attended 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 genome sequences for bioinformatics analysis. The other model is the ABI 3730XL DNA Analyzer from Applied Biosystems, which does not produce as many sequences 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 element of gene sequencing or changes in the genome and that doesn’t use such data to design research or plan experiments,” says Ronaldo Pilli, Unicamp’s Dean of Research. “This equipment is improving the quality of research carried out at Unicamp.” Providing bioinformatics services, another goal of LaCTAD, is supported by a collection of computers that includes IBM servers and HP machines. “We have invested in the training of human resources by offering bioinformatics courses every semester,” says Dean Pilli. Approximately 160 students have already been trained.

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Address for excellence

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

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Epilepsy

One 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 Medical Sciences at Unicamp. She is using one of the LaCTAD sequencers to study the molecular mechanisms in the development of epilepsy, seeking to identify gene expression from brain tissue samples of rats. Selected neuronal networks from the hippocampus in animal models induced to present this disease are subjected to deep sequencing to search for transcripts (messenger RNA) that may be used to differentiate between the pathological 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 Souza of the University of São Paulo (USP) Chemistry Institute, who conducts research 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 sugarcane reference genome. “LaCTAD is providing sequences obtained using the

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

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 provide,” 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 student, Vagner Katsumi Okura, involves constructing and sequencing the bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library of sugarcane. BAC libraries are funda-

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

In the field of proteomics, LaCTAD offers 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 Institute 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 laboratory 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 multiplex immunoassay instrument, which can quickly and accurately measure dosages of hormones or cytokines, the molecules involved in the signals emitted between cells during immune responses. “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 central laboratory, so that we can exchange experiences and improve our services.

The idea is to generate greater momentum for LaCTAD in cell biology,” says Dean Pilli. n Fabrício Marques pESQUISA FAPESP z 27

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High Impact Science y

The expansion of knowledge FAPESP’s new Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Centers embolden Brazil’s science and enhance its impact Published in June 2013

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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

n one of the biggest investments ever made in a research program in Brazil, FAPESP announced the creation of 17 new Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) that will bring together 535 scientists from the state of São Paulo, Brazil, and from 69 other countries 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. “Largescale 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 committee 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 leaders. 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

(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, Coordinator of the RIDC program. “Some leaders received significant international recognition; for example, Professor Marco Antonio Zago has been applauded for his research on cellular 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 Metropolitan 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, biomedicine, 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 pESQUISA FAPESP z 29

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 environment 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), hemophilia 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 Coordinator 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 contributions, 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), plasmonics (work that could result in optical computer 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 projects 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 Foundation (NSF) in the United States, the RIDCs encourage the establishment of multidisciplinary, topicbased 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 Chaimovich. The centers should also produce innovation and transfer knowledge to the productive sector 30 z special issue october 2013

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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 knowledge that was produced,” says the coordinator, referring to courses offered to students and the development of educational resources.

THE FRONTIER OF KNOWLEDGE

The updates to the goals to be followed by certain RIDCs, which have technically turned the RIDCs into different centers, were driven by the emergence of new topics at the frontier of knowledge.

A center devoted to research on genetic diseases, 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 Center. “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 aging, 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 followed for more than 10 years.

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

1e2 Mass spectrometer (1) and preformulation laboratory (2) at the Butantan Institute 3 Laboratory at the Human Genome and Stem-Cell Research Center at USP

$680

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

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“What we want is research that meets international standards and identifies new directions for science,” says Hernan Chaimovich Whereas the RIDC approved in 2000 studied the structure and function of molecules of biotechnological interest, the current center aims to develop drugs based on compounds found in the diverse Brazilian ecosystem, as well as synthetic substances. Led by Glaucius Oliva of the São Carlos Institute of Physics, who is the current president of the National Council for Scientific 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 collection of compounds isolated from plants, fungi, microorganisms, and other sources (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue Nº 200). “We learned a lot by doing high-quality research in structural biology, and now, it’s time to use that knowledge to develop 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 AREAS

In 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 consistent 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 professor at USP and Coordinator of the center, which is housed at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap). “Our goal is to systematically 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 internationalization 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 distancelearning course on georeferencing that would be tailored to policymakers and researchers.

The Center for the Study of Violence will conpESQUISA FAPESP z 31

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, scenarios of violence in Brazil were mapped, and issues such as the causes of persistent violence and the nature of the political culture that supports 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 Literature, and the Humanities and the principal researcher at the center. “We want to understand how an individual’s relationships and ties work with regard to obeying laws, respecting authority, recognizing the institutions responsible for enforcing laws and preserving rights,” he says.

The starting point, Adorno says, is the observation 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,

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and to understand the possibilities for strengthening policies of respect for the laws and institutions,” Sérgio 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. Researchers from countries such as Colombia, Mexico, the United States, South Africa, and India will perform studies along the same lines, several of which will do so by select a series of snapshots. All the while, these studies will produce results comparable with those obtained in Brazil.

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

HEALTH

To 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 longterm funding, we can work calmly, without having 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 Neuroscience 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 perform complex analyses,” he says.

A virtuous circle is formed. “The group guarantees a level of prestige that makes it possible to recruit the best students and to obtain 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 Research (CInAPCe). Between 2007 and 2012, this network brought together 30 research groups who studied the mechanisms of epilepsy, as manifested among Brazilians (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue Nº 124). The new center will focus on technological research and 1 development related to epilepsy,

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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

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 understanding of diseases that afflict a large percentage 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 collaboration between nine researchers from Unicamp, four researchers from USP, and nine researchers from other countries, the plan is to make progress in identifying and describing the mechanisms 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 center will work on a disease or a specific research topic. “By joining forces, we want to advance in knowledge and therapeutics. We have one researcher 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 therapeutic 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, characterizing 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 Coordinator 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 immunological 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 autoimmune origin and infectious and metabolic diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, pESQUISA FAPESP z 33

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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 contributions 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 examined the reasons that smokers suffer from more serious arthritis. The group has also contributed to the study of inflammatory pain and sepsis. Sepsis 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 problems. “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 investigated.” 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 researchers with analytical tools.

A new element in the results of the second RIDC request for proposals was the selection of two 34 z special issue october 2013

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 Neuromathematics (NeuroMat). “The center’s mission is to conduct pure research in mathematics and statistics, starting with fundamental questions raised by basic and clinical neurobiology. Neuroscience is experiencing a situation of disequilibrium between a high capacity for producing experimental data and an insufficient capability for theoretical comprehension,” says Antonio Galves, a professor at the USP Institute of Mathematics and Statistics and Coordinator of NeuroMat. “Overcoming that imbalance means developing a new domain of mathematics at the interface between 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 neurobiology,” he says. Mathematicians from several specialized fields will work together with computer 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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Photos 1 ITACI BATISTA / ae 2 PHILIPPE PSAILA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/SPL DC/Latinstock 3 léo ramos

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

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 countries,” says José Alberto Cuminato, a professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Computation (ICMC) at USP in São Carlos and Coordinator of the Center for Research in Mathematical Sciences Applied to Industry. The center’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 diameter 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, computational intelligence, optimization, operational research, and risk analysis for banks. “We want to work primarily on problems for small companies,” he notes.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY

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

and computational and applied mathematics to develop advanced computational modeling techniques. “We are bringing together scientists who have different backgrounds in multidisciplinary topics but whose focal point is the application and development of computationally intensive methods,” says Munir Skaf, a professor at the Unicamp Chemistry Institute and Coordinator of the center.

Skaf cites the example of computational geophysics, which needs to analyze gigantic quantities of cyclical data, such as series of seismographic signals, 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 Research 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 intervene throughout the chain of production of foods and to produce basic and applied science that is relevant to agribusiness, consumers, and regulatory 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 environmental 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, situated at a distance of 100 km from the state capital—are home to seven of the 17 RIDCs, a sign of the vigor of research institutions in that repESQUISA FAPESP z 35

The new RIDCs The 17 FAPESP Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Centers Successors to the first-round RIDCs of 2000-2012

(new 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 Therapy

Marco 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)

36 z special issue october 2013

juan ojea

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

properties of a material and have analyzed how they can be used as elements of a new material. The reserves of certain compounds have been depleted. We need to optimize the use of raw materials and to improve their performance.” Energy and health are two important focal points for the center. “We are developing 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 companies. “At the international level, we will increase our interaction with universities and high-technology 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 gengion. Research on the nucleation and eral public. The CePOF crystallization of glass in São Carlos, at São Carlos has a TV which is some of the most productive channel that broadcasts in the world, gave rise to the Center “A good idea distance courses for high for Research, Teaching, and Innovawould be to school students. “Now, we tion in Vitreous Materials (English are going to set up coursacronym: CeRTEV). Under the leadcoordinate the es on the Internet for stuership of Edgar Zanotto, a profesdents all over Brazil,” says sor at the Federal University of São RIDCs to create Vanderlei Bagnato. “We Carlos (UFSCar) and a supervisor of offered educational games the Vitreous Materials Laboratory one big for students on an Inter(LaMaV), the RIDC will unite 14 reprogram for the net portal and obtained searchers in materials engineering, got more than 4 million physics, and chemistry from UFSCar dissemination hits,” says Elson Longo, and the USP campus in São Carlos, whose center also posted plus 20 collaborators abroad and 10 of science,” videos with mini-lectures in Brazil. “Our group has won interby scientists on YouTube. national recognition, but there are Zago says An initiative that several aspects that need to be strengthened, centers have joined deand the experts in physics and chemistry will be able to contribute significantly,” Za- velops science experiment kits that encourage notto says. Among the topics on which the RIDC adolescents to enjoy research. “We distributed is hoping to make progress, Zanotto emphasizes kits among schools in São Paulo, and the impact the development of vitroceramics for use in or- on the students was enormous,” recalls Mayana thopedic and dental prostheses and as substitutes Zatz. Other centers will offer courses, develop for marble and granite, of materials for ballistic software and videogames, and organize the colprotection of automobiles and aircraft, and of sup- lections of science museums. “A good idea would ports for catalyzers in the production of ethanol. be to coordinate the distribution activities of all The Center for Research and Development of the RIDCs, while maintaining each group’s of Functional Materials, based in Araraquara, autonomy, in order to create one big program evolved from the Multidisciplinary Center for for the dissemination of science in the State of the Development of Ceramic Materials, an RIDC São Paulo,” suggests Marco Antonio Zago, whose that focused on research on materials synthesis. RIDC launched the House of Science program in The new center intends to develop nanostruc- 2001, featuring activities aimed at students and tured materials, fashioned to solve problems teachers in schools in the Ribeirão Preto region.

“In the previous round, there was an obrelated to renewable energy, health, and the environment. “We will continue with what we vious increase in the intellectual, social, and were doing, but take it in a different direction,” economic impact of the RIDCs. That is why explains Elson Longo, Coordinator of the RIDC our expectations are so high with respect to and a professor at Unesp’s Araraquara Chemis- the 17 selected for this new round,” says the try Institute. “We want to create multifunctional scientific director of FAPESP, Carlos Henrique materials. We have studied the entire range of de Brito Cruz. n Fabrício Marques pESQUISA FAPESP z 37

science OBITUARY y

The sage of biodiversity 1

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 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 mechanisms underlying the formation of new species from biological, evolutionary, and environmental perspectives.

Vanzolini, who died of pneumonia on April 28, five days after his 89th birthday, had another passion, 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

38 z special issue october 2013

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 January 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 under 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 saddened 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 authorized the establishment of a research funding

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

2

PHOTOGRAPHS 1 léo ramos 2 DRAWING TAKEN FROM THE ARTICLE "Vanzolini e Williams," 1970 3 FAMILY ARCHIVE

3

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 selecting 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 Trustees during three separate periods (1961-1967, 19771979, 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 collection from little over 1,000 catalogued specimens to the current holdings of more than 300,000 specimens. He personally typed up labels and

identification cards for the stored animals, recalls 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 eventually succeeded Vanzolini as director of the museum, which today holds one of the largest and most valuable neotropical zoological collections.

Between the war and bohemia

Vanzolini was familiar with both USP and music from a young age, as his father was an electrical 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 intention of fighting in Italy, but the war ended before he shipped out. He preferred studying animals pESQUISA FAPESP z 39

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 Brazilian science as much as the one he completed at Harvard University. After working alongside biologists who were exploring the formation and diversification of species from an evolutionary perspective, Vanzolini returned to Brazil in 1951 advocating concepts that revolutionized Brazilian zoology and continue to be used to understand biodiversity today. Vanzolini argued that it was vital to study species not only through isolated specimens, which was the accepted ap40 z special issue october 2013

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 climate changes that took place thousands of years ago. According to Vanzolini, during 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 refugia alone were not responsible for these

patterns of biological diversity,” underscores Célio Haddad, professor at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) in Rio Claro. In his opinion, phylogenetic, 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 Alexandrino, 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 diversity patterns suggested by preliminary findings, Alexandrino advised the young man to read an article published

by Vanzolini in 1981, in which Vanzolini proposed the concept of vanishing refugia, which explained that forest islands could suffer fragmentation and thereby force less specialized species to adapt to open environments.

PHOTOGRAPHS Paraguassú Éleres Collection

Large rivers can favor the isolation and differentiation of species

2

3

1

4

1 Sketch of the wooden structure of the Lindolpho R. Guimarães,

by Paraguassú Éleres

5

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

pESQUISA FAPESP z 41

“The refugia approach was innovative at the time it was presented, and it guided several generations of researchers,” observed Hussam Zaher, director of the USP Zoology Museum, which Vanzolini 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 greatest merit as a scientist was that he introduced Brazil to the “modern synthesis,” consolidating the works of Theodosius Dobzhansky in genetics, Ernst Mayr in zoology, and George Simpson in paleontology, and encouraged its adoption in Brazil. Vanzolini studied under Mayr and Simpson at Harvard, which was already a center for modern science at that

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 animal 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 introduced by German geologist Jürgen Haffer in the journal Science in 1969. Haffer showed that there was a higher concentration of populations of different spe-

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

n FAPESP + MZ-USP n MZ-USP n Proposed 1977 trip

42 z special issue october 2013

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 Trefaut Rodrigues. Today, brejos de altitude, Caatinga moist forest enclaves found on hilltops surrounded by open fields (especially in the Northeast), are “the most consistent evidence of refugia,” he says.

These brejos de altitude remain areas of climatic stability, favoring the diversification 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 latter (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 collection, arguing that he wasn’t any good at it. But in his own way, he was always adding precious material to the collections 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

REPRODUCTION Daniel das Neves / FAPESP COLLECTION

"What distinguishes Vanzolini is that his musical thinking is based on contradiction," says Sonia Marrach

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 geographic variation and distribution of a species of lizard of the genus Anolis in the Amazon Region, which could be explained by climate variations; they published their paper one year after Haffer.

In an interview with Pesquisa FAPESP in 2012, Vanzolini reported that his and Williams’ research was “a practical example 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.”

PHOTOGRAPHS MZ-USP COLLECTION

1

1 Vanzolini with classmates and professors at Harvard in 1951

2

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 researchers from Brazil and abroad visited unexplored 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 bohemian

When asked in an interview about his dual role as scientist and composer, Paulo Vanzolini explained with irritation that no one could do just zoology or just music full time. But the journalist insisted, asking which of the two activities occupied more of his time. He replied,

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

“How do you think I make a living? As a zoologist.” As Luiz Tatit, professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University 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 needed 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-

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

His samba was sophisticated pESQUISA FAPESP z 43

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

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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 breaking 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 characteristics,” 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, affirming their local cultural differences.

In addition to pride in the progress of São Paulo, its samba highlighted the inequalities and other ills of urbanization.

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

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 sessions in Sao Paulo took place exclusively at night, in bars and nightclubs. “Vanzolini, 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 composer. 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 disagree with your clapping for the only person who does not know the difference 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 musician. 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 Caetano Veloso a lot,” says Regina Machado.

In his presentation of the record collection Acerto de contas (Settlement of accounts), Professor Antonio Candido (a critic and essayist) notes that Vanzolini gets maximum yield out of minimum work through his use of expressive words to create true poetic portraits of late night São Paulo.

“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 transformative 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 Barbosa. And Vanzolini’s sambas continued in that same vein, thanks precisely to what Tatit called “his lizards,” his work at the university. n

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 patterns shed light on evolutionary process in South America.

Molecular Ecology. v. 22, pp. 1,193-213, 2013.

pESQUISA FAPESP z 45

Genetics y

Ramifications of sugarcane Small RNA molecules control lateral stem growth in sugarcane Maria Guimarães

P

lanting 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 architecture of sugarcane is being unveiled by a group of researchers led by agricultural engineer Fabio Nogueira from Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) in the city of Botucatu, in partnership with bioinformaticist Renato Vicentini from the University of Campinas (Unicamp). In a study reported in the Journal of Experimental Botany in May 2013, the researchers showed that small RNA molecules (sRNA) control gene silencing 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 changes, causing the buds to sprout and produce 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, abundantly present in dormant axillary buds, which also contain large amounts of the plant hormone abscisic acid. This microRNA blocks the plant's physiological

46 z special issue october 2013

response to another hormone, gibberellic acid, which stimulates cell proliferation. 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 elements. 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) biologist Marie-Anne Van Sluys (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue No. 198). According to Nogueira, transposable elements associated with small RNAs increase diversity and control genome function. The association between the two genetic entities does not end there. “Some transposable elements 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 maintaining the properties of commercial varieties developed to produce more sugar or to flourish in less rainy areas.

“I sought basic knowledge with my project, but this understanding is also essential for the propagation and productivity of sugarcane,” Nogueira explains. The plant's architecture is central to determining the intended purpose of a given plantation. Sugarcane culms with few ramifications are better for producing 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 characteristics makes it possible to develop markers for plant selection and can contribute to the improvement of commercial varieties. The importance of this work was acknowledged by the 2012 edition 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, published in BMC Plant Biology in 2010, won second place at the same awards program in 2013.

Nogueira's work has yielded a catalogue of active small RNA molecules (microtranscriptome) from the axillary buds of sugarcane, and has made it available to

PHOTOS 1 léo ramos 2 e 3 fabio nogueira / unesp

Published in June 2013

Dormant axillary bud

Development tissue

Leaf precursor tissue

Active axillary bud

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 actually 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 axillary 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 architecture studies. n

Project Isolation 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 article ORTIZ-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.

pESQUISA FAPESP  z  47

Geology y

Andes

Paraná Basin

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

48 z special issue october 2013

Why the earth shakes in Brazil

Seismologists propose a new explanation for earthquakes in Brazil Igor Zolnerkevic and Ricardo Zorzetto

Published in MAY 2013

Illustrations pedro hamdan

O

n October 8, 2010, the earth trembled as never before in Mara Rosa, a city of 10,000 in the northern region 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 several 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 Observatory of the University of Brasília (UnB). In the weeks after the earthquake, Barros and his team installed seismographs in Mara Rosa and neighboring municipalities to track the reverberation of the tremor. Within six months, 800 additional, 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 municipalities in northern Goiás and southern Tocantins 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 Atlantic. 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

D

uring a conversation in his office in early April, Sacek, co-author of the study, picked up a paperback book to illustrate what occurs in the stretch of the Goiás-Tocantins seismic zone where Mara Rosa is located.

“Let’s say that this book represents the lithosphere 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 upper part was subjected to forces of compression, 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.”

50 z special issue october 2013

Under the ground A survey shows the difference in thickness of the Earth’s crust in Brazil and in the Andes -70° Crustal thickness (in km), measured at sea level

65

-70°

-65°

-60°

-55°

-50°

-45°

-40°

Crust more than 2.5 billion years old

0° Andes region with thin crust

-5°

60

-75°

5°

70

Transbrasiliano Lineament

55

Borborema Province

-10°

50

Tocantins Flexure

45 40

-15°

35 30 -20°

25

15

Paraná Basin

Andes region with delamination

20 -25°

Seismic zone of the continental shelf

10 -30°

Andes

Paraná Basin

6.000 4.000 2.000 0

Depth (in km)

lineament, no tremors have ever been detected.

Those who doubt the direct influence of the lineament 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 Sciences (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 layers of rock—the crust and the upper region of the mantle, which physically behave as a single and rigid structure that geologists call the lithosphere—causes them to slowly rupture like a bending tree branch. In this situation, the lithosphere can break like a plastic ruler that bends when you try to make the ends meet (see infographic 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.”

-10 -20 -30 -40 -50 -60 -70

0

500

Source marcelo asssumpção – iag/usp

1.000

1.500

2.000

2.500

Distance (in km)

Several years ago, while analyzing a map of earthquake 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 Brazil 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, Assumpção 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

6,2

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

3.000

-35°

GOIÁS-TOCANTINS SEISMIC ZONE

1 STABLE REGION

EARTHQUAKE-PRONE REGIONREGION

Average thickness: 40 km

Crust

Lithospheric mantle

Less dense rock Denser rock

35 km Excessive weight Weight downward

CONSTANT STRESS

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

The planet’s lithosphere, formed by the crust and the upper

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

portion of the mantle, is divided into plates that move

thinner may cause additional stresses that promote the occurrence of tremors

and collide. The shock at the edges of the plates creates stresses that spread through the continent’s interior

2

The difference in weight between crustal rocks

Crust bends

and the mantle at Compression of the upper crust

the same depth causes the thinner region to bend due to the extra weight below it.

This flexure compresses

Weight downward

the rocks near the surface

3

With the stress on the

Cracks and tremors

edges of the plates of the

Infographic ana paula campos

lithosphere, this 5 km

compression is extreme Tremors in the crust

for rocks less than 5 km deep, as they tend to crack and cause

Region with the most fissures

earthquakes

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 occur 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

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 exceed 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 mechanism—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 prepare 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 damaged 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 distance 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 pESQUISA FAPESP z 51

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 Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), the São Paulo 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.

T

he development of these models of the cause of the tremors in Brazil was made possible only through the discovery of variations 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) collected 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 federal government. On the map that summarizes these data, published in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences, the researchers indicated 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 detailed 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 also the most costly, is seismic refraction, in which researchers record along hundreds of kilometers tremors caused by controlled explosions (see Pesquisa 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 52 z special issue october 2013

in Mato Grosso do Sul to Goiás and Tocantins—has not yet been well delineated because little seismic “Seismology information is available about the region. In the northeast, where the cannot predict team of Reinhardt Fuck from UnB earthquakes, and performed most of the seismic refraction experiments, there is less even if it could, uncertainty.

The province of Borborema, a rocky it would be block on which almost all the states in the northeast sit, is the largest area unable to prevent in Brazil with the thinnest crust and them,” says Lucas has the highest frequency of tremors in the country. At some points in Barros of the UnB 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 America 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 occur Earthquakes 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

eduardo cesar

The Andes Range: This region has the thickest crust in South America, at up to 75 km thick

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 abnormally 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 lower portion of the crust, increasing its thickness.

Together with researchers from Chile and China, 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 thickness is similar to the thickness observed in other relatively recent mountainous regions, such as the Himalayas. In general, there is a direct correlation 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 Argentina, where the Andes rise to more than 4,000 meters, the crust is less than 55 km thick. Again, researchers provide two possible explanations: Either 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 thickness 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 geological 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 Ussami, a geophysicist at USP, observed in the Marañon 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

Project Tectonic, climatic and erosional evolution in convergent margins: A numerical approach (No. 2011/10400-0); Grant mechanism Postdoctoral research grant; Coord. Victor Sacek - IAG/USP; Investment R$153,896.91 (FAPESP).

Scientific articles ASSUMPÇÃO, 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 compilation 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 dispersion. Tectonophysics. 2013 (online).

pESQUISA FAPESP z 53

PATTERNS OF STAR FORMATION

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

CRITICAL MASS Galaxies with masses of approximately 70 billion suns, such as NGC 4047, form their stars in less than

IMAGES ENRIQUE PÉREZ AND ANDRE LUIZ DE AMORIM INFOGRAPHICS ANA PAULA CAMPOS

three billion years, from the inside out

54 z special issue october 2013

LOW MASS Galaxies with masses of fewer than a few dozen billion suns, such as UGC 9476, continue to form stars in all their regions

Astronomy y

Star

archeology Survey identifies three patterns of galaxy evolution Igor Zolnerkevic Published in June 2013

A

pioneering study has begun to trace the evolutionary history of galaxies. Under the leadership of Spaniard Enrique Pérez of the Institute of Astrophysics 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 billion 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 galaxies 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 (Calar 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 Observatory in Andalucía, Spain. pESQUISA FAPESP z 55

Evolutionary profile Galaxy mass influences the rate of star formation 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

NCG 6411 High mass and early star formation

NGC 4047

COLOR

Intermediate mass and rapid star formation early in life

LUMINOSITY

56 z special issue october 2013

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 galaxy into a thousand pieces and analyzes the light from each piece separately. The result is a map that reveals the differences in the physical and chemical properties of the various parts of the galaxy.

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

105

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

IMAGES CALIFA AND SDSS

The sample of 105 galaxies, as described in Astrophysical Journal Letters, is insignificant when compared with the billions of galaxies in the visible Universe. It is small, too, when compared with the total number of galaxies—approximately one million—already observed by the largest astronomical survey ever conducted, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which was accomplished through the efforts of another international consortium using a telescope in

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

UGC 9476 Low mass and continuing star formation

million to 400 million light-years away— in the Milky Way. These galaxies are neither 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 criterion was to observe galaxies with the greatest variety of colors and luminosities. When seen from more or less the

same distance, young galaxies are bluish, while older ones are reddish. Luminosity 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 galaxies continue to form stars at a respectable rate, while for the higher-mass galaxies, the party’s over,” Fernandes says.

Another difference lies in the order of star formation. The low-mass galaxies formed their stars more or less at the same time throughout, starting slightly earlier in their outer regions. In the highmass galaxies, however, the opposite occurred: 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 approximately 60 billion solar masses. “The regions farther from the center of the Milky Way have fewer heavy chemical elements than the inner regions,” explains astrophysicist 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.”

This difference between the center and the periphery, however, does not increase with galaxy mass. It reaches its maximum in galaxies of approximately 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 something 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 expelled 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 explain what we are observing.”

Next year, the astronomers working on the SDSS hope to begin a similar study, called MaNGA, that will map 10,000 galaxies. “Increasing the sample by a factor of 100 will be transformational,” 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

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.

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technology AGRICULTURE y

Profitable plots A small agricultural-automation company in São Carlos gains international recognition Published in April 2013 Onboard computers, sensors, and systems installed on agricultural machines permit greater control of production

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 countryside. Enalta, an agricultural automation 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 multinationals like Nike and Amazon, Enalta ranked 43rd, ahead of giants like Microsoft (48th) and Tumblr (50th). In the South American sectoral ranking, the company captured first place. According 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 consecutive year that Brazil appears in the ranking, which is published annually.

In 2012, the start-up firm Bug Agentes Biológicos, from Piracicaba (SP), appeared in the 33 rd spot (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue nº 195).

58 z special issue october 2013

“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 agricultural automation in Latin America. 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 products industry. Its portfolio includes automatic controllers and pilots for precision 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, historically, the degree of mechanization has

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

Confident that demand for its products 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 indication that innovation is at the foundation 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 onboard computer known as EES (Enalta Embedded System), used to manage agricultural machinery. When coupled to the e-Manager system, also manufactured

Enalta by the numbers The company plans to grow by 20% this year and to invest 16% of its sales in R&D

18

30%

10% Products in its portfolio

Percentage of revenues from sales to customers in other countries

2,5

R$

Forecasted growth this year

15%

eduardo cesar

Million is the anticipated investment in R&D in 2013

by this firm, the computer improves the productive performance of the cutting, loading, and transportation of raw materials for agroindustry. Reading data from more than 20 sensors installed on tractors and harvesters enables the farmer 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 vehicles that transport cane seedlings, vinasse (liquid waste from cane processing 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 (Unicamp), from which it licensed a patent for a scale invented at the School of Agricultural Engineering for use in the company’s sugarcane productivity system. In another partnership, with Embrapa Instrumentação Agropecuária in São Carlos, it developed a precision irrigation system. Funding from research-

12,2

R$

56 Million in sales in 2012

sponsoring agencies also played a decisive 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 Carlos (ParqTec) because we were granted approval of a FAPESP Innovative Research in Small Businesses Program (Pipe). The objective was creation of a system to manage crop spraying. That support was vital in enabling the company to strengthen its position in the market,” says Manzoni. After that, Enalta had four more Pipe projects. In all, FAPESP invested more than R$1.2 million in the company.

Enalta also received funding from the Economic Subsidy Program administered 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 directors, pointed out that “Enalta is the

Active customers

The crop productivity gain produced by its software and systems

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

Projects 1. System for management of “spraying” in agriculture using automatic date-acquisition technology in the field (Nº 1999/11662-5); Grant mechanism Innovative Research in Small Businesses Program; Coordinator Cléber Manzoni/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; Investment 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 management (Nº 2006/56606-0); Grant mechanism Innovative Research in Small Businesses Program; Coordinator Domingos Guilherme Cerri/Unicamp; Investment R$328,866.32 (FAPESP).

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BIOFUELS y

From bagasse to innovation In the midst of an industry crisis, companies are investing in technology to increase ethanol production Bruno de Pierro

I

n early February, ETH Bioenergia, which was founded in 2007 by the Odebrecht Organization, changed its name to Odebrecht Agroindustrial. 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 O ​ debrecht Agroindustrial innovation unit, which was created in 2010, must partner 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 Innovation and Technology for Odebrecht Agroindustrial. Odebrecht is one of several large companies, 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.

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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 consecutive 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 agreement 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 University of São Carlos (UFSCar). These projects received 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 sugarcane and on identifying and selecting plants whose genotypes (genetic makeup) are suitable for the agroecological conditions of the Pontal do Paranapanema region, where sugarcane productivity remains low.

syngenta

Published in June 2013

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

SYNGENTA Has 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.

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).

Granbio Has constructed an experimental plant where second-generation ethanol production will begin this

Monsanto

year and has developed a new

Has developed new sugarcane

sugarcane variety called Cana Vertix,

varieties that are adapted to

which is resistant to pests and

mechanized harvesting and have

diseases and has a high fiber content.

high germination rates in lessfavorable planting environments.

Odebrecht Agroindustrial Has funded research on new sugarcane varieties, including transgenics, to boost ethanol production and expand cultivable areas.

novozymes Has 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 pESQUISA FAPESP z 61

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

1973

1986

2004

First oil crisis;

Brazil goes through

Embraer launches

within five months,

an economic crisis,

the world’s first aircraft

the price of oil

and sales of

powered exclusively

skyrockets

ethanol-powered

by ethanol and produced

by 300%

vehicles begin to fall

on a commercial scale

1975

2003

Creation of Proálcool

Flex-fuel vehicles are

(National Alcohol Program)

introduced; by 2012, the

for the large-scale replacement

use of flex-fuel vehicles

of petroleum-based

reduces CO2 emissions

fuel with ethanol

by 160 million metric tons

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 average production costs have eased the financial problems of some companies,” says Miriam Bacchi, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies in Economics of the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture (Esalq/USP). For example, some companies, such as the Centro de Tecnologia Canavieira (CTC) and Granbio, estimate that they can achieve gains of approximately 50% using the new secondgeneration ethanol-production process, which is expected to enter the domestic market in 2014.

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One possible milestone in the role of large companies in sugarcane research is Monsanto’s November 2008 purchase of two Brazilian companies, Allelyx and CanaVialis, for US$290 million. 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 fastidiosa, the bacterium that causes citrus variegated 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 Organization 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.

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onsanto launched three conventionally 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 Monsanto 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.

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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 sugarcane—a very different situation from the great leap forward between 2005 and 2010, after flexfuel 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.

eduardo cesar

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

“In the research field, I cannot imagine biotechnology 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 increase 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, including Odebrecht, Dedini, Oxiteno and Braskem.

“There has been an evolution in the number of partnerships between the program and companies seeking increases both in conventional breeding and in the transgenic route,” says Glaucia Souza Mendes, a professor at the USP Institute of Chemistry and a BIOEN coordinator.

Another institutional measure that favors research 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 Companhia 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 prevented more than 20.6 million tons of pollutants from being released into the atmosphere.

In its new phase, CTC has contributed an important technological innovation in the field. The company has been able to reduce the time-tomarket 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 marketplace, which involves a series of tests and cross-

2007

2010

Agro-Environmental

The United States classifies sugarcane

Protocol of São Paulo State

ethanol as an advanced biofuel; the Brazilian

foresees an end to the

Bioethanol Science and Technology

burning of cane straw

Laboratory (CTBE) is created

2005

2008

2013

First new-energy auction;

Launch of

Reinstatement of 25%

today, electricity

BIOEN-FAPESP;

mixture of anhydrous ethanol

produced from bagasse

height of the

in gasoline; launch of

supplies more than 2% of

credit crisis in the

federal-government incentives

Brazil’s consumption

United States

for the sugar-energy industry pESQUISA FAPESP z 63

breedings, was 12 to 14 years; today, only 8 years are needed, says Mark Casagrande, CTC’s manager 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 construct a demonstration plant at Usina São Manoel with the capacity to produce three million liters of ethanol before moving on to the industrial 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 secondgeneration ethanol in Brazil. The process of enzymatic 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 approximately 30% downtime, by giving the plant greater flexibility to alternate between sugar and ethanol production. “If second-generation ethanol 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.

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ranbio, a Brazilian company founded in 2011, also sees new horizons for secondgeneration ethanol. This year, its synthetic-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 company 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 hybrids. “We will have a more robust sugarcane, more resistant to pests and diseases, greater longevity, a higher fiber content and greater productivity than conventional plants,” says Alan

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Hiltner, executive vice president of the com“There has pany. Gonçalo Pereira, been an a Unicamp researcher and the compaevolution ny’s vice president of technology, says that in the number the new sugarcane variety will be used onof partnerships ly for Granbio’s own between consumption. “The efficient photosynBIOEN-FAPESP thesis of Cana Vertix will be reflected in the and businesses,” cost of the raw material. In the industry, says Mendes 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 Interuniversity 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 station. Hiltner notes that one reason to invest in second-generation ethanol from bagasse and cane straw is the fact that the U.S. market rewards the use of cellulosic ethanol, particularly in California, where there is an additional reward per metric ton of captured carbon.

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

photos 1 syngenta 2 michel rios

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.

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

Another company that has become more involved in sugarcane research is the Swiss multinational 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 technological 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 2 will be 20% higher than in the previous year.

Today, Syngenta has established three pillars to support sugarcane reused to break down the lignin and search. The first is to hemicellulose of sugarcane cells to “Paralyzed multiply genetic mateyield pulp and then glucose, thus research rial, which is done in the enabling ethanol production via city of Itápolis, São Paulo sugar fermentation. In 2007, for takes longer State. At Itápolis, diseaseexample, the Danish multinationfree plants are generated al corporation Novozymes, which to recover by multiplying genetic was founded in 1923, entered into material, thereby ensurits first commercial partnership to from than ing healthy plant materidevelop enzymes for ethanol prothe crisis als because sugarcane has duction (with CTC). a high risk of contracting itself,” says disease during breeding. ovozymes began supply“So we are multiplying ing enzymes to Petrobras, Fernandes clones of the same matrix which also has a research in a controlled manner,” program in second-generation ethsays Vilas Boas. To obtain anol, in 2010 and entered into an thousands of samples, the agreement with Granbio in 2012. sugarcane is managed in According to Pedro Fernandes, the president of Novozymes for Latin America, the greenhouse environment, and the samples are the sugar-energy industry crisis has affected multiplied, preserving their DNA, so that they can the company because customers have reduced be directly planted in field nurseries. Biotechnoltheir demands for production and investments. ogy research aiming to increase the ability to deHowever, research has continued apace. “Cri- velop genetically modified sugarcane varieties is ses always come and go, but research does not. now being performed at the company’s research If we stopped research today, a recovery from stations in Brazil. Syngenta is investing more than the setback would last longer than the crisis,” $1.4 billion in research and development worldhe said. Novozymes invests US$300 million in wide but has not disclosed its budget for sugarR & D across its research facilities worldwide, cane in Brazil. Today, it employs more than 100 including enzyme research for ethanol produc- agronomists working on sugarcane and developing tion in Brazil. The Latin American division of technology in the field, including a team dedicated the company represents 10% of Novozymes’ exclusively to transgenic research. Its partnerglobal revenue, which was $2 billion in 2012. ships with universities include the Universidade Today, Novozymes employs 11 professionals Estadual Paulista (Unesp) and Esalq/USP, which working directly in research in Brazil, two with help to validate the technologies, and IAC, which PhDs and the others with advanced degrees. participates in a joint project to improve sugarThe company has also formed partnership with cane breeding and processing methodologies. n

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1

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MEDICINE y

Digital autopsy A new contrast injector and a high-power MRI help to ascertain causes of death Marcos de Oliveira Published in June 2013

T

he most celebrated portrayal of a human dissection is a 1632 oil painting by the Dutch artist Rembrandt. Known as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the picture shows seven earnest medical students looking at the body of a criminal 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 doctors 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 studies in this realm is being conducted in São Paulo at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine (FMUSP). There,

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under the coordination of Prof. Paulo Saldiva, head of the Department of Pathology, a group of researchers is testing ways to conduct an autopsy using images obtained using tomography equipment. 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 magnetic 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 methods have been adopted from biochemistry 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.

Full-body colored CT images of cadavers

School of Medicine/USP

pESQUISA FAPESP z 67

“Autopsies are a lot of work; they can take up to three days to do, and they pay poorly.” 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 degree in medicine, prepares reports for criminal investigations and legal processes. “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 example, and the doctors don’t know what cause to put on the death certificate,” 1 Three-dimensional reconstruction Saldiva explains. based on a CT scan.

These ambitious Organs are shown studies on digital in red. Bones and autopsies are made the contrast inside blood vessels possible by new are shown in white equipment at the to gray tones School of Medicine.

They are important 2 Images

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 autopsies. “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, attached to USP. Anyone who dies in São Paulo and doesn’t have a death certificate 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 addition to relying on the collaboration of all departments in the School of Medicine. 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.

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

of the heart

Discovering discrepancies

1

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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 perform 1,000 autopsies a year using images 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 figure 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

IMAGES School of Medicine/USP

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

A medical autopsy, according to Saldiva, 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 treatment that had been given was appropriate and if there were any complications stemming from it. “There’s room here for quality control at hospitals,” he says. Saldiva remembers a study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital, which performed 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 complicated 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-related 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 assessing the relationship between genome and environment,” he says. He dreams of collecting the data on the 13,000 autopsies performed at the Svoc annually and studying each person’s habits—for example, determining their diet—and then mapping out diseases, especially those linked to air pollution.

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

2

The injection pump developed

by Braile will work with the new MRI equipment 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 Saldiva. “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 apparent whether a vein or artery has broken open. “The equipment is very capable and flexible in developing the functionalities 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 is also being designed 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 metric 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 going to purchase a 3-T, but at the request of the staff in radiology, we bought one that is more appropriate for research purposes,” says Saldiva. “Only Germany, the United States, England, Japan, Switzerland, 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 Medicine Foundation), and R$3,000,000.00 (USP).

pESQUISA FAPESP z 69

humanities MEDIA y

The sensationalist press and science Assis Chateaubriand’s evening newspaper highlighted technology as part of an agenda to overcome Brazilian “backwardness” Carlos Haag Published in May 2013

I

n 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–briand’s agenda was to achieve national union through the modernization of Brazil. He believed that this necessarily demanded an end to the ‘ignorance’ of the masses, whether this might entail attacking spiritism and Africanbased religions – which he referred to as ‘voodoo’ – or whether it would involve using science to overcome Brazilian ‘backwardness’,” explains historian Mariza Romero of the Pontifical Catholic University in São Paulo (PUC/ SP). “Diário da Noite started featuring scientific information for lay readers who had no familiarity whatsoever with technology. What’s interesting is that the paper didn’t have a set page or supplement devoted to the topic but inserted 70 z special issue october 2013

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 analyzed the paper’s scientific agenda in Divulgação científica e imprensa popular (“Science Communication 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 consumption, these sectors began to be seen as playing a leading role in political engagement on the one hand, and as classes that needed the guardianship 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

ILLUSTRATIONS abiuro

pESQUISA FAPESP z 71

defender” through its support of popular 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 machinery were increasingly accessible to a budding national consumer market. Science was at the service of humanity, as some advertisements said. “One thousand, ninehundred highly skilled technicians have created the aerodynamic Vigorelli ‘super machine’ just for you,” boasted a sewingmachine 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 administration, Brazil was excited about developmentalist thinking, and this 72 z special issue october 2013

Science was seen as playing a vital role in leading Brazil toward progress and modernity broader ideological basis provided the underpinnings for the idea that technological development would make it possible to open the only path to true economic 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 personnel, and technical personnel are the human product of science.”

“Brazilian science communication has its singularities. The government never invested heavily in science and technology 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 Ribeiro de Andrade, researcher at the Museum 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,” Hucitec/Mast). “So, some individual efforts notwithstanding, sensationalism is the prime feature of this science communication: 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 actual 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 containing precise information. What at first glance appeared to be the headline for a

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

frivolous story proved to be a good strategy for drawing in the reader.

Children

Another 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 illustrates 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 possibility 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). Finding himself in an awkward position, the physicist Marcelo Damy stated, “The subject lies outside my field of expertise” and, further, that he was “on the whole against the use of atomic weapons for the purposes of war.” According to the article, “José Goldemberg, of the São Paulo School of Philosophy spoke ‘briefly’ to reporters about the damaging effects of radioactivity.” Romero explains, “Many scientists

didn’t like to see themselves associated with papers like Diário da Noite because they didn’t want to tarnish their reputations.” 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 fanciful flight, as in the stories related to flying saucers that often made the front page of Chateaubriand’s evening paper. “The Brazilian press failed to offer their readers enough information to recognize heavenly phenomena and routine flying objects.

Lacking any background in science, many of them were susceptible to the speculations offered up by sensationalist papers,” observes historian Rodolpho Gauthier Cardoso dos Santos, who researched the topic for his book A invenção dos discos voadores: Guerra Fria, imprensa e ciência no Brasil (1947-1958) (“The Invention of Flying 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

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 science more accessible to the reader, precisely because it used more popular journalistic techniques. Unlike other means of science communication, it also gave voice to contemporary fears and anxiety about scientific development. It thus helped demystify 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 entertained the collective imagination when it addressed subjects like flying saucers in an ambiguous way.” n Project Spreading 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).

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Music y

Lílian Campesato in the work Conexões dispersas/dispersões conexas (Scattered connections/Connected scatterings), 2011 74 z special issue october 2013

Seeing sounds and hearing movements Researchers from the Móbile project go on tour to show the results of blending art with technology Published in May 2013

Photos Public domain image

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hen 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 theoretical 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 showcasing the Móbile project on an international 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 Hangar 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 important as the written results,” explains Iazzetta, author of Música e mediação tecnológica (music and technological mediation) from the publishing company Perspectiva.

In addition to the project coordinator, Lílian Campesato, Michelle Agnes, Julian Jaramillo, Rogério Costa and Vitor Kisil comprise the members of Móbile. 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 research. The show, which was named Transparência (Transparency), consisted of six scenes in which “traditional” works were combined with instruments pESQUISA FAPESP z 75

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 1

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

In the interactive scenes, the group used a black table on which a mini camera was installed and operated by Lílian Campesato. “She manipulates objects so there are variations in the projection of sound and images, for example. In another 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 researchers from the fields of music, visual arts, performing arts, and computer 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 novelty emerged. Technological advances were revered as if they were the stars of the show on their own. For us, what matters is the result,” says Iazzetta. “Often, a lot of technology can even cause interference. 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 technology is prevalent even in major music research centers. He believes that the reassignment of the role of virtuosity, which has divided creators and audiences into two separate groups, and a certain distancing in terms of tradition results in

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76 z special issue october 2013

4 Cesar Villavicencio playing the hyperflute

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.

Reaction

The basis of the project is a reaction against technology as a solution to every problem without disregarding history. This is the case with music. The term “electroacoustical music” emphasizes 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 facilitated the connection between sound and visual elements.

“The audience at a concert, for example, 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 understand 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 asymmetry between persons who create and persons who appreciate the work of art would disappear. Machines would replace technique and experimentation would replace tradition. “Playing with machines is an experience in which art tends to stop being art. These are artistic

3

proposals that leave technique behind and focus on the experience of playing with materials. In turn, art is increasingly 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 musicians. We have many questions about the sound and they are objective, carrying 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 scientific 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 problems of technical interest that require technical solutions arise naturally. After all, since computers are more flexible, they offer more opportunities to expand upon and experiment with sounds and signals than by creating new instruments,” says Queiroz. For Queiroz, music and the visual arts of the past are following 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

Technology helps to demystify the act of musical creation 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 assembling 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 project began, we have sought to approximate 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

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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 representative of human beings than the machines we make,” notes Iazzetta. Musicians treat the relationship between music and technology in terms of dependency 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 music. Instead, it has become incidental.

Technology is no longer the focus and can be used as a tool to create interest and demystify the act of musical creation. n Carlos Haag

Project Móbile: Interactive Musical Processes (No. 2008/086328); Type Thematic Project; Coord. Fernando Iazzetta (USP); Investment R$515,936.56 (FAPESP).

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78 z special issue october 2013

big datay

The human ark in a

deluge of data Workshop discusses potential of eScience and affirms the important role of the humanities Published in June 2013

Illustrations nelson provazi

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or certain scientists, the Gordian knot in developing their theories is that they require ever more data and that new ideas cannot be tested due to a lack of equipment or technology. For others, such as genomics researchers and astronomers, their anguish is due precisely to an overabundance: data are collected so quickly that they overwhelm the ability to analyze, validate and store the information. 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 machines, 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 computer science technologies and tools that will allow us to carry out scientific research faster

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 potential 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. pESQUISA FAPESP z 79

Specialists believe that Brazil cannot remain on the sidelines of this movement, which seeks to transform research practices through computational thinking using scientific instruments driven by computers that transform the instruments into universal amplifiers. The idea might not seem so new: remember Darwin and his network of correspondents. However, whereas scientists 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 students from Europe, North America, Latin America (including Brazil), Asia and Africa gave the workshop a youthful, globalized feel. The students, who were mostly master’s or PhD students, 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 machines 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. “Important advances in science need to be placed in a larger social context by the humanities and the arts,” says Hey. 80 z special issue october 2013

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, methods 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 competitiveness, 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 technological. 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, financial 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 solutions. The meaning of a technology now depends 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 framework 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 interdisciplinary collaborations between philosophers, biologists, engineers and artists to interpret the ethical, legal and aesthetic dimensions of biomedical technologies; geographers, together with demographers and economists, rethinking agriculture policies; entrepreneurs identifying critical issues to be researched by sustainable development scholars.”

The Canadian then proposed a new way of thinking about the technological age in which we live. “A new way to understand these profound changes is to rethink what it is to be human,” 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 presumably non-strategic research are being abandoned. His group also rejects any hierarchy of types of research activities in terms of prestige or importance.

The same applies to expanding academic contributions beyond the familiar emphasis on articles 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 specialization to “multiple epistemologies”; the digital humanities are now asking themselves how one can interpret 1 million books.

Until recently, notes Gaffield, humanities scholars thought that sharing their knowledge with non-experts amounted to lowering themselves.

Today’s academics recognize that effective communication beyond specialized groups is a complex 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 scholars now provide audiences with online courses, podcasts and social media content to disseminate information, stimulate debate and advance knowledge.

The researcher believes that in the future, students 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 reFor Chad Gaffield, cently, the dominant global flow ocone way to curred in one direction, with former colonies and developing countries understand looking to metropolises to lead research efforts and educate their best the new era students. Now, flows are multinational and not clearly distributed. of technology The leaders of the old, prestigious is to question institutions know that they can be left behind. At the same time, new what makes talent and knowledge developing in other regions can help to build us human societies in the new era that are no longer subject to the old circuit of knowledge. In other words, according to Gaffield, the internationalization 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 Understanding the Human Condition: “The national research support agencies need to collaborate internationally to provide resources to researchers 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 allow them to keep up in important research areas.” 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

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ART

Like old times Published in June 2013

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.

82 z special issue october 2013