Pesquisa FAPESP International issue 3

Pesquisa FAPESP 2013_ edition 3

2013_ edition 3 www.revistapesquisa.fapesp.br

Medicine

Particles reduce side effects of drugs against cancer Ceramics

Innovation boosts ceramic wall and floor tile industry Science Olympiads

Competitions reveal talent at the secondary level Positive image

The U.S. government brought in Brazilian artists during the military regime

The era of comparative genomics Bioinformatics makes strides with efficient methods of genetic information analysis and new DNA-sequencing machines

2013_EDITION 3

www.revistapesquisa.fapesp.br

5 COVER Brazilian bioinformaticians create tools for studying genomes

SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL POLICY 18 Geosciences

48 Optics Physicists use lasers to synchronize microscopic oscillators that act like the pendulums of clocks

USP starts using a new electronic microprobe to analyze chemical elements in minerals

TECHNOLOGY

10 INTERVIEW

22 Education

50 Business research

Erney Plessmann de Camargo The parasitologist talks about his most recent discoveries and his commitment to public health

Brazil’s progress in the science Olympiads motivates secondary school students and helps train new researchers

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

28 Media

56 Silviculture

The editor-in-chief of Nature and a director of the Royal Society meet at FAPESP to discuss the challenges and limitations of open access to scientific data

Transgenic eucalyptus has 20% higher productivity than conventional eucalyptus

Cover illustration fabio otubo

SECTIONS 4 Letter from the Editor 74 Art

SCIENCE 30 Ecology Three-dimensional maps show details of forest structure and facilitate monitoring of the impacts of fragmentation on native vegetation

36 Zoology Study identifies bone abnormalities commonly found in humpback whales on the Brazilian coast

38 Medicine Synthetic particles reduce toxicity and augment the action of drugs against cancer

44 Astronomy Gas expelled by stellar explosions interrupted the growth of dwarf galaxies

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

HUMANITIES 64 Fine Arts Archives reveal that the U.S. government had a hidden agenda in bringing Brazilian artists to New York

70 Personality Studies analyze the work of Oscar Niemeyer, the architect who designed much of Brasilia

Letter from the Editor

São Paulo Research Foundation Celso Lafer President

From Bioinformatics to the Science Olympiad

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

Mariluce Moura | Editor in Chief

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 Carlos Haag (Humanities), 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 Evanildo da Silveira, Fabio Otubo, Igor Zolnerkevic, Maria Hirszman, Valter Rodrigues (image bank), 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

A

pproximately 15 years ago, the human genome sequencing project emerged as the most fascinating scientific adventure of the final portion of the 20th century and inspired teams of biologists to believe in the antiquated idea that biology could replace physics as science’s field par excellence. At this time, Brazil began pioneering work on genomics, which, among other objectives, sought to considerably advance the field of molecular biology. This first initiative involved the bacteria, Xylella fastidiosa, and significant obstacles had to be overcome for the project to succeed. One of the project’s greatest challenges involved bioinformatics, as Brazil had no expertise in this field at the time.

By the time the project was concluded in early 2000, the source of its success lay in the field of bioinformatics, then in the hands of Brazil’s first experts. Three generations of bioinformaticians have since been trained, and our junior and senior specialists today are competitive in the international race for tools that seek to enable comparisons between genomes and to increase the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the sequencing process. The cover story in this issue of Pesquisa FAPESP by our special editor, Marcos Pivetta, reports on these tools in the context of an increasingly sophisticated national bioinformatics capability, which can easily navigate both science and technology (page 5).

I would also like to highlight the report on the progress that has been made in the technical quality of ceramics produced in São Paulo, especially at the ceramics industrial complex in Santa Gertrudes, in the central area of the state. This complex has helped to make Brazil the world’s second largest manufacturer of ceramic wall and floor tiles, ranking only behind China.

Until 2001, Brazil was the world’s fourth largest producer of ceramic tiles, and São Paulo accounted for 40% of that production (473 million m 2). At this point, a proposal submitted by researchers from the Ceramics Center of Brazil (CCB) and companies from Santa Gertrudes, in partnership with researchers affiliated with other universities and research institutes, received substantial support from FAPESP’s Sectoral Consortia for Research and Innovation (ConSITec) program. The result was a significant improvement in the quality of Brazilian ceramic materials. Moreover, São Paulo’s share of the nation’s ceramic output rose to 70% of the 866 million m2 that was produced in 2012. Details of this trend are found in the article by Yuri Vasconcelos, starting on page 50.

To conclude, I would like to recommend a report that touches on a sensitive topic related to the contemporary development of Brazil: scientific education. In the text that begins on page 18, Fabrício Marques, our science and technology policy editor, attempts to demonstrate the connection between the participation of high school students in the Science Olympiad and the generation of new researchers. He notes that winning medals in these contests can serve as a special incentive for young people to pursue a career in science. Enjoy your reading!

Cover

More bits in the service of DNA Brazilian bioinformaticians create tools for studying genomes Marcos Pivetta

L

ittle more than a decade ago, only a few complete genomes were available for analysis. Today, there are not enough programs or personnel to track the number of DNA sequences that are deposited in public databases and produced every day by the new generation of sequencers.

These extremely fast machines identify the base pairs, or chemical letters, of the genetic material at a cost that is thousands of times lower than was possible in the early 2000s, when the epic journey of sequencing the first human genome came to an end. Eyeing that challenge, mathematician João Meidanis, a founding partner of the company Scylla Bioinformática and professor at the University of Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil, invested in a line of research to create simpler, more efficient methods of comparing two or more genomes.

Working with his former doctoral student Pedro Feijão in 2009, he formulated the theoretical basis for a method of comparing entire genomes, known as the Single-Cut-or-Join (SCJ) operation, and last year, he tested it in practice on the genomes of organisms, including plants and bacteria. “With our method, we can easily compare two or more genomes without exponentially increasing the number of calculations we make, which is what happens with other techniques,” Meidanis says.

“We can use it to construct genealogical trees and see which genomes are closest or farthest from an evolutionary standpoint.” The mathematician was one of the bioinformatics coordinators for the project that, in 2000, sequenced the genome of the bacteria Xylella fastidiosa, which causes citrus variegated chlorosis in orange trees. The work resulted in the first cover story of the scientific journal Nature devoted to a Brazilian research study. pESQUISA FAPESP | 5

ILLUSTRATION Fabio Otubo

Published in February - 2013

The fall of DNA In one decade, the cost of sequencing a human genome has fallen from $100 million to less than $10,000 * axis y in logarithmic scale (in $)

100 million

10 million

1

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2000

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To compare all of the genetic material of one species to that of another, researchers must resort to simplification. The primary way to do this is to take into account the notion that the genes in the compared genomes are exactly the same but are in a different order in the specific sequence of each organism. Using this logic, methods for comparing genomes count the number of rearrangements that would be needed to transform one genome into another. These rearrangements occur when large segments of DNA in the original sequence move over time. The fewer rearrangements separating two genomes, the closer they are to one another on the evolutionary tree.

Using their method, Meidanis and Feijão formulated an alternative definition for the 6 | special issue July 2013

2003

2004

2005

concept of the breakpoint, an important parameter for finding rearrangements in a sequence and calculating the proximity of two genomes.

A breakpoint is the location at which there is an interruption in a long conserved segment in the genomes being compared.

Last year, the two researchers refined another method of genome comparison that is more elaborate than SCJ. This second technique, initially proposed in 2000, compares only circular genomes. With this development, it also became useful to compare the genetic material of linear chromosomes. “That was one of the limitations of the original technique,” says Feijão, who is now with Scylla. The new method, based on what mathematicians call adjacency

2006

2007

4 Jane Ades / NHGRI 6 Maggie Bartlett / NHGRI 7 BGI 8 NHGRI

2001

PHOTOS 1 Elliot W. Kitajima / USP 2 Public domain image 3 and 5 Wikimedia Commons

2000

Moore’s Law Until the mid-2000s, the decline in the cost of sequencing had followed the declining cost of technology in line with Moore’s Law, after which the cost has plummeted 7

2011 Chinese scientists at the BGI announce a project to sequence

8

three million genomes of plants, animals, humans and microorganisms 2012 The complete genome of 1,092

6

people from different continents is published in the journal Nature 2008 The second- or latestgeneration machines arrive on the market and bring down the cost of genome sequencing

2008

2009

SOURCE NHGRI Genome Sequencing Program

2010

2011

2012

algebraic formalism, has not yet been tested on real genomes. For now, it exists only in theory.

Metagenomics

Meidanis is clearly not the only researcher to feel the effects of the new reality in his field. Having returned to Brazil in mid-2011, after eight years at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute in the US, João Carlos Setubal, who now is a full professor at the Chemistry Institute of the University of São Paulo (USP), notes that the demand for services and research in his field has grown in volume and sophistication in the recent years. As an example of this trend, he has received 16 proposals for collaboration on other researchers’ initiatives since returning to São Paulo. “The latest-generation

sequencers produce an astronomical amount of data on genomes, proteomes and organism metabolism,” says Setubal, who was a bioinformatics coordinator for the Xylella project. “Because of declining technology costs, today any research project with minimal resources can sequence the genome of an organism.”

One field that has opened up to biologists and bioinformaticians in the past decade is metagenomics, which studies the microbiota of an ecological niche. Setubal’s principal research, an FAPESP thematic project on microorganisms at the São Paulo Zoo, is focused on this field. In this approach, instead of isolating and cultivating the microorganisms such that the DNA of each species can be extracted separately, he takes a sample directly from the environment to be studied. In such a sample, the DNA of several species comes “mixed,” and it is up to the bioinformaticians to find the techniques for separating and characterizing the genetic material of each species. “We are studying three microbiomes at the Zoo: compost made by zoo staff, water from the lakes and manure from howler monkeys,” Setubal says.

M

etagenomics is also a way to search for unknown organisms in a specific habitat.

The team headed by Ana Tereza Ribeiro de Vasconcelos, the coordinator of the bioinformatics center at the National Scientific Computing Laboratory (LNCC) in the city of Petropolis, participated in the discovery of magnetic bacteria found in Araruama Lake on the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro, one of the world’s most saline lagoons. One of the bacteria found in that study was Candidatus magnetoglobus multicellularis; identified by Ulysses Lins of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), the bacteria are difficult to isolate from the environment and keep in a culture medium. “We are currently involved in about ten metagenomics projects,” says Vasconcelos, who has three sequencers in her laboratory and a team of approximately 25 people.

The amount of time and money required for projects devoted to DNA analysis of organisms has changed radically in the past decade. In the early years of the genomics era, only large companies dared to venture into this new field.

By the time the international public consortium that sequenced human genome for the first time was officially terminated in April 2003, that mega-initiative required 13 years of work by hundreds of scientists from at least 18 countries, including Brazil, and had an estimated cost of $2.7 billion. In considerably lower but equally massive proportion, the sequencing of the Xylella bacterium had cost FAPESP $12 million and involved the contributions of 192 researchers over a three-year period. pESQUISA FAPESP | 7

Genome sequencing has become cheaper by a factor of 10,000 to 20,000 compared to what it cost a little more than a decade ago, according to the data from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in the U.S. The mass influx of the second-generation sequencers into the market in the early 2008, which used a technology different from that of the early Sangertype machines, caused the cost of sequencing to plummet at a rate that far outpaced the performance gains resulting from Moore’s Law of computing power. Today, in two or three days and at a cost of just a few thousand dollars, it is possible to identify all of the three billion chemical letters of a person’s DNA. “Bioinformatics is a new tool, a magnifying glass, that enables us to better understand this biological phenomenon, which has not changed but can now be seen in another way,” says Gonçalo Pereira of the Institute of Biology (IB) at Unicamp.

H

owever, sequencing is one thing, and extracting useful information from the billions of data points that computers pour out on a daily basis into the hands of scientists is another thing and is considerably more complex. “Genome sequencing is cheap today and has become a commodity, but data analysis is expensive,” says computer scientist João Paulo Kitajima of Mendelics, a new company that pro-

vides personalized genome analysis. “The number of people searching for jobs in bioinformatics has grown exponentially, and there is The declining a supply and demand gap for specost of sequencing cialists in Brazil and elsewhere.”

It is difficult to accurately estihas made mate the size of the community of bioinformaticians in Brazil. Accordgenomic ing to Guillherme Oliveira, president of the Brazilian Association for techniques Bioinformatics and Computational accessible Biology (AB3C), there are approximately 300 people, including proto projects fessors, students and researchers, who maintain ties with the orgaof any budget nization. “Bioinformaticians were once self-taught,” says Oliveira, who coordinates the bioinformatics center at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in the state of Minas Gerais. “Today, many of them have come out of post-graduate programs, and every state has a bioinformatics specialist. What’s new is that now companies are also operating in this field.” Large Brazilian universities, such as USP, UFRJ and the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), as well as Fiocruz, have specific post-graduate programs in bioinformatics. Other universities incorporate it as a line

China has the largest sequencing center In less than 15 years, a Chinese

projects that reach far beyond

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bioinformatics center has gone

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the go-ahead from the U.S.

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of the giant panda, the national

for the $177 million purchase

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of Complete Genomics, a California

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company that developed a new

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the first complete genome of a human

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2

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individuals. The center has 4,000

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of humans, plants, animals and

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microorganisms in the next few years.

the Chinese on an enormous scale,

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A giant panda: One of the genomes for which the China’s Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) decoded its complete sequence

1

8 | special issue July 2013

PHOTOS 1 Manyman / Wikimedia Commons 2 Ebengtso / Wikimedia Commons

However, Souza also has access to all of the machines from the Ludwig Institute, which closed its facility in the city of São Paulo and moved them to the Ribeirão Preto School of Medicine at USP (FMRP-USP), where the Center for Medical Genomics opened just last year. “The techniques used in genomics and bioinformatics will create a revolution in medical practice similar to what happened with image-based medicine,” says Wilson Araújo da Silva Júnior, one of the people in charge of the new center at FMRP.

2

T The hypersaline waters of Araruama Lake in the state of Rio de Janeiro, where metagenomic studies found magnetic bacteria

of research in their post-doctoral programs in broader fields, such as biology or computing.

The work of sequencing and analyzing the genome of Schistosoma mansoni, the parasite that causes schistosomiasis, has been the focus of the highest profile project at the bioinformatics center of the Fiocruz facility in Minas Gerais in recent years. However, the six sequencing machines and 15 specialists in the bioinformatics unit headed by Oliveira have participated in approximately 60 different projects, including studies of the genomes of cancer, infectious agents, bovine breeds, and metagenomics studies. The center now also generates and analyzes data for the Research Network for the Molecular Identification of Brazilian Biodiversity (BR-BoL), coordinated by Cláudio Oliveira of the Institute of Biosciences at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) in Botucatu, which plans to catalogue 120,000 specimens from 24,000 species in nature within four years. BR-BoL is the Brazilian arm of the International Barcode of Life Project, whose goal is to identify species by characterizing their DNA. Bioinformatics has spread throughout Brazil, even to centers far from its major cities in the Southeast. At the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), Artur Silva conducts bioinformatics research in collaboration with groups from São Paulo. Since May of 2012, Sandro de Souza, who for years headed research in this field at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in São Paulo, is now at the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN). He does not have a sequencer at his own facility in Natal, the state capital, but he appears unconcerned.

“Don’t forget that I can even do sequencing in the cloud if I want,” Souza says. “I’m beginning my neuroscience research without any problem.”

o increase access to the DNA and RNA sequencing and analytical services, Unicamp is opening the Central Laboratory for High-Performance Technologies (LacTAD) on March 1. The laboratory will focus on genomics, proteomics, cell biology and bioinformatics. Its equipment includes two new-generation sequencers made by Illumina that are capable of decoding a complete human DNA sequence in a matter of a few days and a third machine to sequence specific genomic regions. The machines at the center have been in use since last year, when they arrived at the university, but were scattered around in different locations. Next month they will begin operating in the 2,000-m2 facility built for LacTAD. “We believe there is an unmet demand for this type of service, and bioinformatics has become a bottleneck for many biological research studies,” says Ronaldo Pilli, a chemist and Provost for Research at Unicamp, who heads the project in the new laboratory. “We are joining the worldwide trend towards offering this type of service on a centralized basis, which makes it easier to purchase, operate, and update the machines.” LacTAD’s equipment was purchased for about R$5.5 million through FAPESP’s Multiuser Equipment Program. The building, budgeted at R$4 million, was financed by the university.

LacTAD will provide services to researchers at Unicamp and to other universities and businesses. Interested researchers can obtain price quotes for using the services at the laboratory website. “The cost of the work we do will range from R$100 to R$100,000,” Pilli says.

Democratization has come to the world of bioinformatics. n

Projects 1. Studies on the microbial diversity of the São Paulo zoo – No. 11/50870-6; Grant mechanism BIOTA Program – Thematic project; Coordinators João Setubal (USP); Investments R$1,711,698.25 (FAPESP); 2. EMU: Central Laboratory for High-Performance Technologies – No. 09/54129-9; Grant mechanism Multi-user Equipment Program; Coordinators Fernando Ferreira Costa (Unicamp); Investments R$6,034,431.00 (FAPESP).

pESQUISA FAPESP | 9

eduardo cesar

10 | special issue  July 2013

Interview

Erney Plessmann de Camargo

The scientist of neglected diseases Neldson Marcolin and Ricardo Zorzetto Published in February - 2013

P

AGE 78 SPECIALTY Parasitology EDUCATION University of São Paulo (undergraduate, PhD and tenure) Pasteur Institute (post-doctorate) INSTITUTION: Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICB), University of São Paulo

rofessor Erney Plessmann Camargo ended the interview below decisively: “I like to do research, and I no longer need to think about my career.”

At age 78, the parasitologist referred to his latest interest: studying protozoa of the genus Trypanosoma, which have no medical importance. His confession of this topic of research seems amazing to those accustomed to seeing him as a researcher and administrator concerned with finding solutions that have an impact on public health and science management. At the same time, this interest seems natural for a researcher whose love for science always came first.

Camargo’s stories bring to mind the teachings of Professor Samuel Pessôa (1898-1976), department chair at the School of Medicine at the University of São Paulo (USP), who influenced generations of students to study medicine related to Brazilian social problems.

Camargo sought to be faithful to these teachings and produced important scientific papers related to Chagas disease and malaria, two neglected diseases that affect the most disadvantaged.

Persecuted by the military regime in 1964, the parasitologist, who never denied his connection to the left, departed the country to work in the United States. Upon his return to Brazil in 1969, with no place at USP, he worked in private business for two years until he was hired by the São Paulo School of Medicine (EPM), today part of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp).

He remained there for 15 years and recreated the Parasitology Department.

By 1986, he was back at USP as a full professor. Hundreds of people attended the lecture

that he gave as part of the official examination for the university position in the name of the many treated unjustly by the regime. Back at his home institution, he also restructured the Parasitology group and was the first Dean of Research before becoming President of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). He was President of the Butantan Institute and today is in charge of the Zerbini Foundation, which manages the USP Medical School’s Heart Institute (USP-InCor). Married with four children—all scientists—Camargo granted this interview to Pesquisa FAPESP. You finished your undergraduate degree in 1959, an important time for the USP Medical School. Your classmates and mentors at the time became renowned researchers, such as Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva and Victor and Ruth Nussenzweig, among many others.

Luiz Hildebrando and Victor are a little older than I. That was an exceptional time at the School of Medicine. Many students became respected scientists. Sérgio Henrique Ferreira, Walter Colli, Nelson Fausto, and Ricardo Brentani, for example, formed a small group that was beginning to do research. I, however, decided to stay in the Parasitology Department as early as my second year. The principal groups at the school that accepted students and researchers were Biochemistry, where Isaías Raw worked; Physiology, where Gerhard Malnic and Maurício Rocha e Silva worked; and Histology, the best department at the school, where the cream of the crop worked, directed by Luiz Carlos Junqueira.

And there was Parasitology, which was also pESQUISA FAPESP | 11

top quality. Hildebrando, Nussenzweig, and Luís Rey were all there. Samuel Pessôa [the Head of Parasitology] had already retired by the time I got there.

Was there some special characteristic of that time that attracted students to research so early?

It was a very important period in the history of the biological sciences because the double helix had been described shortly beforehand, in 1953, and they were beginning to understand how DNA worked. Peter Mitchell had discovered the process of energy production in mitochondria in 1961 and created an entire area of research around it, which, until then, had been a mystery. With electron microscopy, the cell structure began to be understood. They discovered the ribosome and how the synthesis of proteins occurs at about that time, when we were undergraduates. There were very favorable circumstances that encouraged us to become interested in science and great professors who taught us this, such as Michel Rabinovitch, Isaías Raw, Roberto Carvalho da Silva, Luiz Carlos Junqueira, Ferreira Fernandes, and the folks in Parasitology.

We had enthusiastic, informal seminars in which everyone wanted to know what was going on. The folks in human genetics, Pedro Henrique Saldanha’s group, also met with us. Every week, someone would talk about the most varied subjects, not just parasites. I gave one on the T4 virus, which was a lot of work.

They were just beginning to map it. It was the start of understanding how information is stored in DNA. We studied a lot. It was very exciting.

The best place to learn natural history was at the School of Medicine

The medical course was a kind of undergraduate degree in sciences, then? [In Brazil, future physicians begin studying medicine at the undergraduate level, rather than as graduate students.]

It was an undergraduate degree in sciences, certainly, although we could not escape the obligations of medical students. The school was very good. Even if we hadn’t wanted to, we would’ve ended up learning medicine well. It didn’t matter if your interests were elsewhere. I delivered two or three dozen babies, for example. It was mandatory. I had to do an appendectomy, with an experienced surgeon at my side, of course. It 12 | special issue July 2013

didn’t matter that I didn’t want to be a surgeon.

The obligatory residency in medicine had been created not long before that. My class was one of the first to do it. But I have no complaints, on the contrary.

What was your research in parasitology like?

I really liked natural history. At that time, in the 1950s, the best place to learn natural history was at the School of Medicine. Biology—today’s biology is very good—was just beginning. Great researchers of that time, such as Paulo Vanzolini, studied medicine and later became biology professors. Moreover, there was the advantage that a doctor could be a biologist, but not the reverse. [A biologist would have to take the undergraduate course in medicine to be a physician, whereas someone with an undergraduate degree in medicine could continue on to graduate work in biology.]

You have four children. Did they follow your example?

Two are doctors: Marcelo, who works in Rondônia, and Fernando, who is a doctor at the Albert Einstein Hospital here in São Paulo. The other two are also scientists. Luis Eduardo is at the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture (Esalq/ USP), and the other, Anamaria, is a biologist at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. I did not demand that they follow this path. It was natural.

My wife, Marisis, is a researcher in literature and was a director of the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC-SP). But none of my children studied literature, only biological sciences.

Your most cited article, on the growth and differentiation of Trypanosoma cruzi, the protozoan that causes Chagas disease, was the first that you wrote. Why was it important?

The paper already has 704 citations and is still cited. There was a problem: Trypanosoma cruzi was very difficult to cultivate. We used what was called Muniz medium, a base of blood with agar and very little liquid. To obtain 1 gram of Trypanosoma, I needed 50 bottles of Muniz. I had already graduated, and it was my first research project. I wanted to study the biochemistry of Trypanosoma. To this end, I needed a lot of it, and one nest would not be enough. One of the things I wanted to know was how T. cruzi differentiated. Cellular differentiation is, even today, a fundamental problem in biology. To obtain the ideal cultivation medium for T. cruzi, I spent a lot of time doing culinary activities: I removed one salt, I added another, I added something else.

At the same time, I was studying the parasite.

This is why the article was entitled “Growth and differentiation of Trypanosoma cruzi” and not

“Production of the culture medium.” There was a basic culture medium that a researcher from Florida used for bacteria. I used it and started adding other ingredients. I then arrived at a medium that is called liver infusion tryptose (LIT).

It was very important not only for me but also because it allowed everyone working with the protozoan Trypanosoma to produce it on a larger scale. I started in 1962 and spent a year doing this.

But the article came out in 1964.

Everything happened thanks to your interest in natural history...

Parasitology was the closest thing to natural history at the School of Medicine. I could have chosen microbiology, too, but the department was not as good as Parasitology. In my second year, I became friends with the staff in the department and started to visit it. I must say that there was something more that drew me to the Parasitology Department: everyone there was politically left leaning. It was the Red Department of the School of Medicine. My political sympathies were on the left, and this encouraged our friendship. Initially, as an undergraduate, I worked with Luís Rey and Kurt Kloetzel on schistosomiasis. They gave me some small tasks, but most importantly, I participated in departmental meetings. Later, I started working with Luiz Hildebrando. He was working on his thesis to obtain tenure, and I helped a bit.

Luiz did not receive a doctorate but went straight to the tenure thesis, something that was allowed at the time. When I graduated, I thought I should learn a bit more biochemistry and did a two-year internship with Sebastião Baeta Henriques at the Butantan Institute. During this period, I met Leônidas Deane, a very important figure—perhaps the most important in our group, though not the most famous—who was highly respected by all of us. He was the guru after Samuel Pessôa.

Samuel was far above the rest based on his academic, political, and social activities. He was our reference. But Deane was second after him and took over the chair in Parasitology for a year. He obtained an opening and brought me in. I was a lecturer. That was in 1962, and it was there that I began working on the LIT culture, published in 1964. After the military coup of March 31, 1964, our work was suspended by Institutional Act No. 1. Me, Hildebrando, Thomas Maack, Pedro Saldanha...There were five or six in medicine. I had accumulated all of the research data and intended to work slowly. Because of the suspension, I decided to finish it quickly and began to work 24 hours a day on the LIT article. It was very difficult because it was my first article, and I had no idea what I was doing. Hildebrando and Victor had already left, and it was Michel Rabinovitch who helped me write the paper.

What was the political activity like at the School of Medicine?

Professor Samuel Pessôa took over the Department of Parasitology in 1931. He was untouchable in that position and was able to be a communist at an extremely conservative institution like the School of Medicine then was. The academic spirit prevailed over political convictions.

Pessôa always tried to perform medical research linked to social problems. He wanted to solve the problems of the Brazilian people. I’m not exaggerating. He said that himself. He was a Communist Party candidate and a friend of Luís Carlos Prestes and had charisma and reach beyond the school. Jovina, his wife, was an ideologist, even more communist than he was. Personally, they were very pleasant people—engaging, charming.

This brought great unity to the group. Over the years, I became friends with Pessôa, even though I was just a boy. It was not just a professor-student relationship. We would go for drinks at the Riviera, a bar on the corner of Avenida Paulista with Rua da Consolação, which later became popular with leftists. Jovina would get angry. When he retired, he went to work at the Butantan Institute. For free.

Parasitology had various communists and was known as the Red Department

Were you ever arrested?

Pessoa was arrested several times, before and after 1964. I was when I returned from the United States in 1969. Police Chief Sérgio Paranhos Fleury went crazy and created the Fishing Net Operation (Operação Tarrafa), as it was called in repression jargon, to arrest leftist intellectuals. It was an outrage. The professors in the Parasitology Department became targets after the 1964 military coup. Those extremely interesting scientific meetings were classified as subversive meetings.

In a sense, they were. In experimental science, when we want to discover new things, we must go against established knowledge. And the extremely conservative School of Medicine was founded on established knowledge, on erudition.

That group was really anti-erudition, as it created new ideas. In that sense, we were subversive. But strictly speaking, no one conducted communist party activities. We met at the building on Rua Maria Antonia. I knew everyone, and we talked a lot. Sometimes, a group of intellectuals who we admired would join us: Fernando Henrique

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Cardoso [later President of Brazil], Florestan Fernandes [a sociologist], Mario Schenberg [a physicist], or Vilanova Artigas [an architect].

Did you leave the country preventively?

After 1964, there was a Military Police Investigation (MPI) at the School of Medicine. One soldier and two assistants interrogated us in a room.

At the Ribeirão Preto Medical School, this did not happen. The director, José de Moura Gonçalves, was a spectacular figure—he was my symbolic PhD advisor—and he did not let them conduct an MPI at the school. He said that if they wanted to carry out their investigations, it would have to be at the police station. At the School of Medicine here in São Paulo, the situation was quite different. The investigation was clearly supported by the administration. They interrogated everyone over a three-month period.

It created a very bad environment. However, even then, we had some surprises during this period.

Since we were targets, and especially those of us in the Parasitology Department, several close friends withdrew and no longer spoke to us. Some, who were not such close friends, offered their help. I left the country because the MPI formally accused us before a military court, and we would be judged shortly.

At that point, an American researcher, Walter Plaut, invited me to go to Madison, Wisconsin. I left before the trial, in which everyone was acquitted. I received a good salary in Wisconsin.

More than 200 people attended the lecture I gave as part of my official examination for the USP position as a sort of redress

What was the surprise that occurred during this period?

During this period, between being fired by Institutional Act No. 1 and leaving the country, we received no salary. I had a wife and three children, and Hildebrando did, too. A group of people—I will not say who—joined together to collect money and pay our salaries. The leader of this group was a militant who belonged to the National Democratic Union (UDN), a very conservative party. We received full pay during that period with the help of colleagues at the university, and we did not even know who they were. Difficult times always bring these surprises.

For example, Moura Gonçalves was a wonderful person but was not on the left. He not only prevented the MPI from being conducted within 14 | special issue July 2013

the Ribeirão Preto School of Medicine but also helped us when the government issued Institutional Act No. 5 [a decree giving almost absolute powers to the military dictatorship], shortly after Hildebrando and I returned from abroad in 1969 and were planning to start working in Ribeirão Preto. Moura secretly gave me his full salary to purchase plane tickets so that Hildebrando’s family could leave the country again.

How was your time in the US? They were five very good years. I wanted to continue my research on Trypanosoma cruzi, but I was in a cytology lab, and I was not allowed to perform research with pathogens. I had to find something else and chose to work with a local aquatic fungus. I could carry out decent biochemistry research there. I joined Professor Jack Strominger’s group. He had discovered how penicillin worked. My friends Carl Peter von Dietrich and Julio Pudles were there. We worked together on synthesizing the wall of my fungus, which is made of chitin. Together, we discovered the synthesis mechanism for chitin. It was an important result and is still cited even today.

Why did you decide to come back in 1969, when the regime was worsening?

It didn’t seem like the regime was worsening.

The government created a reintegration program for scientists and invited us, Hildebrando and me, to return with some perks. The program was coordinated by Paulo de Góes at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. That’s why we came back. But four months later, Institutional Act No. 5 was issued. It was clear that there were conflicts within the regime. Without a job at the university, I went into industry. I worked at Editora Abril, a publisher, at the invitation of Pedro Paulo Popovic, an intellectual in the true sense of the word who was highly regarded by the Civita family, owners of the publishing house. He brought in many people from the left. In my case, I was hired to work on the Medical Encyclopedia and Medicine and Science. The articles came from Italy, and we adapted them for publication here, inserting information on Brazilian diseases. I also worked in the analytical laboratory Lavoisier. I lived that way for two years and earned more than I would have in 10 years in academia. But what I really wanted was to return to the university.

Was that when the invitation came from Unifesp?

During the period in which I was at Editora Abril and Lavoisier, I also worked at the Gastroenterology Institute, run by José Pontes. I established an analysis and research laboratory there. When I was at the Institute, Professor Leal

Prado invited me to go to the São Paulo School of Medicine (EPM), now part of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). They had created a Biomedical Sciences course and invited me to teach Microbiology and Parasitology. I thought it was great, but I warned Prof. Prado of the problems with Institutional Act No. 7, which prevented people who had been suspended from being hired for a government position. He told me to talk to the dean. And that was when I was surprised again.

The dean was Horácio Kneese de Mello, who simply hired me, saying that he was not obligated to obey any institutional act. I went to the EPM and began as an assistant professor and soon rose to associate professor and then full professor.

When did you finish your doctorate?

The graduate course, as it is known today, was created in 1967. I was given the choice of following the old or the new doctoral program. I chose the old system, in which I only needed to write a dissertation. Since I had done work in the US, all I had to do was organize it and talk to my pro forma advisor, Professor Moura Gonçalves.

How long did you stay at the São Paulo School of Medicine?

Fifteen years. When I arrived, the Parasitology Department was not strong. I hired biochemists and biologists, but no parasitologists, to change the department’s outlook a little. The people there worked a lot and gained national recognition. The department is small today but scientifically spectacular. That was something important in my career: the recovery of the department and the creation of a graduate degree in Microbiology, Parasitology, and Immunology at the EPM, together with Luiz Trabulsi and Nelson Mendes.

The course had a Capes [Coordinating Agency for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel] grade of 7 (the highest) right from the start.

Why did you decide to leave?

At the EPM, the Parasitology group had three or four professors and could not grow. At USP, the group included professors from eight schools, with a total of 20-25 professors. The difference was enormous. I returned to USP at the invitation of Flávio Fava de Morais [later President of USP], who was Director of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICB). Everyone understood the reasons that I returned to USP and supported me. The official examination was beautiful. There must have been 200 people there for my lecture, which is rare. Normally, official examinations for full professors attract at most 20 people. Mine was a sort of redress. People from all over the university came. When I arrived, Hélio Guerra Vieira was the president of USP, and José Goldemberg was the

president after him. Goldemberg asked me what I needed to change the department and gave me all of the support I needed. I hired eight or nine new professors, and we were able to purchase machines and material. What a leap. Scientific production went from 0.2 articles per year per professor to 4.

During the same period, the University’s structure changed. A dean of research position was created around 1989-90, and Goldemberg nominated me for the position. I was the first Dean of Research at USP. Roberto Leal Lobo succeeded Goldemberg. At Lobo’s request, I continued on as Dean.

You redesigned the department and set up the dean’s office at the same time?

Yes, I worked a lot during that period. But since there were a lot of good people here in the department, I did not need to supervise my colleagues much. What took a lot of time, during Goldemberg’s tenure and then Lobo’s, was obtaining a large loan from the Inter-American Development Bank for the University.

To study malaria, I saw that we had to go to Rondônia and not just stay in São Paulo

With all of these management activities, did your lab work fall to the wayside?

I always continued working with my staff. My production level fell, of course, but never to zero.

After I was no longer the department head, I went to the Butantan Institute to direct it and then to the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). There were no crises while I was at Butantan. It was a quiet year.

Since I am a member of the Institute’s board, I had to take on the presidency two other times to calm people in moments of crisis. But it was only for two months each time.

What about during your time at CNPq? It was at the start of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first term as president. In the beginning, it was complicated because a lot of people rejected Roberto Amaral, the Minister of Science and Technology. The CNPq had no money and was not paying the funds it had granted. To our surprise, the President gave us the support we needed. When Robert obtained funds, the first thing I did was pay off all of the CNPq’s debts because I would have no credibility with the scientific community if I didn’t. Later, I could think pESQUISA FAPESP | 15

about future projects. It was a good strategy. In the end, Minister Roberto Amaral proved to be a great minister, sensible and competent. He gave me great support. We are friends even today.

Was the Lattes Platform [ for storing researcher CVs] created under your management?

It had already existed offline. Researchers had to download a program, fill in the data, and send it back. It was very complicated. We simplified the process and put it online. That was in 2004, shortly after I got there. At that time, we also created the Carlos Chagas Integrated Platform for use by researchers and for contact with the CNPq. Before CNPq, you spent time doing research in Rondônia. What was that experience like?

It was important. Before working there, in the 1980s, I took a post-doctoral position at the Pasteur Institute to learn more about molecular biology.

At the time, I was trying to determine what had become the largest challenge in parasitic diseases in Brazil. Chagas disease had been practically controlled. I concluded that the biggest problem was malaria as a result of the decision by the military government to promote the transfer of people from the south to the Amazon region. There was an increased incidence of cases, from 1 million to 1.5 million cases per year, just in Rondônia. When I came to the department at USP, I saw that we could not forget about malaria. We had to have a field project. We set up a project for the Amazon region and took advantage of the experience of Professor Marcos Boulos, who ran a research center in Rondônia. I proposed a joint project to Hildebrando, who was then at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. If need be, we could do the molecular biology research at Pasteur and in my lab, but the fieldwork would have to be done in Rondônia. I went in 1982, and the project began in 1990. The project was funded in part by the World Health Organization, by FINEP—to create the framework in Rondônia—and later we obtained a Pronex [Centers of Excellence Program] grant for the Rondônia project. The ideology of this process was “we need to participate in the national health program, and malaria is the best thing to work with.” There were two things to do. One was to better understand

Evaluating science using the impact factor is dangerous because the measurement is for different areas

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the epidemiology of the disease, and we published many papers on the topic. The second was to use molecular biology to clarify many unexplored aspects of the disease. It was a very successful project. The conditions were poor in the beginning.

As always, it was difficult to work in the Amazon, but we gradually obtained resources and made it work. My son Luís Marcelo and Marcelo Urbano Ferreira, now head of the USP Parasitology Department, became professors in the department and were allocated to the Rondônia project. Luís Marcelo is still there today.

You set up an outpost in Porto Velho?

The Rondônia state government had a Tropical Medicine Research Center (Cepem) in a hospital in the city of Porto Velho. We began working there. Later, we moved further inland. Luís Marcelo moved to Monte Negro, and Hildebrando continued on in Porto Velho. Hildebrand established a foundation there, of which I am a director. The second most important parasitic disease in the Amazon is leishmaniasis. However, there was not a single clinic in Rondônia to treat people with this disease. We established a clinic in Monte Negro and have already treated 5 million people because they come from all over the state. It is an official branch of the ICB. In parallel with this clinic, we continue to do research, and years ago, we published a very important article on asymptomatic malaria.

Why is asymptomatic malaria important?

We thought that prospectors were largely responsible for the spread of malaria. When they arrived in a new region, everyone caught malaria.

But it was not the prospectors who brought the malaria; it was the opposite. They mixed with the population who carried malaria and contracted the disease. We did not know this because no one knew that the people living along the river were infected. They were asymptomatic and lived normal lives. They developed a resistance to the plasmodium after contracting the disease repeatedly. It is not a sterile resistance. They contracted an attenuated form of the disease. The anti-malaria program recommended treating those with malaria. If you contracted malaria, you were treated. But it is better to treat those who do not have the disease because they are the reservoir of malaria. In a region of Porto Velho, Hildebrando clearly showed that treating asymptomatic individuals caused malaria to be weaker when it returned the following year.

Is treatment able to eliminate the parasite from the blood?

Yes, completely. But the person can contract another form of malaria.

Do you believe a vaccine is possible?

It would not be easy to produce a vaccine, principally due to the plasmodium’s polymorphism.

I agree with Victor and Ruth Nussenzweig that a vaccine will appear, but I do not know when.

What about for Chagas disease?

After World War II, DDT appeared and began to be used to fumigate houses and eliminate the vector, Triatoma infestans. In 1960, Chagas disease had virtually disappeared from the state of São Paulo but was still very common in the rest of the country. In the 1970s, we started holding meetings in Caxambu on Chagas disease as part of the Integrated Program on Endemic Diseases (PIDE), funded by the CNPq. The meetings involved everyone who was working on Chagas disease. This created an awareness in the scientific community of the importance of the disease. The results were great. Basic science researchers became aware of the importance of Chagas disease in Brazil and eventually convinced João Figueiredo’s military government to create a national program to combat the disease. It practically ended household transmission within a few years for less than $100 million. Today, the program is being adopted by all Latin American countries.

Brazil produces 2.3% of the world’s science, but this output has not yet had much impact. The average number of citations of Brazilian research is low. How can this be improved?

Let’s take Brazilian parasitology as an example.

Today, it oscillates between the second and third most productive in the world. The first is the United States, of course. The second is England. We compete with France for third place. Parasitology is Brazil’s top science. However, the global audience for parasitology is very small compared with that for cancer, for example. Work in parasitology or infectious diseases has a smaller impact because impact is measured by the number of readers and not the intrinsic quality of the work. Judging and evaluating science by the impact factor is very dangerous because very different areas are being compared.

What about your research today? What are you doing?

Let’s see if you can guess. Dengue fever? No. Schistosomiasis? No. I returned to the study of trypanosomes, but now only those of no medical importance. Today, I belong to a team that studies trypanosomes in wild animals and insects. We study the biodiversity and phylogenetic relationships of these trypanosomes. We work and collect material throughout the world: in Brazil; the Americas; and Madagascar, Africa. Samuel Pessôa did the same thing. After he retired, he went to the Butantan Institute and began studying ma-

laria in snakes. We also have studied trypanosomes in alligators, snakes, monkeys, rodents, and especially insects and bats.

Are you trying to trace the evolutionary history of these parasites?

Yes. Using molecular techniques, we have tried to trace the evolutionary history of trypanosomes. Let me give you an example. There is a trypanosome, T. erneyi, described by Professor Marta Teixeira, which infects bats in Africa. In Africa, parasites of the genus Trypanosoma cause sleeping sickness; here, they cause Chagas disease. The continents separated about 100 million years ago. The question is how did Trypanosoma cruzi appear in the Americas? It’s not the same as the African trypanosome. It’s different. The hypothesis was that the two existed on the ancient Gondwana supercontinent and that when it split, one was there, and one was here. Now that we have begun to study trypanosomes in bats from Brazil, Africa, and Europe, we have found a trypanosome just like the one causing Chagas disease in bats in Africa. British researchers, together with Marta Teixeira, have already published an article with a brand new hypothesis. Trypanosoma (Schizotrypanum) erneyi might be the T. cruzi of Africa and probably came here at some point carried by bats. They estimate that this occurred between 20 and 15 million years ago, when the continents were already separated. Another example of what we have been doing is related to trypanosomes in alligators and crocodiles. About 10 million years ago, the genus Crocodylus originated in Indochina, Indonesia, and crossed the Pacific Ocean, arriving in America.

In the Amazon, these reptiles met our alligator, the genus Caiman, and then went to Africa. Our studies on trypanosomes in alligators and crocodiles show that during their passage through the Americas, alligators and crocodiles exchanged trypanosomes.

Today, the trypanosomes of alligators and crocodiles are very similar, almost twins. These studies have given me much intellectual pleasure. I travel around the world and back to our laboratory, without any other commitments aside from research. There is no lack of resources: we have support from the CNPq, Pro-Africa, FAPESP, and USP. I continue to work, and it is a pleasure. I like to do research, and I no longer need to think about my career. n

Today, I belong to a team that studies trypanosomes in wild animals and insects

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Policy EDUCATION y

They enjoy

science and challenges Brazil’s progress in the science Olympiads motivates secondary school students and helps train new researchers Fabrício Marques Published in March - 2013

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ITA Professor Ronaldo Pelá (front) and two of his students, Ivan Guilhon (seated) and Cássio Sousa (standing): these students have won medals in Olympiads and enjoy research

s the first Brazilian to win a medal at the International Physics Olympiad, with a bronze in 2002 in Indonesia, Ronaldo Pelá, now 27, says that the experience of participating in science tournaments as a teenager had a major impact on his decision to become a researcher. Pelá is a professor in the Physics Department of the Aviation Technology Institute (ITA) in São José dos Campos. « The tournaments were decisive in helping me find my calling, » says Pelá, who completed his doctorate in 2011 with a grant from FAPESP. Participation in Olympiads during secondary school, he says, was a major incentive behind his quest for advanced knowledge and his growing enjoyment of intellectual challenges. Through the tournaments, he acquired valuable skills in many areas; in particular, he acquired skills that contributed to his science career. « The unrelenting routine of testing means that, at some point, you completely lose the fear of taking tests, » he recalls. Last year, Pelá received the Best Paper Award for Young Scientists at the International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors held at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. He is currently one of the leaders of the Semiconductor Materials and Nanotechnology Group (GMSN) at the ITA and is working on a simulation of magnetic semiconductor materials.

The GMSM, not coincidentally, has two undergraduate science students who have won a number of medals in science Olympiads. Pelá has always had an interest in meeting other pESQUISA FAPESP z 19

one bronze medal from the Brazilian Chemistry and Mathematical Olympiads. Cassio dos Santos Sousa, 19, a Brazilian from the state of São Paulo, is striking a balance between an academic career and private initiative. He believes that it is still too early to decide between these options. « Taking part in Olympiads gives you quite a head start, » says Cassio, who won a silver medal at the International Junior Science Olympiad in South Korea in 2008, a bronze at the International Physics Olympiad in Croatia in 2010 and a gold at the Brazilian Physics and Robotics Olympiad, to mention just a few. Cassio’s undergraduate science research is on graphane, a variant of graphene. « One common characteristic of the medalists is that they enjoy science and challenges. This kindles their desire to teach themselves and learn on their own, » says Lara Kühl Teles, a professor at ITA and one of the leaders, along with ITA Professor Marcelo Marques, of a research team that she established in 2007 under the Young Investigators in Emerging Institutions Program at FAPESP.

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medalists who study at the ITA, and a few years ago, he became one of the founders of a study group that assists the undergraduate students who are taking part in an annual tournament for young physicists at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (IFT) of the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Last year, engineering student Ivan Guilhon Mitoso Rocha, 21, won first place in the IFT tournament, and he says that he is leaning toward an academic career. « I want to do a masters degree in physics. Recently I completed an internship in information technology at a financial institution and concluded that it is not what I want to do in the future, » says Ivan, who is conducting undergraduate scientific research on the link among three materials: graphene, silicene and germanene. Originally from Fortaleza in the state of Ceará, Ivan’s collection of medals includes one silver from the International Physics Olympiad in Mexico in 2009, one gold from the the Brazilian Physics Olympiad and 20 z special issue July 2013

Students from over 1 100 countries participate in tests at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Amsterdam in 2011.

The Brazilian medalists become physicians, engineers and researchers

he ITA example shows how popular and important science Olympiads have become in Brazil. These regional Olympiads and the preparation of students for international tournaments, most often with support from universities, are boosting Brazil’s performance in terms of winning medals, which contrasts the country’s poor performance in international rankings for learning (see Pesquisa FAPESP No. 153). Professor Euclydes Marega Júnior from the São Carlos Institute of Physics at USP has helped organize the Brazilian Physics Olympiad for 14 years and prepares the national team for the international Olympiad in this subject area. The professor says, «We learn from experience and strengthen training for students. The performance of Brazilian students has improved significantly since Brazilian Ronaldo Pelá took the bronze medal in 2002. In the last two years we have won gold and silver medals. » » This performance has been repeated in other tournaments. In the International Mathematical Olympiad last year, Brazil took one gold medal, one silver and three bronze medals, which is an improvement over its performances in 2010 and 2011, when the country failed to win a single gold medal. In the 2012 International Chemistry Olympiad, Brazilians won one silver and three bronze medals.

Another example of Brazil’s increasingly professional approach to preparing competitors is found in a team of young engineers, mostly graduates of the Polytechnical School at USP, who founded a company to train the Brazilian teams for the International Junior Science Olympiad (IJSO) and the International Young Physicists

« Medalists like challenges and strive to learn on their own, » says Lara Kühl Teles of the ITA

PHOTOS: 1 AFP PHOTO/VALERIE KUYPERS 2 LÉO RAMOS

Tournament (IYPT). The B8 Educational Projects, the organization founded by the young engineers, build upon the experience of several of their members who competed in these Olympiads when they were in secondary school. « Stimulation and challenge is lacking for the brightest students, so we are helping to mitigate this problem, » says one of the members, electrical engineer Márcio Martino; Martino won a gold medal for Brazil at the IYPT as well as silver and bronze medals at the Brazilian Physics Olympiad. In 2007, the company established a national event at the IJSO to select the team for the international tournament, held in Iran last year. Brazil won one gold, three silver and two bronze medals, as well as its very first gold in the experimental tournament.

In 2011, the B8 Educational Projects group also began to organize the Brazilian IYPT event, with a new, nontraditional tournament format. In an auditorium in São Paulo, 20 teams from various cities in Brazil took practical tests in which one team tries to solve a problem, the second team questions the solution and a third questions and evaluates the performance of the first two, all under the supervision of a panel of judges. Each of the five best teams sends one representative to the International Tournament.

Of course, it is not just the academic environment that benefits from these talents. « We have

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medalists who have become physicians, engineers, educators, and then there are those who have pursued an academic career, » says Nelly Carvajal, Secretary of the Brazilian Mathematical Olympiad (OBM), organized by the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA). IMPA itself has profited from these talents. The coordinator of the OBM, Carlos Gustavo Moreira, age 40, won the gold medal in China in 1990 and the bronze in Germany in 1989 in the International Mathematical Olympiad. Mathematician Artur Ávila, who divides his time between IMPA and the Jussieu Mathematics Institute in Paris, won the gold in the tournament in Canada in 1995. Ávila has been mentioned as a candidate for the Fields Medal, the highest award for mathematicians under 40 years old.

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Matheus Camacho, who won Brazil’s very first gold medal at the International Junior Science Olympiad in Iran, complains that the elementary school content is repetitive

o be sure, recognition in an international Olympiad has become a powerful credential that can lead to scholarships at excellent secondary schools and job offers after graduation. « Olympiads have proven to be an excellent way to select the best candidates, and major companies and research institutions worldwide recognize this, » says Ricardo Anido, professor at the Unicamp Institute of Computing. Anido helps organize the Brazilian Computer Society’s Informatics Olympiad and university informatics marathons; he also helps prepare the Brazilian team for the International Olympiad in Informatics. Anido observes that jobs in conglomerates such as Google and Facebook are the most attractive to medalists. « Companies compete for talented professionals and some act in a manner that I consider unethical. Until recently, a large company customarily invited all the finalists from the Brazilian Programming Marathon to internships, even though a competitor sponsored the marathon. They’ve now stopped doing it, » says Anido.

Gabriel Dalalio, 21, is in his final year of computer engineering at the ITA and is currently spending three months in California on an internship with Facebook. « I plan to work as a programmer and am evaluating the experience in the United States to decide whether to stay here or work in Brazil, » says Gabriel, who has won bronze medals in two editions of the International Olympiad in Informatics. « I put it on my resume and indicated that I would take part in the global marathon in July, in Russia. My supervisor at Facebook said that he too would be going to the marathon. They focus on people who do well in computer studies. They know exactly what a bronze medal is, » says Gabriel.

One common trait seen in many medalists is their willingness to help the younger students who are new to Olympiad tournaments. Ricardo pESQUISA FAPESP z 21

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Gustavo Haddad Braga has seven international medals; he left the School of Medicine at USP when he was accepted at MIT

Anido says that he usually invites prize-winning students to help prepare the questions for the tests, and they are always ready and willing. « I recently spent four days in a small city poring over questions for the Brazilian Informatics Olympiad. In the end, they were the ones who were thanking me, » Anido says. Regis Prado Barbosa, a 22-year-old student from Ceará studying computer engineering at the ITA discovered his vocation as a math teacher while helping to prepare secondary school students for the International Mathematical Olympiad. Barbosa participated in several editions of the tournament, taking two silver medals—in Vietnam in 2007 and in Spain in 2008—along with a bronze medal in Slovenia in 2006. « I was impressed with this experience. I enjoy creating difficult problems and find it even more rewarding when I see a student who comes up with a solution that is better than mine. I chose computer engineering to broaden my horizons, but

Brazilian medalists Brazil’s achievements in the international science Olympiads Gold

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I discovered that I really like teaching, » he says.

However, the organizers of the Brazilian Olympiad have one major concern: the medalists tend to leave Brazil once they graduate. « We’re losing talent, » says Euclydes Marega Júnior. « We organize the Olympiads, help identify talented people early on, and then they go and apply to foreign universities such as Harvard and MIT, and they are accepted, » he complains. « It’s relatively easy for medalists to get scholarships to the École Polytechnique and go study in France, and they get a grant of €1,000 a month. They take our talented students for €1,000! We need to figure out how to keep them in Brazil. They need incentives to stay. It’s not only about scholarships: they also need to be offered challenges that they can delve into, in addition to good tutors, » he says.

Ricardo Anido believes that medalists should be permitted to enter Brazilian universities without being required to take the college entrance exam. « It would be an incentive for them to stay.

Foreign universities admit them based solely on a review of their résumés, » he says.

Gustavo Haddad Braga, an 18-year-old student, has one of the largest collections of medals in the country. He holds 50 Brazilian and seven international medals, including a gold medal from the International Physics Olympiad held in Thailand in 2011. He recently left Brazil to study at the undergraduate level at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Raised in São José dos Campos, he spent six months studying medicine at USP while he waited to see whether he would be accepted at MIT. He was accepted and received a scholarship from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) to study in the United States at the undergraduate level. He was very much looking forward to studying abroad

even before his performance in the Olympiad in secondary school. « The first time I ever heard of MIT was in the seventh grade when I met the father of a student who had been accepted at MIT. I thought to myself: MIT must be a great place, » he recalls. He still does not know if he will study computers or electrical engineering at MIT; he will not decide until after his first year there. However, he plans to return to Brazil after graduating. With entrepreneurial enthusiasm, he and some classmates helped establish three promising business ventures: one is a site with tips on how to apply to universities in the United States; another is a service that connects students with strong skills to companies interested in sponsoring them to study abroad—in exchange, these companies take on the students as interns once they complete their studies; and the third is an application that discreetly connects Facebook friends who are seeking a boyfriend or girlfriend. The idea for this service emerged last year, when Braga competed in a programming and entrepreneurship tournament in Miami, where he won a $50,000 prize that he invested in the business.

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fotos 1 CLAYTON DE SOUZA / ESTADÃO 2 facebook

he personal experiences of a medalist in a science Olympiad are unusual. Gustavo Haddad Braga, for example, has been to countries that very few people his age have visited. Among the places where he has participated in Olympiads are countries such as South Korea, Azerbaijan, China, Croatia, Poland and Thailand. The study routine is arduous and requires both time and interest to master content that is generally explored only in higher education. The youngest star among the Brazilian medalists attracts attention precisely because he manages advanced knowledge so easily. Matheus

2

Camacho, 14, won a gold medal at the International Junior Science Olympiad, held in Iran in DeA medalists’ cember. He answered all study routine is of the questions correctly for the practical test on a arduous and DNA electrophoresis experiment (a technique for requires both separating molecules) including physics, chemistime and try and biology. He also interest to won silver in the individual general categomaster content ry, in which a student’s performance is evaluated using three tests: objective, discursive theory and experimental.

This feat is impressive because Camacho is a student who just began his ninth year in middle school (the other two members of his team were secondary school students). His first contact with chemistry and biology content was just last year, but he was already familiar with physics from studying on his own. Matheus, of course, likes to study, but his relationship with school is ambiguous. In the morning, he attends ninth grade classes at Colégio Objetivo in São Paulo, but he finds them very repetitive, especially physics, chemistry and biology. He feels that the only class in which he is learning new things is Portuguese, which, he admits, is not his favorite subject. He spends part of his afternoons as well as his Saturdays attending advanced preparatory classes for Olympiads at the same school. His subjects include differential calculus, which he considers to be challenging. At night, he studies for an hour or two, but it is important for him to stay in touch with the friends from the elementary school where he started. He also exercises daily and has been a fan of the Beatles since childhood. Simone, his mother, says, « He complained that he was not interested in school because he considered it repetitive. » His father, Carlos Henrique, a colonel in the Army, says, « We try to give him the support he needs. If he asks for a book, I buy it. When he told me confidently that he was going to Iran, even before he was chosen for the last national team, I admired his conviction and I knew that ITA student I had to encourage him, for sure. Deep down, I Gabriel Dalalio think he already knew he would meet his goal. » in San Francisco. « I have met people from all over the world, and The bronze medal it has been a very interesting experience, » says that he won at the Informatics Olympiad Matheus. He does not yet know what he wants was his passport to study, but he does enjoy surfing the Harvard to a three-month and MIT web sites and keeps both institutions internship with on his radar screen. n Facebook pESQUISA FAPESP z 23

Geosciences y

The essence

of rocks

USP starts using a new electronic microprobe to analyze chemical elements in minerals Marcos de Oliveira

Published in January- 2013

24 z special issue July 2013

Images Microprobe laboratory at IGc-USP

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he newest version of a device that gained notoriety among geologists when Apollo astronauts brought rocks back from the Moon between 1969 and 1972 is now up and running in a custom-built facility at the Geosciences Institute (IGc) of the University of São Paulo (USP). The electronic microprobe is a research instrument capable of quickly identifying and quantifying the chemical elements in a mineral, which became important immediately after the Moon missions, when NASA sent samples to institutions around the world. Knowing whether a rock contains calcium, iron, or any type of rare earth is important not only for learning more about the geologic properties of a given place but also for determining whether any valuable materials for mining or other industrial purposes can be found there.

This knowledge can also be used in metallurgy to analyze the components of metallic alloys or even to reveal the chemical details of how teeth are formed.

The equipment, purchased from one of its two manufacturers, the Japanese company Jeol (the other is Cameca in France), cost US$ 1.6 million and was fully funded by FAPESP. It will replace and upgrade a microprobe purchased in 1992 with money from a funding program by USP and the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB), with supplemental funding from FAPESP. The older device had replaced an American model from 1971, the first ever installed in Brazil, which was fully funded by the IDB. Its data-capturing process was complicated and hand-operated, and it recorded information on

Images obtained with the microprobe, using wavelength-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy.

A silicate mineral sample with aluminum (in blue, top image) and calcium (in green, bottom image) is shown pESQUISA FAPESP  z  25

Sand cushion

To house the new microprobe, a new, 90-m2 laboratory had to be built on the ground floor of the IGc. The new equipment is more sensitive, and it required a setting in which it would receive no interference from the magnetic fields produced by the institute’s other equipment. The microprobe stands 1.8 meters high and is connected to a table with supporting equipment and three viewing screens on which the results can be observed. The apparatus sits on a type of cushion, consisting of a sandfilled hole that is one meter deep and was designed to absorb the vibrations produced by automobile traffic near the 26 z special issue July 2013

The microprobe is used by master’s and doctoral students, but is also used in studies by companies, including Vale and Petrobras

building. The microprobe is also encased in a Faraday cage, a type of metal framework that provides electrostatic shielding.

Opened on December 14, 2012, the new laboratory is ready to efficiently receive the partners and inquiries that used to be directed at the older microprobes. “We provide services to mining companies like CPRM and especially Vale, which demands a wide diversity

of mineral products,” Gomes says. “We also conduct studies for Petrobras.”

The fees for these services are used to maintain the laboratory. However, the microprobe’s most frequent users over the years, according to Professor Celso Gomes, are master’s and doctoral students. They schedule dates and times to use the equipment, coming not only from USP but also from the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), and the federal universities in the states of Paraná (UFPR), Pernambuco (UFPE) and Bahia (UFBA). “We also receive researchers from several Latin American countries and from Mozambique and Angola, in Africa,” says Gomes. “With the new equipment, I would like to make arrangements for studies in odontology, to analyze the distribution of chemical elements in teeth and study how nature handles teething,” he affirms.

“Having a new microprobe is excellent,” says Professor Marcos Aurélio Farias de Oliveira of the Geosciences and Exact Sciences Institute at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), in the city of Rio Claro. “It has more features and enables us to complete experiments in less time. Its predecessor was already quite good, but it had to be shut down for maintenance more often and the waiting

Element composition Microprobe images show chemical zoning within a mineral On the right is a grain of britholite, a mineral that contains calcium phosphate.

The colored X-ray images quantify the presence of specific chemical elements.

The shades of gray show the presence of calcium in the darker areas

5µm (micrometers) LESS

MORE

Silicon

Calcium

Phosphorus

Calcium Images John Wolff/Washington State University

punch cards in a computer attached to the machine, which is still stored at the IGc. The oldest apparatus had three X-ray spectrometers, while the new one has five such spectrometers attached to the microprobe. This type of spectrometer analyzes the chemical elements present in a mineral by reading the wavelength generated by an electron gun when the beam hits the sample. The result is X-ray radiation with the specific wavelength irradiated by the material under analysis. The wavelength is captured by a crystal inside the microprobe, which matches it to a chemical element and recognizes its intensity at specific points of the sample.

“Operating the first device was very difficult, and preparing and analyzing the sample was a complicated and lengthy process; the second one already had five spectrometers and the most recent one allows a more automated analysis, with better resolution in the graphical interface and brighter images. It will be possible to get better quality photos of minerals such as those containing manganese or cadmium, which can emit light when an electron beam is aimed at them. Also important is the fact that the vacuum conditions in which the electron beam is emitted are more sophisticated now, without the electrons being absorbed by air molecules before they hit the sample,” says Celso de Barros Gomes, Professor Emeritus of the IGc, who installed and directed the Institute’s Electronic Microprobe Laboratory and was responsible for purchasing the three devices in 1971, 1992 and 2012. “It’s a historical cycle,” he says.

Photos Eduardo Cesar

1

1 Microprobe (in the back) and the screens and devices that make up the full apparatus

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2 Glass slide with rock substrate prepared for analysis

line could take up to six months,” says Oliveira. “For about three years, it was the only one in the country available for academic studies, as all the other ones, like the one at the University of Brasília [UnB], were out of order,” he explains.

He mentions that the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and UnB recently bought their own microprobes and that Unesp has already approved the purchase of one, to be funded by the Brazilian Innovation Agency (Finep), under the Ministry of Science and Technology.

“Today the microprobe is part of the scientific culture of geology,” says Celso de Barros Gomes, from USP

GENETIC INFORMATION

The central purpose of academic microprobes is training new geologists, as this type of equipment is also used by major industries such as metallurgy. In addition, training qualified professionals is especially important when companies such as Petrobras and Vale are expanding. “Element quantification is the driver of geology. Quantification makes it possible to determine the pressure and temperature conditions at which these minerals were formed, many kilometers under the surface.

This is like genetic information about

the chemical composition of the material you are analyzing,” says Gomes. In applications related to ore content, this and other information obtained using the microprobe is very important in making an accurate assessment of a mine’s potential yield. The data also support its installation and indicate the necessary infrastructure for a mining operation.

To begin to analyze rock samples collected in the field, microprobe users prepare their specimens — with the

help of a technician, in USP’s case — by cutting them into slices just micrometers thick (a micrometer is one thousandth of a millimeter). This thin layer of rock is attached with transparent glue to a glass slide, which is inserted in the microprobe. Then, the specimen is worn down until it is practically incorporated into the glass. The sample is first examined under an optical microscope to measure its thickness, which should be in the range of 30 to 40 micrometers. It is subsequently placed in a device called a metalizer, where it receives a coating of carbon that turns the material into a conductor.

“When we have an unknown sample whose minerals we have not identified, we use the technique called energydispersive spectroscopy (EDS), which allows us to scan for every chemical element in the periodic table and specify if that material is a feldspar, for instance, or some other type of mineral,” says Professor Celso Gomes. It is possible to identify a mineral based on its chemical composition. To quantify elements or determine the percentage of specific elements such as silicon, iron, aluminum, or magnesium in each rock, the geologists set the microprobe to use wavelength dispersive spectroscopy (WDS), which not only meets that main objective but can also indicate the conditions under which the material was formed.

“Today, these techniques are well known and disseminated, but in the past, when microprobes first became commercially available in the 1960s and 1970s, it was difficult to convince the academic community of their importance. And the fundamental effect of that persuasion was to disseminate the technique through data presented in congresses and conferences, as well as courses and internships, and through the publication of papers,” says Gomes.

“We started a persuasion process forty years ago and now the microprobe is part of the scientific culture of Brazilian geology,” he affirms. n Project MUE: Acquisition of a new electronic microprobe for the Geosciences Institute at USP – No. 2009/53835-7; Grant mechanism Multi-User Equipment Program; Coordinator Celso de Barros Gomes – USP; Investment R$473,729.58 and US$ 1,662,330.00 (FAPESP).

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Media y

A more open science The editor-in-chief of Nature and a director of the Royal Society meet at FAPESP to discuss the challenges and limitations of open access to scientific data Bruno de Pierro Published in March - 2013

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pen access to data has no value in itself because open science is more than simply the availability of scientific data.”

This assessment is that of British physicist Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals.

During a brief trip to São Paulo, Campbell participated in a conference entitled “Science as an Open Enterprise: Open Data for Open Science,” which took place on February 25th at FAPESP. Before a full auditorium, the participants discussed the challenges and changes to open access to scientific data. It was during the event that Foundation scientific director Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz addressed the prospects of open access to scientific data in Brazil. José Arana Varela, chief executive officer of FAPESP’s Executive Board, and Martyn Poliakoff, foreign affairs secretary for the Royal Society, served as mediators.

The discussion concerned a Royal Society report published in June 2012 in which the world’s oldest scientific society highlighted the need to broach the issue of open access to scientific data, now accessible in ever greater quantities, albeit not always intelligible or of interest to researchers. “Rapid technological change has given rise to new forms of access, storage, handling and transmission of collections of data that stimulate new modes of communication and collaboration,” says Poliakoff. The study was prompted in 2009 by a debate in the United Kingdom involving

28 z special issue July 2013

hacked emails from climatologists that were eventually published. In this case, the messages suggested that a scientist had sought to conceal data countering global warming claims. An investigation ruled out the notion of falsification, but the case gave rise to debates concerning the need for a more open atmosphere surrounding the scientific profession.

Campbell explained that scientific data should be not only merely accessible but also rendered comprehensible and useful. Noting one of the reasons for not delaying open access to data, the physicist emphasized his hope of encouraging the public’s trust in science through the replication and duplication of research findings. Open access, according to Campbell, can also help to counter academic dishonesty and to encourage public participation in the sciences.

The Royal Society report presents an example of such public collaboration. In 2011, an outbreak of intestinal Escherichia coli spread from Germany to the rest of Europe, infecting approximately 400,000 people. Doctors in Hamburg were unable to find a solution because, upon initial examination, the bacteria resembled those of other strains.

The problem was resolved only when data on the genome of the E. coli strain were published on the Internet and made available to researchers everywhere. Soon afterwards, approximately 200 scientific reports were published presenting suggestions on how to curb the epidemic.

Technology provided new modes of scientific communication and collaboration, the report shows

Photo Léo Ramos

Campbell, from Nature (at left) and Poliakoff from the Royal Society: open access can increase the public’s participation in the sciences

According to Martyn Poliakoff, the Royal Society representative, “the information we have today determines how scientists must adapt to technological, social and political changes in a manner that profoundly affects the way in which science is conducted and communicated.” The chemist also talked about his work with PeriodicVideos (www.periodicvideos.com), a program that distributes entertaining science-related videos.

The program began in 2008, thanks to a partnership between the University of Nottingham and the BBC of London.

Three modes

In addition to the publication of research data, another topic of discussion during the meeting was the use and diffusion of tools for accessing papers published in scientific journals. Campbell noted the three modes of open publication of articles: one that allows free and open access to the paper within six to 12 months after its publication; a second, in which the paper can be accessed from the time it is published; and, finally, a hybrid model that allows open access to only a portion of the paper once the author has paid a fee for its immediate issue. When asked whether open access to data can affect

scientific communication, especially lay science journalism, Campbell responded that he did not believe the system would necessarily improve the process of communication. According to Campbell, it does not matter whether articles are freely accessible or available only to those who pay a fee because the best journals will always evaluate and publish the best data. What may happen, he went on to say, is that a journal that makes its content freely available will receive feedback on its content in the form of comments and corrections more promptly, thereby contributing to the quality of particular papers upon publication. “Freely accessed content might be a little better (as compared to content openly available only after payment of a fee),” says Campbell.

Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, FAPESP’s scientific director, reminded the audience that the debate surrounding open access to data is not an entirely new one, citing Brazilian data banks available through the Internet. He went on to mention the freely accessible information made available by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and the Lattes Platform of the National Council for Scientific and

Technological Development (CNPq), providing academic information from more than 174,000 researchers. Brito Cruz also pointed to FAPESP’s Scientific Electronic Library (SciELO), a virtual source that provides free and open access to 270 Brazilian journals and receives about one million hits a day. “It’s an important mechanism that contributes to increasing the visibility of Brazilian science throughout the world.”

Another important development was the agreement signed two years ago to create a repository for all articles related to FAPESP-financed research. These articles would be made available in accordance with the norms of the journal in which a particular paper is published.

The repository is scheduled to be operational by the second half of this year.

Philip Campbell noted that although he was not familiar with Brazil’s current science agenda, he nonetheless recognizes the county’s efforts to position itself internationally. By way of example, Campbell mentioned FAPESP’s backing of research projects linking scientists and businesses. “I believe that this sort of financing is valuable, besides encouraging a link between universities and industry,” he said. n pESQUISA FAPESP z 29

Science Medicine y

Remarkable letter carriers Synthetic particles reduce toxicity and augment the action of drugs against cancer Carlos Fioravanti

An artistic representation of a network of arteries.

IMAGE PASIEKA / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / SPL RF / LATINSTOCK

Published in February - 2013

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wenty-one years ago, when Dr. Raul Maranhão presented his cancer treatment strategy—based on artificial, compact, cholesterol particles—in national and international scientific journals, he did not imagine that he would encounter so many surprises, disappointments, setbacks and detours in moving his idea forward. Systematically, he ​​experimented using animal models and then on limited groups of people with cancer, concluding that lipid nanoemulsions (known as LDEs) could act as a drug platform. LDEs would be able to carry drugs to predefined targets and reduce toxicity, which is a serious problem and very common in anti-cancer therapies. Often, the unwanted effects of these therapies are severe enough to limit their use, forcing a reduction in dosage or cessation of treatment. “We mastered some chemotherapeutics,” said Dr. Maranhão, with equanimity earlier this year from his basement office at the University of São Paulo (USP) Heart Institute (Incor).

He then brought up on his computer screen a table summarizing the undesirable side effects that arose in 46 people treated with carmustine, a highly toxic anti-tumor drug, combined with spheres of artificial cholesterol. With this treatment, the most common side effects—such as nausea, vomiting, alopecia (hair loss), anemia, severe loss of immune cells and hepatic or renal changes evaluated at grades 1, 2 and 3—were minimal, even at a dosage of 350 milligrams, nearly three times more than the dosage normally administered. “The results are very consistent, with no loss of pharmacological action,” he says.

Making these strategies work is not easy. There is a global battle to reduce drug toxicity, which could result in more treatment options for physicians and less discomfort for people undergoing treatment. Teams from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and the Butantan Institute are also making progress with other types of particles that are proving effective in improving the action of drugs and vaccines. In each case, new combinations must pass all the safety and toxicity tests in animal models and in humans, and if

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PRINCIPAL DESTINATIONS Concentration of cholesterol particles (LDE) with taxol, labeled with radioactive elements in the tissues and organs of mice 6.000 5.000 4.000 3.000 2.000 1.000 0 cpm/g*

Liver

Tumor

Kidney

Spleen

Intestine

Heart

Lung

Testicle

Brain

Skin

* Cpm / g: particle radioactivity per gram of tissue

they perform satisfactorily in all of these experiments, they will be approved for widespread use.

Dr. Maranhão had to overcome many scientific, technical and bureaucratic obstacles before successfully concentrating the drug-containing spheres in tumors (see graph above). Cholesterol-rich LDEs, with a structure similar to low density lipoprotein (LDL) and a diameter of 20 to 60 nanometers (one nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter), are captured by cells through LDL receptors, which are abundant in tumor cells. “We deceived the tumor cells by providing a raw material they need in order to multiply, combined with a drug that will destroy them,” he says.

Two other anti-tumor drugs, paclitaxel (Taxol) and etoposide, provided them with more work to do. With Hélio Stefani, a colleague from the USP School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Dr. Maranhão soaked the LDE spheres with fatty acids to augment the adherence of the anti-tumor drugs.

“In tests in mice and people with cancer,” he said, “the toxicity decreased dramatically.” However, this does not always work. In fact, the toxicity of methotrexate did not decrease when combined with LDE spheres. “I cannot explain why, but it may be possible to reduce the dosage, since the combination with the LDEs augments the absorption of the drug by tumor cells.”

Testing in hospitals

Intense scientific work and the results of initial clinical trials conducted since 1990 on approximately 200 people have served as the motivation behind two broader clinical trials that are in progress at public hospitals in the city of São Paulo. In one study, 23 people, after undergoing other treatments for prostate, breast, ovarian and lung cancer, some with bone metastases, 32 z special issue July 2013

are now receiving Taxol and LDE at the Arnaldo Vieira de Carvalho Cancer Institute. In two men, the level of prostate specific antigen (PSA) decreased from 100 to 10 nanograms per deciliter of blood, indicating the regression of prostate cancer after seven months of treatment, according to Dr. Sylvia Graziani, a physician at the Institute’s oncology clinic. “In ovarian and breast cancers, we observed a stabilization of the disease and a significant improvement in clinical status due to the absence of adverse effects common to chemotherapy,” she says. “I saw a number of patients having lunch while undergoing chemotherapy,” says Dr. Maranhão. The medications used to prevent vomiting, a common side effect of treatment, have been eliminated.

“LDEs have a high affinity for inflamed tissues and areas of intense cell division,” says Dr. Maranhão. This characteristic led to other potential uses, such as treating atherosclerosis, a chronic inflammatory disease characterized by the buildup of fatty plaque in the arteries and veins. In one experiment, the arteries of rabbits with cholesterol plaques, somewhat similar to tumors, absorbed three times more LDEs than other tissues or organs. “The LDEs with paclitaxel cleaned the rabbit arteries,” he said, as he showed a succession of photos and graphics. The information he collected was used as the basis for testing the safety of combining taxol with LDE in a group of 10 people selected for treatment at the Dante Pazzaneze Institute of Cardiology in São Paulo. The results, detailed in an article in the final stages of preparation, indicate that this strategy can reduce the inflammation that accompanies the formation of fatty plaques in the coronary arteries of people who have already suffered a heart attack. “We have almost zero toxicity,” he

IMAGES 1 LQES / UNICAMP 2 & 3 INCOR / USP

SOURCE LIPID LABORATORY / INCOR-USP

Carbon nanotubes activate immune cells and augment the response to antigens

concludes. This evidence is also impressive because it supports the use of an anti-tumor agent such as taxol to treat heart disease.

New vaccines in sight

Special vehicles: purified carbon nanotubes (in red) and lipid nanoemulsion alone (left) and with methotrexate (right).

1

Particles that carry drugs can do more than expected, and they can change other characteristics that often hinder drug efficacy. The Unicamp team of Chemist Oswaldo Alves has apparently overcome a limitation of camptothecin, an antitumor agent that is difficult to apply because of its insolubility, according to tests performed on tumor cells at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp).

“We made a slurry with silica nanoparticles, and the camptothecin entered the cells as if it were soluble,” says Amauri Jardim de Paula, one of the Alves researchers. “Today, we can synthesize nanostructures with a high degree of control over the chemical and physical properties on the surface and inside so that the surface can attract and the interior repel water molecules.”

In the cover story of the October 2012 issue of the Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society, Alves makes an important statement concerning the safety of using mesoporous silica nanoparticles: these nanostructures do not destroy red blood cells under real-life conditions when immersed in plasma, regardless of the electrical charge on the surface of the particles; previous studies performed on a cell solution have suggested that this could be the case.

A type of nanostructured porous silica called SBA-15 is proving effective in transporting vac-

2

cines orally, according to studies conducted since 2002 in collaboration with the University of São Paulo, the Butantan Institute and the Laboratório Cristália. Tests with the hepatitis B vaccine in mice indicate that viral antigens carried by silica spheres were able to pass through the extremely acidic environment of the stomach, which most proteins cannot withstand, and be absorbed in the intestines.

“We are now in the process of planning tests on human volunteers,” says Osvaldo Sant’Anna, a Butantan researcher who is excited about the possibility of expanding oral vaccinations that are currently limited to the Sabin polio vaccine.

He believes that if the tests go forward with positive results, silica particles could carry more than one vaccine at a time, in a manner more benign to the body than current techniques of application (injections), and they could yield considerable savings by eliminating the use of needles and syringes. These silica particle-based delivery vehicles could also increase the number of people vaccinated and enable the application of doses smaller than those presently administered.

Diego Stéfani Teodoro Martinez, of the Alves team, prepared carbon nanotubes of 10 to 40 nanometers in diameter and up to 10 micrometers in length soaked in antigens. This combination increased the body’s response compared to the response induced by antigens alone in preliminary tests in mice at the Butantan Institute, in partnership with Sant’Anna. “Nanotubes apparently have an immunostimulatory effect,” says Martinez, “possibly because they activate macrophages, a type of immune cell, and the release of cytokines,” which are the communication molecules of the immune system.

Other combinations of carriers and drugs may also yield impressive results. Unicamp, USP and

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34 z special issue July 2013

IMAGES 1 LQES ​​/ UNICAMP 2 & 3 INCTTOX / THE BUTANTAN INSTITUTE

Unesp groups coordinated by Wagner Fávaro and to the BCG vaccine, the best available treatment Nelson Duran, both of Unicamp, were able to re- against this disease, as detailed in an article pubduce the dosage of the P-MAPA immunomodula- lished in the June 2012 issue of the journal Infector agent by a factor of approximately 10 without tious Agents and Cancer.

Results that now appear simple to understand a loss of efficacy against bladder cancer by using a commercial polymer known as poloxamer or were, at first, difficult to interpret. In 2006, Ospluronic in preliminary tests in animal models. waldo Alves was faced with the following di“The pluronic must have facilitated the entry lemma: should I purchase or synthesize the carof the P-MAPA into the layer of cells lining the bon nanotubes? He decided to buy them, but he inside of the urinary bladder,” says Fávaro. “It’s noted that the nanotube sample was not a pure an excellent result.” If confirmed in future stud- substance, as it should be, and this caused Alves ies, this effect may allow a considerable savings in to doubt the results of the experiments—positive drug costs and improve drug action, in addition or negative—uncertain whether the outcomes he to reducing the risk of any toxic effects. The P- observed were caused by the action of the nanotubes or the impurities.

MAPA and LDE spheres apparently “Purity has been a nedo not lead to adverse reactions, nor glected subject,” he says. do they present health risks, accord“Because of the rush to ing to the tests performed thus far.

“Almost no one publish results, almost In studies conducted at Unicamp is questioning no one is questioning and Colorado State University in the the origin of the nanoUS—with funding from the research the origin structure samples used network Farmabrasilis, FAPESP, the National Council for Scientific and purity of the in experiments; there is an assumption [that] they and Technological Development are pure.” Alves and his (CNPq), the US National Institutes nanostructure group developed their of Health (NIH) and Unesp of Botsamples used own purification techucatu—P-MAPA has been shown to and they now rehalt the progression of bladder canin experiments,” niques, move 98% of the metallic cer and slow the growth of bacterial and carbonaceous resicolonies that cause tuberculosis in says Alves due from the imported animal models. In studies on rats nanomaterials. The rewith bladder cancer, P-MAPA exsulting purified substanchibited superior efficacy compared es from Unicamp’s Solid State Chemistry Laboratory are so different from the original that they have been named LQES-1 and LQES-2. Another ongoing challenge, he said, is “to identify other chemists, physicists, biologists and physicians who want to work with nanostructures and believe that it is possible to bring quality to Brazilian science.”

“We cannot move forward alone,” says Dr. Maranhão, who has also faced many dilemmas. One of them was where to publish the results: “if I reveal too much, having sought the most widely read journals, I could be pushed aside by other groups, which could advance more quickly”.

Deciding not to publish was not feasible because publishing scientific articles affords researchers visibility and credibility. The solution he found was to publish in medical journals of medium impact “without much fanfare.”

When Dr. Maranhão started, there were no patent laws for new drugs. At that time, the concept of medical nanotechnology did not exist, and the national companies were not interested in developing national drugs in Brazil. He tried a 1 few foreign companies, hoping to find partners

2

Two types of mesoporous silica nanoparticles: one type from Unicamp, with pores that repel water and a surface that attracts water (opposite page); and another type from Butantan-USP, with hexagonal pores (above, left) and in the shape of cylindrical tubes (right).

that would help in the production and development of nanoparticles, but company mergers and acquisitions disrupted the negotiations. Dr. Maranhão saw that he would have to set up and install his own production laboratory next to his room at InCor, and he paid a fortune for imported chemotherapy even as India and China began to sell at much lower prices. “It’s a chess game,” he says. “Often, the strategy precedes the science.”

The next battle

Dr. Maranhão explored areas unknown to him and formed teams, another risk, because the pace of the work and the methodological rigor of the group members may differ. “Luckily I’ve never had problems with my collaborators,” he says, “and I owe a lot to my medical colleagues and professors, such as Sylvia Graziani, Noedir Stolf, Vânia Hungria, Eloisa Bonfá, Roberto Hegg, Jesus Carvalho, Durvanei Maria and many others who have collaborated on this project for many years and whose work is of the highest quality.”

Yes, he says he did have problems with the necessarily anonymous reviewers of his funding requests, who criticized his lack of focus— because the research involved exploring other LDE medical applications—or asked for details that he did not have or that did not concern him.

“We are our own executioners,” says another USP professor who has followed Dr. Maranhão’s work for many years.

To anyone who has discovered an apparently fantastic molecule and thinks the next stages of research and development will be simple, Dr. Maranhão’s message is: “Do not be overly ambitious. If you really want to accept this challenge, you must be in it for the long haul.” The work is not over yet; the next battle in sight will be to register the LDE drug combinations with government regulators.

3

“In the United States,” he says, “since we have already made the medical and scientific arguments, and given the urgency of finding new drugs against cancer, our registration request could easily be fast-tracked.” Fast-track is a fast and simplified method for obtaining approval on new drugs—a process that has been adopted by the US federal government. In Brazil, there is no fast-track, and the registration process usually requires a lot of paperwork and takes many years before the final stamp-of-approval is obtained.

A Brazilian company is reported to have sent 70 kilos of documents to the agency responsible for this area in Brasilia and waited seven years to register a Brazilian drug similar to Viagra. n

Projects 1. Lipid nanoparticles: applications in the study of the physiopathology, diagnosis and therapeutics of degenerative diseases - No. 06/58917-3; Grant Mechanisms Thematic Project; Coordinators Raul Cavalcante Maranhão (USP); Investments R$1,406,940.52 (FAPESP).

2. New therapeutic strategies for non-muscle invasive urinary bladder cancer - No. 12/20706-2; Grant Mechanisms Regular Line of Research Project Award; Coordinators Wagner José Fávaro (Unicamp); Investments R$133,260.00 (FAPESP).

3. Production of mesoporous silica nanostructures to transport hydrophobic antitumor agents - No. 09/10056-8. Grant Mechanisms Doctorate; Coordinators Amauri Jardim de Paula (Unicamp); Investments R$110,201.13 (FAPESP)

Scientific articles FÁVARO, W.J. et al. Effects of P-MAPA immunomodulator on toll-like receptors and p53: potential therapeutic strategies for infectious diseases and cancer. Infectious Agents and Cancer. v. 7, No. 14. 2012 (online).

KRETZER, I.F. et al. Drug-targeting in combined cancer chemotherapy: tumor growth inhibition in mice by association of paclitaxel and etoposide with a cholesterol-rich nanoemulsion. Cellular Oncology. v.

6, pp. 451-60. 2012.

PAULA, A.J. et al. Suppression of the hemolytic effect of mesoporous silica nanoparticles after protein corona interaction: independence of the surface microchemical environment. Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society. v. 23, No. 10, pp. 1807-14. 2012.

pESQUISA FAPESP z 35

Astronomy y

Stars that the wind blew out Gas expelled by stellar explosions interrupted the growth of dwarf galaxies Igor Zolnerkevic Published in January - 2013

Fornax, at the top of the page: one of 26 dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way 36 z special issue July 2013

ESO / Digitized Sky Survey 2

T

here is something mysterious about the evolution of dwarf galaxies. Astronomers have encountered a much smaller number of these small clusters of stars than expected, given the current Big Bang theory of how the universe was formed by an explosion 13.7 billion years ago. For this reason, astronomers believe that either there is something wrong with this theory—an option increasingly less accepted by experts—or something happened during the formation of these galaxies that left them so empty of stars that even the most powerful telescopes cannot observe them.

In a paper recently accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a group of Brazilian astronomers presents results that strengthen the second hypothesis and describe a possible mechanism that could have prevented some dwarf galaxies from producing an abundance of stars. Through computer simulations, Diego Falceta-Gonçalves, of the University of São Paulo (USP), and Luciana Ruiz, Gustavo Lanfranchi and Anderson Caproni, of Cruzeiro do Sul University (Unicsul), propose that a series of stellar explosions that occurred at the beginning of

the formation of dwarf galaxies could have expelled almost all of the gas that would have been needed to generate new stars. As a result, stars in these dwarf galaxies are sparse.

Although these explosions would have occurred more than 13 billion years ago, shortly after the creation of the universe, they may have left traces—differences in the concentrations of chemical elements within and outside galaxies—that can be checked through astronomical observations to help confirm or refute the model.

“Our work explains what may have occurred both within a dwarf galaxy and between clusters of galaxies,” says Lanfranchi.

Dwarf galaxies exist throughout the universe, orbiting larger galaxies such as ours, the Milky Way. In general, they have hundreds of millions of stars—approximately 0.1% of the total found in the Milky Way. Some still contain gas and are still capable of generating new stars. However, most contain only a group of old stars. For example, in Ursa Minor, one of the dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, the last star was born 9 billion years ago.

According to current cosmological theory, which indicates that the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago

from an initial explosion and has been expanding ever since, dwarf galaxies were the first star clusters to form, approximately 300 million years after the Big Bang. Larger galaxies, the size of the Milky Way, began to emerge one billion years later. Astronomers are still debating whether the larger galaxies emerged from the joining together of dwarf galaxies or grew independently of them. However, everyone believes that galaxies, large or small, were created from gas that accumulated in regions of space where dark matter is concentrated.

Dark matter is an invisible and still unknown substance. It permeates all of space and is perceptible only because of the gravitational influence it exerts on the motion of stars and galaxies. Based on cosmological observations, there should be five to nine times more dark matter than normal matter in the Universe. Computer simulations based on the Big Bang theory suggest that larger galaxies formed precisely in areas where larger amounts of dark matter (“halos”) collected.

These simulations also show that each of these large halos of dark matter is surrounded by a constellation of hundreds of smaller halos, which, in principle, should have given rise to

pESQUISA FAPESP z 37

All of the studies suggest that the protagonists of this story are supernovae— the explosions that mark the end of the life of stars with very high mass, dozens of times more massive than the Sun. According to theoretical models, the first supernovae in these galaxies would have transferred so much energy to the gas within these star clusters that they ultimately would have expelled it into the intergalactic medium. Without gas, star formation would have been interrupted.

No simulation until now, however, had reached a level of detail sufficient to explain exactly how this gas could have escaped or in what quantities and at what stage of galactic evolution. The Brazilian astronomers accepted the challenge of simulating the first billion years of dwarf galaxies as realistically as possible, using a computer code developed by Polish astrophysicist Grzegorz Kowal of USP. In the simulations, the researchers evaluated 11 possible scenarios for the evolution of these

galaxies, varying parameters such as the distribution of dark matter and the supernovae formation rate. They also considered details such as the random appearance of supernovae in various regions of the galaxy and the amount of energy from explosions converted into heat or light.

Ubiquitous winds

Despite controlling the parameters of their simulations, the researchers had no way of knowing the outcome beforehand. “We were able to determine how fast the galaxies lose gas, depending on their mass, the distribution of dark matter, and the supernovae formation rate,” Gonçalves explains.

In all scenarios, the simulations showed that supernovae created winds that began to expel gas from the galaxy 100 million years after its birth. In the most extreme case, 88% of the gas was eliminated in 1 billion years. “Most halos end up with few stars and become

The structure of the Universe A high-energy explosion took place 13.7 billion years ago—the Big Bang, the creation of the Universe—which, as it expanded and cooled, organized visible matter into atoms, stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies

100 s

300,000 years

Atomic nuclei are formed

Neutral atoms emerge

300 million years The first stars and dwarf galaxies are born

1 billion years

13.7 billion years

Large galaxies, such as the Milky Way, begin to take shape

Galaxies are arranged in clusters

The simulation below shows how dark matter (bright spots), an invisible form of matter that permeates the universe and interacts with ordinary matter through gravity, could have evolved after the Big Bang in a region around the Milky Way

900 million years

38 z special issue July 2013

1.7 billion years

3.3 billion years

6 billion years

10.3 billion years

infographic Cosmic Timeline Illustration NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

dwarf galaxies. However, instead of hundreds of dwarf galaxies, only 26 have been observed orbiting the Milky Way. “According to observations and simulations, there must be hundreds of dark matter halos that never formed many stars,” says Lanfranchi.

Another mystery related to dwarf galaxies is that the ratio of normal matter to dark matter that they contain is very different from that observed in larger galaxies. The mass of the dark matter halo that surrounds the Milky Way is 10 times greater than the total mass of its stars, while the dwarf galaxies studied have 20 to 3,400 times more dark matter than stellar mass. “For some reason,” Gonçalves notes, “proportionally far fewer stars were formed in dwarf galaxies than in the Milky Way.” To better understand the history of dwarf galaxies, several groups of astrophysicists have been conducting simulations of how the galaxies’ initial concentrations of gas and dark matter evolved.

How dwarf galaxies lose gas Heated, less dense gas bubbles float on the cooler, denser gas toward the intergalactic medium Beginning

2 million years later

46 million years later

Density (No. particles/cm 3 ) 0,8

Colder, denser gas

0,5

Heated, less dense gas bubbles

0,4

0,3

0,2

0,1

Images Ruiz, L.O. el al., MNRAS - 2012

Dark matter makes the gas concentrate in the innermost region of the dwarf galaxy ...

... until supernova explosions create bubbles of hot gas ...

In the simulations, up to 40% of the gas heated by supernova explosions escaped the galaxy in less than 200 million years.

Old companions Galaxies are formed in regions with the highest concentration of dark matter. At each point around the main cluster, which led to the Milky Way, there should be a dwarf galaxy, but we have identified only 26 (see the main ones below) Leo IV UMaI Sextans Ursa Min CB BootesI

w1

Herc

Draco

UmaII Via Láctea * 1 kiloparsec (kpc) = 3,260 light-years

... which expand and fuse together, forming channels through which the gas escapes

Sag Carina

LMC SMC

Sculptor Fornax

13.7 billion years

30 kpc = 100,000 light-years*

invisible,” Gonçalves says. “The galaxies we see today formed in scenarios in which the wind was more moderate.”

The researchers thought that gas heated by supernovae had overcome the gravitational pull of the galaxy and escaped, impelled by large amounts of energy, like a rocket launched into space.

However, they found that was not always the case. In less than 200 million years, 5–40% of the gas heated by the explosions escaped by floating in the cooler, denser gas around it, even without having the energy to overcome gravity. “It’s more like a helium balloon that climbs by itself, without being launched,” Gonçalves says.

This phenomenon, known as Rayleigh–Taylor instability, is the same phenomenon responsible for the mushroom-shape rising of gas in an atomic bomb explosion. In the Brazilians’ simulation, supernovae create bubbles of hot gas around themselves, which migrate to the outer, colder layers of the galaxy, expanding and merging to form channels through which the gas escapes. An important consequence of this phenomenon is that the composition of the gas expelled from the dwarf galaxies is not the same as that of the primordial gas, composed of light

chemical elements (hydrogen and helium), the first elements to appear in the universe. The gas that escapes is enriched with heavier chemical elements created in supernova explosions.

“These results are interesting and should be compared with observations to see if the theory is correct,” says astrophysicist Reinaldo de Carvalho of the National Institute for Space Research, who studies the evolution of galaxies.

The researchers hope to find evidence of what happened to dwarf galaxies by investigating the chemical compositions of their stars. To do so, they are analyzing a dwarf galaxy, Ursa Minor. They plan to compare its composition with that of the intergalactic medium into which the heavier chemical elements would have been expelled. n Projects 1. Magnetic fields, turbulence and plasma effects in the intergalactic medium - No. 2011/12909-8; Grant Mechanisms Regular of Research Project Award; Coordinator Diego Falceta Gonçalves – USP; Investment R$151,676.28 (FAPESP).

2. Numerical study of collisional and collisionless magnetized plasmas in astrophysics - No. 2009/10102-0; Grant Mechanisms Regular of Research Project Award; Coordinator Diego Falceta Gonçalves – USP; Investment R$108,750.89 (FAPESP).

3. Application of theoretical-computational models in astrophysics - No. 2006/57824-1; Grant Mechanisms Young Investigator; Coordinator Gustavo Amaral Lanfranchi – Unicsul; Investment R$171,395.05 (FAPESP).

Scientific article Ruiz, L. O. et al. The mass loss process in dwarf galaxies from 3D hydrodynamical simulations: the role of dark matter and starbursts. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In production.

pESQUISA pESQUISA FAPESP FAPESP z 39

Opticsy

In tune with light Physicists use lasers to synchronize microscopic oscillators that act like the pendulums of clocks

A

fter suspending two pendulum clocks side by side from a wooden plank in 1665, the noted Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens observed that the clocks soon began ticking in unison, even if the pendulums initially swung out of sync.

The experiment impresses us even today, although how spontaneous synchronization of clocks works is no longer a mystery (a search for “synchronization” on YouTube turns up several interesting demonstrations of this phenomenon).

Physicists can now accurately calculate how the clocks influence each other by means of mechanical vibrations exchanged through the board that eventually force the clocks to oscillate in the same manner.

Almost 350 years later, Huygens’ experiment has been carried out in the microscopic world, using two oscillators carved into a silicon microchip instead of pendulums. Each oscillator has a diameter of 40 thousandths of a millimeter, or 40,000 nanometers. These oscillators are so small and flexible that they vibrate from the light of a laser beam with a power a thousand times smaller than that of an ordinary laser pointer. Even more amazingly, the light exchanged between the oscillators plays the role of the wood40 z special issue July 2013

en plank, synchronizing their vibrations.

The feat is the work of a team of researchers from Cornell University in the United States, led by the American physicist Michal Lipson. She was assisted by a Brazilian, Gustavo Wiederhecker, who has been a professor at the Institute of Physics, State University of Campinas (Unicamp), since 2011. Other groups had already built micro-oscillators synchronized through small mechanical connections. “We were the first to show that synchronization can be induced using only light,” says Wiederhecker. “We thought it could be done, but it was not obvious that it would be possible.”

More than a curiosity, the demonstration was published as the cover article of the journal Physical Review Letters, in the December 5, 2012, issue. The article suggests that these optical-mechanical micro-oscillators could become the basis of a new portable technology for highprecision timekeeping. Computers, cell phones and navigation systems all need precision timekeeping to work properly.

In general, these portable devices use the regular vibration of small quartz crystals—activated and synchronized using electrical signals—as clocks. Their accuracy is good, but the microelectronics industry is always looking for alter-

Drawing from the book Horologium oscillatorium, published in 1673, in which Christiaan Huygens describes the pendulum motion also observed at the edges of microscopic oscillators

Infographic Ana Paula Campos Image Mian Zhang / Cornell Nanophotonics Group Drawing Reproduction from Horologium oscillatorium, 1673, by Christiaan Huygens

Published in February - 2013

Laser interactions Lightweight and flexible microscopic disks of silicon vibrate with the force applied by light

A

B

photons

200 nm 40.000 nm

1

At rest

A

B

Light

Light

A continuous laser beam is aimed at the disks so that light with a specific wavelength enters the space between them

2

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Light presses on the walls of the disks, forcing the space between them to grow and letting the light escape. Thus, the discs vibrate and emit light pulses

3

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B

The light emitted by the pair of discs on the left enters the space between the pair of disks on the right, and vice versa, thereby synchronizing their vibrations Source Gustavo Wiederhecker - Unicamp

natives because the crystals need to be manufactured separately from the silicon microchips and then soldered onto them, increasing the cost of production. However, the micro-oscillators developed by Lipson’s team, made of silicon nitride, could be manufactured along with the rest of the internal structure of microchips, without additional cost. “Any factory in the world would be able to build the design,” Wiederhecker points out.

The research began in 2008, when Wiederhecker, interested in investigating how light could be used to move parts of a microscopic mechanism in a silicon chip, obtained a post-doctorate position at Cornell under Lipson’s supervision. By 2009, the Brazilian physicist had already published an article in the journal Nature as first author, showing for the first time that it was possible to manufacture a micro-structure that vibrates regularly when activated by light of a specific wavelength. In 2011, the team filed a patent for a filter based on this device, which was able to select telecommunications light signals of several wavelengths sent over optical fibers.

Pulsing in unison

In their latest work, the researchers produced dual oscillators. Each oscillator consists of a pair of superimposed disks separated by 0.2 millionths of a millimeter, or 200 nanometers (see infographic above). The disks vibrate when a laser beam of constant intensity and a wavelength able to enter the space between the discs is incident on them. When this happens, the particles of light travel around the edges of the discs and put pressure on their walls, forcing them apart. With the expansion of the space between the discs, the light escapes and the edges of the discs return to their original position. Then, more light from the laser enters the space, and the cycle begins again. The result is a pair of discs oscillating at a constant frequency, emitting light that pulses at the same frequency.

The physicists found that when these two oscillators were placed side by side, they could, under certain conditions, interact through these light pulses. At a certain vibration frequency, the flashing light emitted by one oscillator enters the space between the discs of the neighboring oscillator. “This blinking light forces the pair of discs on the right to vibrate at the frequency of the pair of discs on the left, and vice versa,” explains Wiederhecker. “Eventually they come to an agreement and vibrate in sync, at the same intermediate frequency.”

Wiederhecker built the first version of the micro-oscillator pair in 2010. The physicist Mian Zhang, also a member of Lipson’s group, then developed a technique for turning the interaction between oscillators on and off, also using a laser beam.

According to Paulo Nussenzveig, a quantum optics expert at the University of São Paulo, the advantage of synchronization via light is that it allows interaction between a network of micro-oscillators through fiber optics, in which the oscillators can be placed as far apart as desired. “The quality and creativity of this work are significant,” he says.

With a recently approved FAPESP Young Researcher grant, Wiederhecker hopes that his Unicamp laboratory will be able to perform these and other experiments with optical-mechanical devices by next year. He and physicist Thiago Alegre, his colleague at Unicamp, are mainly interested in investigating what happens when the oscillators are cooled to temperatures near absolute zero (-273.15 degrees Celsius) and the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics control their dynamics. “What does it mean to synchronize objects in the quantum world?” asks Wiederhecker. “This is something we’re starting to explore.” n Igor Zolnerkevic Scientific article ZHANG, M. et al. Synchronization of micromechanical oscillators using light. Physical Review Letters. v. 109, p. 233.906-10. Dec. 5, 2012.

pESQUISA FAPESP z 41

Ecologyy

Amazonia in three dimensions Three-dimensional maps show details of forest structure and aid monitoring of the

Carlos Fioravanti, in Manaus Published in March - 2013

Astronaut photograph ISS017-E-13856 / NASA

impacts of fragmentation on native vegetation

T The forest as seen from the International Space Station: 150 kilometers of the Amazon River, its tributaries and the many lakes and floodplains along its course

he trees appear as red, yellow and other vibrant colors, as if each had been hand-painted on the maps posted alongside scientific articles and invitations to seminars in the hallway of the building that is home to the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP) at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (Inpa) in the Brazilian city of Manaus. The technique that made it possible to assemble the maps—LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, which records variations in light reflected by the trees—is greatly facilitating the work of the researchers in the oldest tropical-forest monitoring program in Brazil, one of the world’s longest-running programs of its type. Launched in 1979 to gauge the impact of road construction and expanded farming on the Amazon forest, the BDFFP monitors changes over time in 11 forest fragments, as well as in adjacent continuous forest areas that serve as controls for comparison purposes. The total area under study encompasses a thousand square kilometers (km²) of forest and includes trees up to 55 meters in height.

Until a few years ago, the only way to obtain detailed data on forest composition and changes was to travel for many hours on unpaved roads in rain, heat, mosquitoes and fungi to reach the areas under study, some of which are 80 kilometers from Manaus. “This new technique will

Landscape mosaic Program studies dynamics of plant and animal populations in 23 forest areas near Manaus

Manaus

N

0

km

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Pasture or regrowth Fragments or controls Roads

of course not solve all of our problems, nor will it spare us from making field trips, but it’s a great help,” says José Luís Camargo, an ecologist from São Paulo State and scientific coordinator of the BDFFP, which is presently funded by the Smithsonian Institution and Inpa, in conjunction with research-supporting foundations and agencies in both Brazil and the United States. Satellite images are two-dimensional, but LiDAR images are threedimensional. They are created from light reflected off the tops of trees and captured by planes flying over the areas under study. “We can map clearings, which are important to the functioning of the forest, and get a good idea of the relief that sustains the vegetation,” Camargo says.

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iDAR, alone or in combination with other remote sensing techniques, can provide detailed data on the height, concentration and distribution of trees and can indicate which animal groups are likely to be living there. A more matted—or, as Camargo says, structurally complex—forest is less likely to be a habitat for certain groups of birds and bats, for example. In a recently completed study in one of the project areas, Brazilian biologist Karl Mokross of Louisiana State University in the U.S. confirmed that birds living in the understory—the area below the tree canopy—prefer to feed on insects in the primary forest, and rarely feed in the secondary forest, also known as the capoeira.

In addition to using three-dimensional images, the Inpa team borrowed from the field of chemistry a technique for identifying chemical compounds, known as near-infrared spectros-

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copy, to classify plants. This technique is based on the fact that the chemical bonds of certain molecules In a few days, have specific vibration frequencies.

Lovejoy These frequencies can be recorded by an instrument and expressed in obtained graphical form. Using this method, biologist Flávia Machado Durgante approval from and other researchers at Inpa examined 159 leaves from 10 tree spethe directors cies collected from a preserved forof Inpa and est area near Manaus and from the BDFFP study areas and retained in from Suframa the program’s collection, which currently has 54,000 samples of leaves to begin and reproductive structures (flowers and fruits) from the monitored trees. the work They then obtained the so-called spectral signature of each species and concluded that the technique is a simple, low-cost method for identifying plant species and differentiating very closely related species, even when they lack reproductive structures such as flowers and fruits that would facilitate recognition by botanists and ecologists.

In their paper, published in March in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, they reported an average accuracy of 96.6%. Biologist Carla Lang has begun to analyze the spectral signatures of leaves from trees and seedlings of the same species to determine whether they are consistent with one another. If so, this will facilitate the rather difficult work of identifying seedlings and predicting the distribution of species in the forest.

SCOTT SALESKA / UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA AND MICHAEL LEFSKY / COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY

Flocks of birds (in red) prefer the primary forest in a 10-hectare fragment (above) and seldom traverse the capoeira (in light green, magnified at right). Darker greens indicate taller vegetation.

Early alliances

The working methods now available provide a modicum of well-deserved comfort for the researchers in the Amazon studies program that two biologists from the U.S., Thomas Lovejoy and David Conway Oren, started designing in the mid1970s. Both had already had several years of experience conducting field research in the region. At that time, the government was promoting occupation of the forests north of Manaus by cattle ranchers. “I was the one who alerted Lovejoy about this unique opportunity to talk with the land owners, go into the forest prior to deforestation and do biological inventories—something that had not been done in Panama,” recalls Oren, an ornithologist who has worked at Inpa, the Goeldi Museum and the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) at Belém and who is currently the biodiversity coordinator for the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI). The biologists did not forget the fact that construction of the Panama Canal, completed in 1914, had isolated areas of a tropical forest about which they knew very little. Lovejoy liked the idea and said he would seek funding.

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ovejoy became the program’s spokesman and became an international authority on biodiversity. He is presently a professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University in the United States (see Pesquisa FAPESP No. 171). A clipping of a page from the journal A Província do Pará from January 7, 1979, which hangs in the hallway of the building that houses the BDFFP, announces the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems Project, as it was then called, with expected annual costs of $500,000 and support from Inpa, the Brazilian Institute for Forestry Development (IBDF), which gave rise to the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), and the

Manaus Free Trade Zone Authority (Suframa).

Determining the minimum area needed to effectively preserve a forest was a concern of the Brazilian government, as well as “a global problem,” argued Lovejoy, who at the time was with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the first international institution to fund this work.

“It was the golden age of Inpa, under the direction of Warwick Kerr. In just a day or two, I received approval from the director and the head of Inpa’s Department of Ecology, Herbert Schubart, and from Suframa, which was also very open to the idea. The cattle ranchers cooperated as well,” Lovejoy said, recalling the creation of the research program in Amazonia. “I basically accompanied Rob (Richard Bierregaard, a biologist and first scientific coordinator of the BDFFP, now with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the U.S.), introduced him to the people in Manaus and left him to work. Rob made friends with the ranchers, who were pleased to participate in work that was receiving media attention.”

The program provided for isolation of forest areas of varying sizes and for surveying and monitoring of trees, insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. The objective was to determine which species die off and which survive as the forest decreases in size. This program was a way to examine the impact of fragmentation on the forest and the organisms that live there. Even today, the reduced size of the native vegetation that has resulted from the expansion of roads, agriculture and cattle ranching is a principal cause of the loss of biodiversity in Amazonia, the world’s largest tropical forest.

Amazon database

The field work, conducted over a 33-year period and completed in 2012, resulted in an immense database of trees and birds. The researchers are pESQUISA FAPESP z 45

The clearing effect Open areas alter air circulation in the lower atmosphere and promote cloud formation and rainfall

Dry air

Cloud

Moist air

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Moist air Low pressure

Forest

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SOURCE ADAPTED FROM WALLACE ET AL. 2012

46 z special issue July 2013

Biological Conservation that synthesizes 32 years of field work. The article is signed by 16 biologists from institutions in Brazil, the United States, Australia and Mexico connected with the BDFFP. The first author is U.S. biologist William Laurance, who lived in Manaus for five years and is currently working in Australia. The vulnerability of large trees to fragmentation and the effects of ephemeral events such as El Niño and storms, they argue, became evident only after decades of monitoring. They noted that when trees fall, they may create clearings that draw moisture away from nearby trees and alter the light and temperature (see illustration). Fragmentation can reduce water circulation; limit the territory of many species of birds that are unable to traverse large deforested areas; reduce the populations of bees, wasps, beetles and ants; and increase the populations of frogs and spiders. These changes result in a cumulative loss of biodiversity and a reduction in water reserves.

Fragile forest

Simulations of forest behavior using data from the BDFFP suggested that even 10-hectare fragments need at least a century to recover their earlier biological diversity and biomass. Once established, these fragments undergo a profound reorganization of their communities of trees, palms, climbing plants, and animals. “As a general rule, the smaller the area, the more severe the effects of fragmentation,” says Camargo. Anyone passing through the study areas will notice the difference: the smaller fragments of a hectare or less in size have now lost part of their original forest structure and look like a capoeira struggling to survive, while the larger fragments, particularly those 100 hectares in size, still harbor tree species that grow in the low light and high moisture conditions that are typical of an Amazon forest. Small areas are more fragile “and suffer more from more intense droughts, such as those that occurred in 2005 and 2010,” Camargo observes.

One consequence of fragmentation is the socalled edge effect: changes that occur at the edges of a forest due to solar radiation, light and wind from outside the periphery of the forest. Because they are exposed to more changes in the microclimate, the trees closest to the edge may fall more easily or dry up and die standing. As a result of the edge effect and forest fragmentation, “half the understory birds and mammals may become locally extinct, sometimes irreversibly so,” Camargo warns. According to the 2011 article, deforestation to open up pastureland creates 32,000 kilometers of new forest edge each year and produces landscapes dominated by irregularly shaped small fragments of less than 400 hectares, which increases the effect of solar radiation and wind on the na-

PHOTO SERGIO JORGE BRAZIL / PHOTONONSTOP ILLUSTRATION SANDRO CASTELLI

now observing the growth of 45,376 trees and 178,295 saplings (less than 10 centimeters in diameter at chest height) on 55 hectares of continuous forest and 39 hectares of fragmented forest.

“We are monitoring a forest with one of the most diverse tree communities in the world,” Camargo says. In addition to monitoring trees, they recently began to include records for lianas. In a recently completed survey on 69 hectares, they counted 33,154 lianas. “Lianas are generally not a subject of forest surveys, but they represent an important component of a forest’s biomass and biodiversity.”

The database contains information on 60,000 birds from 400 species that live in the understory, the intermediate level between the canopy and the forest floor. Each bird was banded with a number that will enable biologists to learn where they have been when they are captured in what are called “mist nets.” “This database enables us to ask more complex questions that arise only after decades of monitoring and that build a basis for public policies and help solve new problems such as the impact of climate change on Amazonia,” Camargo says. “Many researchers come to work here because we have a long track record, so they don’t need to start at square one. This knowledge is a national asset.”

Many conclusions of the BDFFP would have been impracticable in a shorter-term study, according to a January 2011 article in the journal

Roads such as this one destroy forest unity and create fragments that limit the movements of animals, reduce biodiversity and affect the climate.

tive vegetation. “If it’s this way here, it may be even worse in other areas, such as the Arc of Fire, the region in the states of Pará, Mato Grosso and Rondônia that is the most subject to deforestation.”

“T

wo days ago, you couldn’t get through the hallway because of all the luggage,” Camargo said on the morning of November 9, 2012. “Our twenty-first training course ended yesterday. We’ve trained 420 ecologists.” Every year, the course in Amazonian Landscape Ecology—usually held in July or August and occasionally in October, as it was last year—brings together 20 graduate students and 15 professors from universities throughout Brazil. “Most of the participants have never set foot in Amazonia,” Camargo says. The professors introduce the different environments in the region, from the várzea, or floodplain, to archipelagos such as Anavilhanas, to train professionals to understand and help solve the problems in the region.

Another way to share the researchers’ findings and increase understanding of the region is through three-week courses for undergraduate students. “Recently, I was one of the people responsible for that course at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) in Rio Claro, the State University of Minas Gerais and the Federal University of Amazonas,” Camargo says. “Today the

BDFFP trains more researchers from Brazil than from the United States.”

According to Camargo, at the present time, the Smithsonian and Inpa cover only 20% of the annual costs, and most of the annual budget of R$1.2 million comes from grants or from funding agencies or foundations in the United States and Brazil. “In the past decade, it was difficult to obtain funding because the focus of the grants changed.

The money migrated from forest fragmentation studies to climate change studies,” Camargo notes.

“Another major problem we face is the devaluation of the dollar. Some years we lose a third of the anticipated budget because of the exchange rate.” There are other concerns, such as a possible redistribution of land near the study areas, which could change the land use and amplify the negative impacts on the fragments. n

Scientific articles DURGANTE, F.M. et al. Species spectral signature: Discriminating closely related plant species in the Amazon with near-infrared leaf-spectroscopy. Forest Ecology and Management. v. 291, pp. 240248. 2013.

LAURANCE, W. et al. The fate of Amazonian forest fragments: a 32year investigation. Biological Conservation. v. 144, n. 1, p. 56-67. 2011.

STARK, S.C. et al. Amazon forest carbon dynamics predicted by profiles of canopy leaf area and light environment. Ecology Letters. v. 15, n.

12, p. 1.406-14. 2012.

pESQUISA FAPESP z 47

Zoology y

Why are the whales dying?

Study identifies bone abnormalities commonly found in humpback whales on the Brazilian coast Published in January - 2013

A

48 z special issue July 2013

1

“Analyzing bone changes could provide valuable data about the life of whales,” says Kátia Groch veloped skin lesions, or gave birth. “We want to understand the health dynamics of the whales and how human activities can influence them, and thus contribute to whale stranding and death,” Catão affirms.

LESIONS AND MALFORMATIONS

In early November 2012, Catão and Kátia Groch, his doctoral student at USP, in collaboration with veterinarians Milton Marcondes and Adriana Colosio (PBJ) published the project’s initial results in the journal Diseases of Aquatic Organisms. According to the researchers, the

paper is one of the world’s largest inventories of skeletal abnormalities in humpback whales. In their work, they analyzed the bones of 49 animals stranded between 2002 and 2011 in the Abrolhos region of southern Bahia State.

Of the 49 whales, 12 presented at least one type of skeletal problem. Five whales had birth defects; four had inflammatory lesions; five displayed degenerative changes; and four showed signs of trauma (possibly from collisions with boats, in several cases). “Analyzing the bone changes of these animals could provide valuable data about the life history

Photos Humpback Whale Project (PBJ)

joint effort by researchers from the states of São Paulo and Bahia has been looking into the lives — and deaths — of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) along the Brazilian coast. Every year, between July and November, these huge cetaceans swim north from freezing cold Antarctic seas into their breeding grounds in the warm tropical waters off the Brazilian coast. Although this migration route is well known, there is little information about the health of these whales and the reasons why they become ill. There is a simple reason for this: it is not easy to collect tissue samples under adequate conditions to estimate the health status of these marine mammals because they can grow to 16 meters in length, weigh up to 40 metric tons, and are constantly on the move.

Two groups of veterinarians from the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Petrobras-funded Humpback Whale Project (PBJ) are working to change that scenario. The group, led by José Luiz Catão Dias (USP) began systematically collecting skin samples and biological material expelled by the whales through their blowholes. By analyzing tissue from live animals and material extracted from the bones of whales stranded along the shore, the researchers plan to record the state of health of Brazilian humpback whales.

“We are using the biological material collected from live animals to investigate various pathogens,” says Catão.

His group is also analyzing the project’s collection of photos taken during field expeditions to check whether the monitored animals gained or lost weight, de-

2

1 A specimen being analyzed on a beach in Abrolhos 2 Humpback whale during typical leap 3 Research team during field expedition 4 Dart for collecting skin samples 3

5

of whales and their pathological conditions,” says Groch. “Some of these changes may have contributed to the whales getting stranded, especially the lesions in the tail region, which we found on two animals,” she explains.

The researchers believe that constant monitoring is the only way to understand the extent to which these animals are affected by exploitation and modification of the marine environment, which

5 Ribcage with bone callus (rectangular area)

might increase further when subsalt oil exploration is fully underway. “Whales and dolphins are indicators of marine ecosystem health. The results of these studies are essential for understanding the threats to whale populations and to provide supporting data for public policies designed for their protection,” says Groch.

Whale hunting was permitted in Brazil until three decades ago, when it was banned by Federal Law No. 7,643. In 2008, Decree No. 6,698 declared Brazil’s marine jurisdictional waters to be a “whale and dolphin sanctuary.” The country’s current legislation for whale protection is very good. “Whales already face major natural challenges just keep-

4

ing themselves alive. Protection policies can only be effective with efficient oversight and by reconciling economic growth, exploitation of marine resources, and environmental preservation,” Groch affirms. n Project Analysis of health aspects of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in the southeastern and northeastern Brazilian coast, with special emphasis on anthropogenic interactions – No. 2011/08357-0; Grant mechanism Regular Line of Research Project Award; Coordinator José Luiz Catão Dias/FMVZ-USP; Investment R$67,661.40 (FAPESP).

Scientific articles GROCH, K. R. et al. Skeletal abnormalities in humpback whales Megaptera novaeangliae stranded in the Brazilian breeding ground. Diseases of Aquatic Organisms. 8 Nov 2012.

pESQUISA FAPESP z 49

TECHNOLOGY Industry y

More sophisticated ceramic tiles Technological developments adopted by manufacturers of ceramic wall and floor tiles propel Brazil to the rank of the world’s second largest producer Yuri Vasconcelos Published in March - 2013

I

n the past 15 years, Brazil has quadrupled its output of ceramic coverings, a category of material that includes flooring and other types of ceramic tiles. Today, it is the world’s second largest producer of these products. With 866 million m2 produced in 2012, Brazil ranks behind China only and has now passed traditional competitors such as Spain and Italy, who dominated the sector until several years ago. According to the Brazilian Association of Manufacturers of Ceramic Tiles, Sanitary Ware and Related Products (Anfacer), which represents 93 companies from 18 states, Brazil’s manufacturers are in step with the best technology available in the world. The Brazilian ceramics industry’s growth accelerated during the past decade after it received support from a project that was submitted to FAPESP’s Sectoral Consortia for Research and Innovation (ConSITec) program. The project brought together researchers from the Ceramic Center of Brazil (CCB) and a conglomerate of companies from the ceramics industrial complex in Santa

50 z special issue July 2013

X-ray of the sector The ceramic wall and floor tile industry is composed of 93 companies and generates 225,000 direct and indirect jobs

Companies 2012

R$

*From the São Paulo ceramics sector alone

billion*

Source Anfacer

Sales 2011

829 million m2**

Sales on the domestic market 2012

200,000

Direct jobs 2012

Indirect jobs 2012

1,02

866

71%

Production capacity 2012

Production 2012

Production

by São Paulo factories 2011

million m2**

3.78

** Forecast

25,000

US$

280 million

Export earnings 2011

37

million m2** Exports 2012

million de m2

16% North America 25%

Central America

of the total

4% Europe

47% South America

2% Asia

6% Africa

Photos Leo Ramos Infographics Ana Paula Campos

Destinations of exports 2011

Gertrudes, located in the Rio Claro region of the São Paulo state, as well as researchers from universities and research institutes. By focusing on developing local industry, the project introduced innovation and skilled worker training to the factories in order to improve the quality and competitiveness of ceramics made in the state of São Paulo.

When the ConSITec project began in 2001, Brazil ranked fourth among the world’s producers of ceramic tiles, with production of 473 million m2. São Paulo represented 40% of the total production. Today, that state’s companies account for approximately 70% of the nation’s output of 866 million m2, and Brazil ranks second in the world. “When the companies began to coordinate in forming the consortium, the image of Santa Gertrudes products was quite negative. Items were seen as being of poor technical and esthetic quality,” recalls materials engineer José Octavio Armani Paschoal, president of the CCB and coordinator of the ConSITec project. “Now that’s changed.

São Paulo has attained a position of distinction in terms of the

manufacture of ceramic plates used for coverings. While once we trailed behind, now we’re on the front line,” he says.

Sales by São Paulo companies totaled R$3.78 billion in 2011.

Anfacer has not released the figures on nationwide sales by the industry, which employs 25,000 workers directly and indirectly generates approximately 200,000 more jobs. The ConSITec project was carried out through coordination among 20 São Paulo factories and involved seven lines of research, from innovations in product evaluation testing to studies of the technology for laying ceramic tiles. Three lines focused on porcelain, a type of sophisticated ceramic tile that has high value-added and differentiated technical requirements, such as a lower water absorption rate, greater mechanical strength, and more elaborate designs. Research was conducted into developing industrial processing technology and raw materials for making those pieces, as well as formulating special enamels.

One of the principal benefits of the ConSITec project, which involved the investment of R$586,000 by FAPESP and an equal pESQUISA FAPESP z 51

World leaders The Brazilian ceramics industry has evolved greatly in the past decade and occupies a position of distinction in the global scenario, overtaking traditionally powerful countries in the sector such as Italy and Spain (figures in million m2) n 2001 n 2008 n 2011

Source Ceramic World Review

CHINA

Principal producers Brazil is the world’s second largest manufacturer of

exporters

Spain

India

Iran

Italy

3.600 2.400 1.200

ceramic coverings Biggest

Brazil

4.800

0 830 622,5

Export sales soared by 35% until 2008 when they were beaten back by the

415

Turkey

207,5

worldwide crisis

0

Principal

4.000

consumers

3.000

With a domestic market that is heating up, Brazil is the second largest

2.000 1.000

consumer

USA

0

amount from the companies over a seven-year period, was a significant improvement in the quality of São Paulo ceramics. “The percentage of tiles rated Class A and free of defects such as cracks, scratches, stains, and variations in enamel hue, rose from 50% to 98% by the end of the program.

Fewer than 2% of the ceramic tiles produced in this state today exhibit any imperfections,” says Paschoal. According to him, the first obstacle to overcome was to modify the production process employed at the factories in order to introduce a quality control system. “We realized that companies did not have control over the process as a whole. As soon as the CCB began quality certification of the finished products, the index of non-conformity with domestic and international standards fell drastically. The ceramic coverings industry became one of the leaders in the construction industry in terms of conformity with technical standards,” Paschoal reports. The number of companies in the ceramics industrial complex in Santa Gertrudes that turned out quality-certified products reached 20 in 2008, double the figure for the seven previous years. During the same period, the number of factories that had adopted the ISO 9001 quality certification system rose from 4 to 13.

52 z special issue July 2013

In addition to achieving an increase in quality and number of certified products, São Paulo factories also began to make a higher volume of porcelain pieces. “Porcelain is a more expensive product and competes with natural stone, such as marble and granite,” says materials engineer Ana Paula Menegazzo, superintendent of the CCB. “When Brazilian companies began to make that type of product, customers with higher purchasing power bought the ‘brand’ and even paid more for it.” According to CCB figures, Brazilian production of porcelain tiles increased 18-fold during the past decade, soaring from four million cubic meters in 2001 to 72 million in 2011. During the same period, the number of São Paulo manufacturers of these goods rose from three, which had been producing only the small-size (mosaic) tiles, to 15 that now had sufficient know-how to make tiles larger than one square meter. Despite the increase in São Paulo, the biggest porcelain production center is still Santa Catarina—a state that also boasts a concentration of factories in an important ceramics industrial complex.

In inland São Paulo, Villagres, which is based in Santa Gertrudes, is one of the leading manufacturers of porcelain wall and floor tiles. With

a tradition in ceramics production that goes back almost 90 years, it offers 108 different items in its portfolio and has been investing in new technologies. Villagres was one of the first in the state to use digital printing technology, an ink-jet process that makes it possible to use serigraphy on any ceramic surface. “It’s a sophisticated method, but, at the same time, easy to work on. You can, for example, scan a stone in its natural environment and reproduce its traits on porcelain. The machine functions as if it were a paper printer, the only difference being that it applies enamel to a ceramic tile,” explains Vanderli Vitório Della Coletta, owner of Villagres. The company produced 6 million m2 of ceramic coverings in 2012 and experienced a 6% growth in sales over 2011. “We had a very good year, and we are still expanding.

We are improving our portfolio and migrating our production toward porcelain tiles,” he says.

T

o Marcos Serafim, Manager of Innovation at CCB, digital printing introduces a new way of thinking about product design and the industrial methods employed in the sector.

It also poses some challenges. “Despite all the technological changes, the most comprehensive transformation has to occur in design. The question now is how to capture, work up, and digitally manipulate those designs without bringing about graphic pasteurization,” he says. On that point, according to Serafim, Brazilian factories are still using as reference countries such as Spain and Italy, which market their digital designs either directly to Brazilian companies or through raw materials suppliers or design studios. “Brazil needs to innovate by creating its own identity in terms of product design,” he notes.

One determining factor in the growth of the ceramics industry in São Paulo is the quality of the raw materials used in manufacturing its products. “Santa Gertrudes has one of the best clay deposits in the world,” says Elson Longo,

1

professor at the Chemistry Institute of the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) in Araraquara and Coordinator of the Multidisciplinary CenClay from the ter for the Development of Ceramic Santa Gertrudes Materials (CMDMC), one of the 11 FAPESP Research, Innovation and region is Dissemination Centers (RIDC). “Furthermore, the red clay that is found of excellent close to the surface in that region is of excellent quality. This means that quality, which manufacturers need to use almost no means additives to make their products. It’s an important competitive advantage,” manufacturers Longo says. He coordinated the research under the ConSITec project on do not need to the academic side with researchers from the Federal University of São use additives Carlos (UFSCar) and the Nuclear and in ceramics Energy Research Institute (Ipen) of São Paulo. “The technology and knowproduction how generated during the ConSITec project were possible only because of financing from FAPESP,” Longo says.

Because of the raw material’s properties, ceramic coverings made in inland São Paulo use dry milling, a simpler process than wet milling 1 Clay in raw form before and one that reduces costs by as much as 50%. factory processing Preparation of a batch for wet milling, as per- 2 Production line formed in Santa Catarina and other places in at Rochaforte: technology Brazil, involves several steps. However, in the and improvements in manufacturing processes have yielded good results

2

pESQUISA FAPESP z 53

dry process, the clay passes through only one mill before it is ready for pressing. “The clay found in the Corumbataí formation in the Santa Gertrudes region has unusually good plasticity, which permits a shorter firing time, thus boosting productivity,” says Menegazzo.

T

he doctoral studies being pursued by materials engineer Rogers Rocha, owner of the Rochaforte factory in Cordeirópolis, focus on the properties of the clay found in the inland areas of São Paulo. “There is a huge difference between the clay found in one mine and that of another. I am researching the mineralogical, chemical and ceramic characteristics of the rocks in the Corumbataí formation from which the local factories get their clay,” states the researcher/ businessman. “Better understanding the characteristics of the raw material will help us improve the quality of the items we produce.” Rochaforte was founded 60 years ago by Rocha’s grandfather.

Like so many other companies in the industry in that region, it began by making roof tiles and bricks and progressed to offering flagstones, a type of rudimentary flooring. It now makes two million m2 a month of ceramic wall and floor tiles, using dry milling. “Nothing compares to that process in terms of cost,” states Rocha.

According to Rocha, the technological development and refinement of manufacturing processes were vital to the boom in São Paulo ceramics.

“As our industry entered into closer contact with academia, the products and processes improved

greatly. I’ve seen practical results from the research at my company. Some of our products are attaining the same Brazil is the level of quality as those made in Spain only country that and Italy,” he says. In addition to selling to the domestic market, Rochaforte has a specific exports to customers in the U.S., Chile, Argentina, and some Central American standard countries.

Established 20 years ago, the CCB for porcelain, has played a key role in the evolution of a type of tile Brazil’s ceramics industry. The center has conducted research and developthat involves ment on ceramic products, operating primarily in the context of the univermore advanced sity/company interface and providing technical and technological consulting technical services to the industry. The Center for requirements Technological Innovation in Ceramics (Citec/CCB) has a modern laboratory infrastructure that has been accredited by the National Institute of Metrology, Quality, and Technology (Inmetro) to conduct certification and quality control tests on products and processes. Citec has a fully equipped facility for making any type of ceramic tile on a laboratory scale, as well as equipment to assess mechanical strength, surface abrasion resistance, and the slip resistance of floor tiles.

In 2011 alone, 20,577 tests were performed at Citec/CCB laboratories, which are staffed by 12 researchers, of whom three have master’s degrees and three have doctoral degrees. “With the start

Constant progress

n 2001 n 2008 n 2011 n 2012

The sector grew by 90%

The influence of São Paulo

UA DYNAMIC NICHE

The increase occurred between 2001 and 2012

In 10 years, participation

Brazilian output of porcelain ceramics,

by São Paulo factories

a category with a higher value-added,

in domestic production

increased 18-fold between 2001 and 2011

Production In million m2

713

866

of ceramic coverings jumped from 40% to 72% of the total

473

Production capacity In million m2

n n n domestic production 1021

PRODUCTION OF PORCELAIN CERAMICS In million m2

72 49

n n n São Paulo production

781 556

Exports In million m2 * Estimated

71%

81,4

37*

CCB and Anface

54 z special issue July 2013

4 15 13

68%

59,5

Source

NUMBER OF SÃO PAULO PORCELAIN MANUFACTURERS

40%

3

At the Villagres company, digital printing technology reproduces the photo of a tiger on a ceramic floor tile

of Citec operations, we began to develop new products, improve production methods, and engage in post-sale activities. That gave us a solid understanding of the principal problems that customers experienced with ceramic coverings.

Similarly, we conducted research into methods of ceramic tile application, which enabled us to achieve a significant decline in problems encountered in laying the product,” Paschoal says.

W

orking with Anfacer, the CCB also participated in the drafting of technical standards for the industry, the Brazilian standard for porcelain among them. CCB is coordinator of the Commission on Studies of Ceramic Tiles organized by the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT). “By applying very strict parameters, the standard for porcelain, NBR 15463, was created in response to a demand by the manufacturers themselves, who wanted to emphasize the high quality and competitiveness of Brazilian porcelain. The first in the world, the rule was submitted to the International Committee on ISO 189, which works on world standards for ceramic coverings,” says Menegazzo. “Brazil is the only country that has adopted a specific standard for porcelain, and its technical requirements are the most demanding of any country. That is why I can say without hesitation that the porcelain ceramics products certified by the CCB are the best in the world,” she says. According to her, Brazil is an active participant in efforts to revise international technical standards. “We are currently working with the Ceramic Technology Institute (ITC) of Spain,

the Tile Council of North America (TCNA) of the United States, and the Ceramic Center of Bologna (CCB) in Italy, in developing new methods for testing the abrasion resistance of ceramic products,” she says.

The favorable results of recent years have kept optimism high among manufacturers. Many São Paulo companies plan to expand their factories. Rochaforte, for example, is planning to open affiliates in the Northeast of Brazil. Those branches are important because the cost of shipping goods from the factories to the customer is an important factor in final product price. The expansion observed in the domestic market, according to Paschoal, is likely to continue heating up demand for ceramic wall and floor tile. “Despite the significant increase in construction of new housing in recent years, Brazil still has a large housing deficit—on the order of 10 million units. Furthermore, there is also the building renovation market, which suggests a major rise in potential consumption of ceramics,” he says. To Paschoal, the major challenge from here out is to increase the productivity of the Brazilian ceramics industry and encourage the development of new ceramic products, primarily through technological innovation, “enabling Brazil to achieve even more prominence in the world market.” n

Project Sector consortium of the ceramic coverings industry in the state of São Paulo: technological innovation and competitiveness (No. 2001/107835); Grant mechanism Sectoral Consortia for Research and Innovation (ConSITec); Coordinator José Octávio Armani Paschoal – CCB; Investment R$586,715.13 (FAPESP) and R$586,715.13 (Companies).

pESQUISA FAPESP z 55

Silviculture y

More cellulose per square centimeter Transgenic eucalyptus has 20% higher productivity than conventional eucalyptus Evanildo da Silveira Published in February - 2013

56 z special issue July 2013

B

y all appearances, the small (2.2 hectares) eucalyptus plot on a farm in the municipality of Angatuba in São Paulo State is nothing out of the ordinary. But something unusual is happening in the cells of these trees, into which a gene from the species Arabidopsis thaliana, a model plant often used in genetic experiments, has been introduced. The new gene enables the trees to produce 20% more wood than their unaltered Eucalyptus congeners. This small forest of transgenic eucalyptus trees is one of four test plots of genetically modified trees planted by FuturaGene, a company whose mission is to improve the productivity and sustainability of forests cultivated for the cellulose, bioenergy and biofuels markets. The goal is to assess the biosecurity of the transgenic plants and determine whether they have any impact on the environment or other plants.

FuturaGene, orignally called CBD Technologies, was founded in Israel in 1993 as a protein engineering spin-off from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In July 2010, the enterprise was purchased by the Brazilian company Suzano Papel e Celulose. The experiments currently being conducted in inland São Paulo State and the states of Bahia and Piauí are a necessary step toward the commercial release of the genetically modified plants, as required by the National Biosecurity Commission (CTNBio), the Brazilian agency responsible for evaluating transgenic products. “The four plantings we did in 2012 totaled nine hectares,” says Eugenio Ulian, FuturaGene’s vice president of regulatory affairs. “The goal is to make observations and collect data so as to

léo ramos

comply with the biosecurity law, and to submit an application to CTNBio in the future for commercial release. The expectation is that this product could be approved for commercial use in approximately four years.”

The gene that was introduced into the eucalyptus trees codifies endoglucanase, one of the enzymes that play a role in the chemical makeup of cellulose.

“By expressing the Arabidopsis thaliana gene for that enzyme in the plants, FuturaGene discovered a way to alter the structure of the cell wall (which is made of cellulose) of the transgenic trees,” Ulian says. “The exogenous gene causes the cells to deposit more cellulose during formation of the cell walls of the tree, which, in the case of species like the eucalyptus, results in a larger volume of wood.”

The cell walls of a plant consist primarily of cellulose, a polymer composed of glucose units, which is embedded in other complex polymers such as hemicellulose and lignin. The molecules form a rigid structure around the plant cell that relaxes only to enable growth and division. “The FuturaGene technology makes it possible to produce species with modified cell walls that can speed up this relaxation and reconstitution process during normal tree growth,” Ulian explains. “Introduction of the new gene into eucalyptus results in accelerated growth and higher yield.” These results make the technology particSix-year-old genetically ularly attractive to modified the paper and enereucalyptus in gy industries. The Angatuba, cellulose extracted in inland São Paulo State from the cell walls pESQUISA FAPESP z 57

of the plant is the source of all industrial fiber used in the production of paper, boards and wood. In addition, cellulose provides the raw material for a multitude of more advanced forestry and agricultural products, including the sugars used to produce secondgeneration ethanol and the chemicals used in bioplastics. The transgenic eucalyptus developed by FuturaGene not

only produces 20% more cellulose than normal plants, which produce an average of 45 cubic meters per hectare, but also yields 30 to 40% more wood for use in applications such as bioenergy.

The company’s journey to successful genetic modification of this plant has been long. The initial research studies that led to the transgenic eucalyptus began soon after the firm was established

1 Biotechnology laboratory at FuturaGene in the city of Itapetininga (SP)

1

2 Manipulation of eucalyptus leaves for replanting 3 Two phases of transgenic planting in Angatuba

2

3

Sugar content

In the second PITE project, Professor Labate developed several transgenic eucalyptus plants with altered expression levels of genes related to synthe58 z special issue July 2013

PHOTOS 1 and 2 FuturaGene; 3 Léo Ramos

The company uses plantings with seeds from crosses between transgenics and conventional plants to test productivity

at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“Many studies were done using various genes involved in cell wall formation that were cloned and introduced for superexpression in model species such as Arabidopsis, in poplar and in eucalyptus,” Ulian recalls. “The endoglucanase gene was chosen for ongoing study because it yielded the best results.”

FuturaGene has now planted 12 test plots with transgenic eucalyptus. The first crops were grown in 2006 and 2007 in Israel and Brazil. The work continued after the company was acquired by Suzano, with new plantings in Brazil. In 2012, in addition to nine hectares planted with the original genetically modified plant, another six were planted with seeds from crosses between the transgenic line and the conventional parents to develop and select improved clones with the increased-yield trait.

Since 1998, Suzano has also been developing projects in partnership with Professor Carlos Alberto Labate from the Genetics Department in the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture at the University of São Paulo (Esalq/USP).

“The work is focused on biotechnology and the functional genomics of eucalyptus,” Labate says. “We already have two projects financed by FAPESP’s Partnership for Technological Innovation (PITE) that have been approved, and now we are on the third one.” The objective of the first PITE project was to develop the methodology for the genetic transformation of eucalyptus.

“My doctoral student Esteban Roberto González was hired by Suzano, and today he manages research and development at FuturaGene,” notes Labate, who became director of the Brazilian Bioethanol Science and Technology Laboratory (CTBE) in January. “The method we developed was patented, and all the knowledge we created was in some manner transferred to the company. In addition, to this day we hold frequent meetings and staff training sessions at FuturaGene, which gives us the opportunity for very good interaction with the company.”

Infographic ana paula campos

sis of carbohydrates. “The goal of the project was to increase the amount of xylans in eucalyptus wood,” he explains. “Those transgenic plants are at FuturaGene, where field tests are to be conducted.” Xylan is a hemicellulose, a polymer of xylose (one of the sugars present in wood), and the compound plays an important role in the bleaching of cellulose pulp and in the properties of paper. Modifying the concentration of this sugar in the plant can increase production and differentiate the properties of the pulps and papers produced from the wood.

FuturaGene plans to plant 30 hectares for testing genetically modified eucalyptus in 2013. “The objective is to test new genetic alterations that could potentially lead to other products with the same increased-yield trait as the first transgenic eucalyptus, but with different genes or improved genetic structures,” says Eduardo José de Mello, vice president of Brazilian operations and manager of forest improvement at FuturaGene. “That is why we think this year’s experiments will help in selecting new products.” Beyond these efforts, the company’s laboratories are developing species that are resistant to pests and diseases and that promote improved weed control and wood quality. In addition to its biosecurity focus, FuturaGene is also testing the behavior of transgenic eucalyptus grown at different crop spacings. “That information will be important for planning future plantations tailored to their end use, such as energy production, boards or cellulose, for example,” Mello says.

“Owing to the high yield of the transgenic plant and depending on the end use of the biomass, harvesting can be done earlier, at five and a half years.”

Conventional eucalyptus reaches that level of productivity at seven years.

According to Mello, Brazil is now the world’s most productive eucalyptusgrowing nation owing to its favorable climate and efforts toward technological development. “Conventional genetic improvement through selection and propagation of the best individuals has played an important part in the productivity gains, but these gains are becoming increasingly difficult to top,” Mello observes. “Biotechnology through the use of transgenics will be an important tool for

Accelerated growth Transgenic eucalyptus requires shorter growth times and provides greater productivity for the paper and conventional cellulose industries Transgenic

Maturation time

Introduction of the new gene reduces the time between planting and harvesting Cellulose production

The transgenic plant produces 20% more cellulose than the conventional plant because it has a wider trunk

Conventional

7

Years

5,5 Years

54

m3/ ha

45

m3/ha

SOURCE FuturaGene

Genetic manipulation of plants could play an important role in the maintenance and preservation of native forests Brazil to remain on the forefront of productivity and continue to be competitive in the market for eucalyptus wood and its by-products.” Suzano is currently the world’s second-largest producer of eucalyptus cellulose. The company posted net revenues of R$4.8 billion in 2011, with over 50% of its sales in the export market.

The genetic manipulation of plants could also play an important role in maintaining and preserving native forests around the world. According to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the planet has approximately four billion hectares of forest coverage, roughly 27% of its land area. The current global consumption of wood is estimated at approximately 3.4 billion cubic meters per year and is expected to increase 25% by 2020.

To meet this demand, native forests are being cut down at a rate of 12 million hectares each year. According to a study by the Center for Environmental Risk

Assessment (CERA), a group at the ILSI Research Foundation that brings together research institutions from around the world, planted forests accounted for just 5% of the Earth’s total forested area in 2000 but contributed approximately 35% of its harvested wood. The global area planted in tree species currently stands at 264 million hectares, representing 6.6% of the world’s forests. Since the late 1980s, when the first transgenic plants were released for commercial cultivation, more than 800 field tests have been conducted throughout the world using genetically modified trees from approximately 40 species. n

Project Functional genomics applied to the discovery of genes resistant to eucalyptus rust – No. 2008/50361-1; Grant mechanism Partnership for Technological Innovation (PITE); Coordinator Carlos Alberto Labate (USP); Investment R$330,195.78 and US$242,235.41 (FAPESP) and R$1,376,000.00 (Suzano).

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Business research y

Global

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

Dinorah Ereno Published in January - 2013

C

onsidered one of the largest subsidiaries outside the United States in terms of production and sales, Johnson & Johnson in Brazil has also become a reference in research and development (R&D). “Today, the global research center for the women’s health care line, which is mainly composed of sanitary products, is right here in Brazil, thanks to a decision made by headquarters last year,” says Samuel Abel Moody Santos, 53, vice president of R&D for Latin America. The Research and Technology Center (CPT) of Johnson & Johnson do Brasil is located inside an industrial complex occupying an area that covers 910,000 square meters, 700,000 of which consist of green space, in São José dos Campos, 72 kilometers outside the city of São Paulo. The CPT is also home to the development of sunscreens for Latin America, Europe and Asia. This leading role was earned over the course of several decades.

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In 1975, when Santos began work as a mechanical technician at Johnson & Johnson after graduating from high school, his job was to design machinery. “At that time, the equipment used to manufacture our products was designed and made here, because it was very expensive to import machinery.” Initially, the R&D center, built in 1972 in São José dos Campos after being transferred from the Mooca district in São Paulo, was not created to develop products for the Brazilian market. It was instead used to house research on raw materials for products that were known abroad but were going to be introduced here. The company came to Brazil in 1933 to supply the Brazilian market with products for hospital and domestic use, such as cotton, gauze, surgical tape and surgical compresses.

For example, the absorbent core of Carefree sanitary pads contained a raw material that even today is not manufactured in the Brazilian market. Local researchers developed a product that offers the same level of performance and some

léo ramos

additional benefits using totally domestic raw materials. Today, this product is sold in North America, Europe and throughout Asia. “In a way, this development brought a global credential to the center that we did not previously have,” says Santos. At the end of his engineering course at the University of Mogi das Cruzes (UMC), he designed a machine to test samples in a pilot plant, which led to an offer to work at the R&D center in October 1980.

In 1994, when he was already a research manager at Johnson & Johnson in Brazil, he went to Shanghai, China, to head the development and product release of feminine sanitary products in the Chinese market. He spent a year and a half there, developing the products, identifying the raw materials to be used and setting up the plant.

From Shanghai, he was transferred to the company’s world headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. After more than 15 years at company headquarters, he returned to Brazil in

May 2011 to take over the vice presidency of R&D for Latin America. “Our research is segmented into areas,” he explains. “There are more than 20 areas with different focuses, because our objective is to have experts in each area.”

To illustrate this diversity, one of the research groups, called the Consumer Science group, identifies consumer wants and needs. Heading up this group is Senior R&D Manager Rosana Rainho das Neves, 53, who holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemical engineering from the Polytechnical School of the University of São Paulo (USP) and has been with the company for 30 years. “I established this area in Brazil in 1992, when it was still beginning in Asia,” says Neves.

Her work focuses on two separate points in the development process. The first point is when the product does not yet exist. “We work to understand consumers and to get insight from them so that together with the researchers, we can create ideas for new products.” The second point is during the

Samuel Santos (to the right), Johnson & Johnson vice president of R&D for Latin America, with a team of researchers at São José dos Campos

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2

1 Mechanical mixer blades 2 Evaluation of dyes in the laboratory 3 Sections of hair used for product testing 4 Children’s hair conditioner in the testing phase 1

development phase, when consumers test prototypes until the group arrives at a product that is ready to be released to the market.

After setting up the Consumer Science group, where she worked for nine years, Neves took over management of the skin care product line and, eight years ago, returned to the group she created. “Every time we have a new product, we need to know what impressions consumers have of it, so we conduct qualitative and quantitative tests,” says Neves, who spent 900 hours in the classroom to earn an MBA degree from the Graduate School of Advertising and Marketing (ESPM), in partnership with the Technological Institute of Aeronautics (ITA). Internal tests are conducted using a database with 1,500 registered employee volunteer participants. When the research team arrives at a product prototype that they consider optimal, tests are conducted using a larger cohort of outside consumers who are recruited by agencies.

The consumer division of Johnson & Johnson in Brazil, which includes sunscreens, skin care, oral hygiene, baby and 62 z special issue July 2013

children’s products, feminine hygiene products and over-the-counter medications is the second largest market in the world, after only the US, where the company’s headquarters are located.

“Worldwide, the skin care line is the highest-selling segment,” says Santos.

In 2011, global sales of the Consumer Division of Johnson & Johnson were US$ 14.9 billion. The company consists

of more than 250 businesses that operate in 60 countries and employ some 118,000 people. In Brazil, there are more than 5,000 employees, 280 of whom work in the R&D area throughout Latin America, which includes Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico and Brazil. “Of this total, 200 have university degrees and 80 are technicians; 80% of them work in Brazil,” says Santos. Pharmacists and chemical engineers are the two main academic backgrounds, but there are also biologists, chemists, physicists, physicians and dentists among the researchers. Approximately 30% of the researchers hold master’s degrees, and 10% have doctorates.

Neves’s group has a direct channel to the product development group. This group includes Paula Scarcelli D’Oliveira Dantas, 37, senior R&D manager of the

Names of institutions from which Johnson & Johnson do Brasil researchers graduated:

Samuel Abel Moody Santos, vice president of R&D for Latin America

UMC – undergraduate

Rosana Rainho das Neves, senior R&D manager

USP – undergraduate and post-graduate ESPM/ITA – MBA

Paula Scarcelli D’Oliveira Dantas, senior R&D manager of skin care area

USP – undergraduate FGV – MBA

Sérgio Luiz de Oliveira, associate director of scientific affairs, analytical research and microbiological R&D

Univap and Oswaldo Cruz College – undergraduate Univap/Unicamp – master’s degree FGV – MBA

José Eduardo Pelino, scientific and professional relationship manager in the oral care area

Unesp – undergraduate and master’s USP – doctorate University of California – doctorate and postdoctorate

photos léo ramos

3

skin care area, who holds a degree in biochemical pharmacy from USP. “We are involved in the project from the very beginning through product development,” says Dantas, who worked at two major pharmaceutical companies and a cosmetics and medications raw materials supplier before coming to Johnson & Johnson in 2005. “Since I joined the company, I have had many opportunities for learning.” For two months, she worked on a cosmetology project at one of the company’s major research centers near Princeton, New Jersey, USA. “Afterwards, I spent another month in the same location, shadowing someone in a high-level management position to inspire me in my projects,” says Dantas. Because she wanted to learn more about the consumer area, she obtained an MBA with a focus on marketing from the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV).

She also took a cosmetology specialization course in hair care at the Regional Pharmacy Council and a course in cosmetic toxicology evaluation in Belgium.

Multidisciplinary group

The products developed by the CPT are evaluated for safety and effectiveness by the team of Sérgio Luiz de Oliveira, 45, who has been at the company for 27 years and holds the position of associate

“Today, I use them to support the products from different lines of research I conducted at the academy,” says dentist José Eduardo Pelino

director for scientific affairs, analytical research, and microbiological R&D. “Since the analyses involve chemical, microbiological and biophysical aspects, we have a multidisciplinary team,” says Oliveira, who began at the company as an intern in the R&D area after finishing a technical course in chemistry. The 30-member team includes biologists, chemists, pharmacists, mathematicians and biophysicists. “We have to guarantee that the formula that goes to market will be able to withstand all the climate variations it will face after it is released,” he says.

Oliveira studied math at the University of Vale do Paraíba (Univap), which had a consortium with ITA, and chemistry at Oswaldo Cruz College in São Paulo.

He also obtained a master’s degree from Univap, also in partnership with Unicamp, in bioengineering and an MBA from the Getúlio Vargas Foundation.

In addition to the internal R&D team, Johnson & Johnson has a partnership with USP, Unicamp, ITA, Univap, the

4

National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

The R&D area also has researchers with extensive academic backgrounds who serve as a bridge between professors of dentistry and professionals in the area. This is the case for dentist José Eduardo Pelino, 42, who graduated from the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) in São José dos Campos, where he also obtained a Master’s degree in microbiology using light sources, such as lasers and LEDs, for cavity prevention.

He also obtained a Doctorate from University of California in San Francisco, with an emphasis on the optical properties of dental tissues, a post-doctorate from the same university in teeth whitening, and a doctorate from USP with a scholarship from FAPESP. In addition to his dental practice, Pelino taught in the Master’s program at USP on the use of lasers in odontology and at United Metropolitan College (FMU). He was also the director and coordinator of the graduate course in odontology at the Cruzeiro do Sul University (Unicsul).

With Johnson & Johnson since 2009, Pelino holds the position of scientific and professional relationship manager.

“All the oral care products that are distributed in Latin America must undergo scientific evaluation,” says Pelino, who notes that “there are several lines of research that I conducted over the course of my academic career that today I am able to use in industry to support products.” Studies in the area of oral care also receive support from specialists in optics from Univap and the USP Chemistry Institute at São Carlos. n pESQUISA FAPESP z 63

Humanities Fine Arts y

The subtleties

of Latin American good neighborliness Archives reveal that the U.S. government had a hidden agenda in bringing Brazilian artists to New York Carlos Haag

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n 1958, then-U.S. Vice President Nixon visited several Latin American countries, including Brazil. Greeted with boos and angry student demonstrations, he was surrounded by a large crowd, stoned, and nearly killed in Venezuela.

It became obvious to the Eisenhower administration that the image of the U.S. in the region was extremely poor. Having to that point centered its attention on the battle against communism in Europe, the U.S. government turned its eyes southward, a focus that intensified after the Cuban revolution. Economic measures taken to reverse the Cuban situation are well known. However, the more subtle cultural initiatives taken during the Cold War have not been much studied in Brazil. “The arts were used as part of a strategy for building a positive image that the U.S. government would use to attract sympathizers.

The São Paulo Biennial art exhibit (Bienal de São Paulo), for example, afforded a particularly useful opportunity as part of the execution of this ‘policy of attraction’ that, among other actions, sponsored research trips for artists and intellectuals,” says Dária Jaremtchuk, professor of art history at the Escola de Artes, Ciências e Humanidades (EACH) of the University of São Paulo (USP), and author of the research study entitled Trânsitos e exílios: artistas brasileiros em Nova York durante a ditadura militar no

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Brasil (Relocation and exile: Brazilian artists in New York during the Brazilian military dictatorship).

Although the U.S. government did not concentrate on artists specifically, but on intellectuals in general, starting in the 1960s figures such as Amilcar de Castro (1966 and 1971), Rubens Gerchman (1967), Hélio Oiticica (1970), Antonio Henrique Amaral (1973), Ana Maria Maiolino (1971), and Antonio Dias (1972) spent time in New York City, funded by Guggenheim and Fulbright grants, as well as by other foundations and the Organization of American States (OAS). “That flow of visual artists and the involvement with political activities have never yet been much analyzed in depth. Those records are viewed as mere biographical data not associated with a larger phenomenon that was connected to shared historical factors,” Jaremtchuk says. “Neither the demonstrations against the military dictatorship nor the approximation of those Brazilians with the Latin American community that was already in New York were frequently mentioned in the bibliography,” she says.

At first, Jaremtchuk traveled to the United States only to map the experiences of those Brazilians, but her discoveries in archives there broadened the scope of her research. “Many documents give

All images used to illustrate this article were kindly made available by MAC-USP

Published in february - 2013

Marcello Nitsche, Alliance for Progress, 1965

clear indications of the actions the U.S. government took in order to attract Brazilian artists and intellectuals. Until then, that flow of visitors had seemed merely to be the consequence of the repressive political situation at the time, which was said to have sent groups into ‘exile’ in New York,” she says. “But Washington acted without taking the military regime specifically into account. The U.S. was interested in welcoming those Brazilians regardless of the kind of government then in power.

It was important to establish a favorable image in Latin America,” she adds. “Of course there are those famous imperialist ‘conspiracy theories,’ but in the case of the arts, everything was very subtle, part of the ideal cherished by sectors of the learned bourgeoisie in the United States that saw themselves as ‘civilizers’ who were collaborating with the government ‘for the advancement of’ Latin Americans.”

Even so, institutions now deny that they awarded study grants on the basis of factors other than merit. “It’s strange that while between 1920 and 1950, only six artists received such assistance, that number rose to 20 between 1950 and 1970.

Furthermore, there are documents in U.S. government archives that prove that certain foundations participated in that policy,” Jaremtchuk reports. Contrary to what one might expect, the Brazilian dictatorship made an effort to facilitate artist travel. “This can be seen in the establishment of the Brazilian American Cultural Institute (BACI), an exchange organization connected with Itamaraty (as Brazil’s Ministry of External Relations is known) but idealized by American diplomats, a hypothesis reinforced by the presence of U.S. congressmen on its board of directors,” the researcher notes. Established in 1964 and closed in 2007, it was “left to die on the vine” in the mid-1970s, as the focus in Washington had changed to winning “hearts and minds” in Asia because of the Vietnam War. If in the past it was Paris that was crucial to the modern experience, for contemporary artists that role would later be filled by New York, despite the generally anti-American ideological and political creeds held by those who applied for the grants.

“The U.S. became a promising alternative for Brazilian artists who ‘went into exile’ voluntarily or otherwise during the 1960s and 1970s, despite the contradictions involved in the choice,” Jaremtchuk observes. The artists themselves, however, did not like to be labeled “exiles” because they could return to Brazil where they were recognized and able to make a living from their work. With rare exceptions (for example, Antonio Henrique Amaral), that was not the case in New York. “It was difficult for Latin American colleagues to understand why these Brazilians returned to life under the dictatorship. But they didn’t feel ‘co-opted’ by the U.S. government and saw themselves from a personal perspective, not as a collective group subject to politics.”

In the U.S., Brazilian artists experienced the difficulties of living in a new city with little money and a lack of professional recognition that often caused them to stop or suspend their work. To the U.S. public, Latin American art was supposed to be figurative, colorful, and exotic. There was no interest in “international” conceptual creations that did not bear a regional brand as the works of Mexican muralists and the paintings by Frida Kahlo had in the past. “Additionally, reflecting the attitude of the U.S. government, the public pESQUISA FAPESP z 65

didn’t see Brazilian art as special but rather as part of a block labeled ‘Latin American art,’” Jaremtchuk explains. “It was, however, in that environment that the Brazilians experimented with a less nationalistic perspective, living in a milieu with a heterogeneous and cosmopolitan group, where experimentation and exploration of technological media such as video, photography, and photocopying were the order of the day.”

Brazilians joined other Latin Americans in the battle against the dumbed-down and stereotypical view of exotic art. “Even today, however, conceptual artists from Brazil who have had success in the United States are rare,” Jaremtchuk notes. Darcy Ribeiro was exactly right when he said Brazil discovered Latin America only while in exile. Antonio Henrique Amaral, for example, was more successful than his colleagues because, among other factors, he used bananas as a recurring theme in his paintings. This reminded Americans of the Brazil of Roosevelt’s “good neighbor” days during World War II, with a definite trace of criticism toward the dictatorship. During relocation, Brazilians came to realize that they had peers; they shared feelings with Hispanic America, something they had previously disparaged. “It was not an identity, but a sharing that was formed,” the professor observes.

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Time spent in the U.S. also sparked new discussions about the nature of art and led to the use of different materials and media. “Amilcar de Castro, for example, couldn’t obtain the raw material needed for his sculptures and started to employ other techniques. Gerchman also rethought his art, based on what he saw in the United States,” Jaremtchuk recalls. Coming from a country where the market for arts was feeble, with only a few galleries and expositions, artists found that the time spent in New York, as one of them put it, made them feel like “children at an amusement park.” Jaremtchuk explains: “Exposed to a lively cosmopolitan market reality, Brazilians began to understand how the modern world of art functioned and passed that knowledge on to the generation that followed them, leaving marks that are still visible today.”

F Maureen Bisiliat, Untitled, 1968

or financial reasons, artists lived in the “less elegant” part of the city, between Tribeca and the West Village, where their apartments became studios and meeting places. “Those casual gatherings helped define the Latin American artists as a community by creating social cells in New York that enabled them to manage their daily lives and still preserve their differences from the Anglo-Saxon universe in which they were living. Since many artists who were not Latin American frequented those spaces, there was always a chance to gain visibility in more traditional circles,” explains Jacqueline Barnitz, a historian affiliated with the University of Texas and author of the study entitled Twentieth-century Art of Latin America (2000). In general, however, the artists who were “in transit” opted to construct a milieu of expositions and galleries that was parallel to the official market.

“There was only one exhibition space in New York that was open to Latin America, because of business interests explicit to the Americas: this was the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR), on elegant Park Avenue. Its headquarters was financed by the Rockefeller group.

During the harsher years of the military regime, however, being present in that space was viewed by us with great reservations. Young people who exhibit there today have no idea of the ‘climate’ the surrounded that facility in the early 1970s,” explains Aracy Amaral, art critic and retired professor of art history at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP). Amaral does not believe, however, that there was a relationship between study grants and U.S. government policy. “The Guggenheim grants were coveted, they were considered as a kind of award for artists, researchers, and scientists, since merit, rather than political criteria was used in awarding them. A candi-

Antonio Henrique Amaral, Brasiliana 9, 1969

The São Paulo Biennial, along with the Venice Biennale, was considered a “political show window” during the Cold War date could be from the Left or any other political faction and still obtain the grant, provided that the project and the candidate’s résumé were approved by the very demanding board,” she says.

According to Amaral, even during the 1960s Paris was the preferred destination for Brazilians.

There, regardless of their personal tendencies, they took part in group shows with other Latin Americans. “We felt like brothers and sisters, especially because of the dictatorial regimes that dominated Southern Cone countries,” she recalls.

“The interest on the part of the United States emerged as a new phenomenon in 1969, when Kynaston McShine, of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, visited Brazil and invited Cildo Meirelles, Hélio Oiticica, Guilherme Vaz, and Artur Barrio to take part in the 1970 show entitled Information, which was considered to have been the first group show of conceptual art in a U.S. museum.”

The visit by McShine occurred in the same year as the boycott of the Tenth São Paulo Biennial, organized by artists after a series of incidents of censorship in Brazilian artistic circles. The call to refrain from participating was so widely heeded that the United States was prevented from participating, thus provoking awkward political and diplomatic moments. After all, the São Paulo Biennial, along with the Venice Biennale, was considered by U.S. politicians an important “political show window” in the scenario of the Cold War. Until 1961, MoMA was responsible for American presentations at those events, but starting in 1962, the United States Information Agency (USIA) took over the exhibits. Therefore, the Biennial boycott worried the U.S. diplomats.

“We need to give more importance to American participation in the next Biennial. Our inability to mount a major art presentation in 1969 is still a topic of frequent conversation and a source of embarrassment,” wrote an officer in the American Embassy’s Country Public Affairs Office in a memorandum found by Jaremtchuk.

More than 80% of the invited artists stayed away from the São Paulo Biennial—including Carlos Vergara, Gerchman, Burle Marx, Sérgio Camargo, and Oiticica. Exhibitors such as the U.S., Mexico, the Netherlands, Sweden, Argentina, and France joined the protest. Ciccillo Matarazzo, pESQUISA FAPESP z 67

president of the Biennial, went to Brasília to ask the military government to get involved to prevent a fiasco at the next edition, in addition to asking for financial assistance. The request was well received because the regime was worried about the “defamation of the image of this country” abroad as a result of the denunciations of torture made by exiles. The rest of the world needed to see a different profile of Brazil. Exhibits by Brazilian artists were organized in several countries to show that there was “freedom of expression” in the artistic world. After 1970, Itamaraty began organizing exhibitions routinely, as well as collecting background information on artists, both those in Brazil and artists elsewhere.

“They even drew up a ‘blacklist’ of who could and could not receive government assistance, as Ambassador Rubens Ricupero told me. He headed the Cultural Diffusion Division of Itamaraty between 1971 and 1974,” Jaremtchuk says. “In fact, he worked closely with the Office of the Special Advisor on Public Relations (AERP), since the government wanted to soften the impact of the reports from exiles.”

Brazilian diplomats were then invited to assist in the effort to bring back for the 1971 Biennial the

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countries that had been absent from the 1969 event.

“The presence of the United States was vital, and its absence could not be interpreted as political disagreement as could, for example, the case of the Netherlands, which had declared its opposition to the dictatorship,” Jaremtchuk notes. Through the efforts of the BACI and Itamaraty’s own staff, the Brazilian ministry was transformed into an important agent that would determine which exhibitions would be taken to other countries. The increase in investment by Itamaraty shortly after the boycott of the Biennial, Jaremtchuk states, is also symptomatic, almost resembling the U.S. “policy of attraction.”

Despite these efforts, American artists once again refrained from participating in the 1971 Biennial.

Brazilian newspapers questioned the U.S. statement that its absence was due to a “lack of funds” from Washington.

“T Antonio Dias, Fumaça do prisioneiro (Smoke from a prisoner), 1964

he international boycott represented more than the cancellation of an exhibition. It was a well-aimed blow to the influence of the Biennial as catalyst for the more recent developments in the visual arts of Latin America,” observes historian Claudia Carliman, of New York’s John Jay College and author of Brazilian Art Under dictatorship (Duke University Press, 2012). Carliman recalls that the boycott did not end until 1979, when the Brazilian government gave amnesty to political prisoners. “And so, visual artists, who were not seen as a threat by the regime and did not suffer the tight control exercised over the theatre, music, or literature, helped denounce the abuses of the dictatorship from abroad. In addition, they were willing to reconfigure the role of the public, question the art market, and challenge the power and legitimacy of artistic institutions,” Carliman observes.

Oddly, this debate arose as an unexpected result of the American “policy of attraction.” “The growing interest by the so-called hegemonic centers for art produced in culturally distant countries also favored the deepening of the conceptual debate on the ‘margins’ by provoking a tense and conflicting relationship with the ‘external’ reading,” says Maria Morethy Couto, professor of art history at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), who is researching the topic for her forthcoming book O trauma do moderno: arte e crítica de arte na América do Sul (The trauma of the modern: art and art criticism in South America (1950-1970)).

According to Jaremtchuk, this consolidates the idea of “relocation” rather than exile: “Brazilian art from that period, in some way, happened in that passage between Brazil and the United States.

The boycotted Biennial would lead to the Contrabienal (Counter-Biennial), a publication that was transformed into a political manifesto produced by groups of Latin American artists in New York,

Carlos Zilio, Para um jovem de brilhante futuro (To a young man with a brilliant future), 1973-74 Rubens Gerchman, É proibido dobrar à esquerda (No left turn), 1965

The United States’ interest gradually waned, and with it the chance for integrating Brazilians into the United States one of the cases in which the community worked together in carrying out projects.”.

Jamemtchuk points out, “A fruit of the same context was to be the Museo Latinoamericano (Latin American Museum), the artists’ answer to the conservative policies adopted by the Center for Inter-American Relations, on whose board were figures such as Dean Rusk and Lincoln Gordon, both linked to military coups in several Southern Cone countries. The idea was to establish a museum composed of separate ateliers. Visitors would be given a map with the addresses and thus be able to acquaint themselves directly with art production without going through traditional procedures.” It was from New York, through the Museo Latinoamericano, that the proposal came to expand the 1969 boycott and to further spur denunciations of the practice of torture under dictatorships. Gerchman, for example, participated in the museum movement while at the same time distancing himself from the drawings and paintings associated with the urban and Rio de Janeiro images that tied him to the Nova Figuração (New Figuration) movement. His abandoning of paintbrushes to take up the use of words in that period, however, can be credited not to the American conceptual environment but to the repercussions of

issues raised in Rio. “However, the visual-poeticfine arts proposals would become problematic in a different way in the New York atmosphere,” Jaremtchuk observes. This makes sense given the relocation of the artists.

However, the United States’ interest gradually waned, and with it the chance for integrating Brazilians into the United States. “Institutions like MoMA that possessed Latin American works didn’t bother to mount permanent exhibits of those pieces,” Jaremtchuk explains. “The absence of representations of Latin American artists in U.S. museums made galleries reluctant to promote them. The public, in turn, was not interested in works by foreigners who were not given space in the more respected institutions, because that seemed to indicate that they were not worthy of attention.” In Brazil, BACI increasingly suffered from the lack of funds until 2007, when it was deactivated after the Lula administration declared that the United States was no longer a priority in its foreign policy.

“Similarly, while Latin America was ceasing to be a focus within U.S. government policy, with fewer official activities devoted to the arts, in recent decades the task of approximation came to be performed by the art market,” Jaremtchuk observes. The promotional work is now done by galleries and fairs, and only in that way are museums starting to take more interest in the diversity of art produced by Latin American countries. n Project Relocation and exile: Brazilian artists in the United States during the Brazilian military dictatorship – No. 2011/0888-5; Grant mechanism: Scholarships abroad – Research; Coordinator Dária Gorete Jaremtchuk (USP); Investments: R$29,105.4 (FAPESP), R$242,235.41 (FAPESP) and R$1,376,000.00 (Suzano).

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PERSONALITY y

Niemeyer In the academic spotlight Studies analyze the work of Brasilia’s creator Published in january - 2013

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BERNARDO GUTIÉRREZ / FOLHAPRESS

T

he apparent simplicity of the work of Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) obscures his hard work and many reflections on architecture. Understanding his career requires a practiced eye and profound analysis. To account for this complexity, which the master liked to downplay, many researchers have tried very hard to understand how Niemeyer’s highly personal universe worked. The result of these efforts led to a series of studies by academics who dedicated themselves to contextualizing the curves and arches in the history of architecture. They concluded that few architects have changed the syntax of the profession as much as Oscar Niemeyer. Pesquisa FAPESP brings together some of the most representative works on the master.

This is a task the architect himself left to his colleagues. “When I give a lecture, I start by saying that I don’t want to influence anyone. I list my works, the problems I encountered, how I proceed with the architecture and what I do. The rest is up to them,” he said. The universities got the message. One of the most prolific scholars of the master is Roberto Segre, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and author of, among other studies, Paradojas estéticas de um Niemeyer definitivo (Aesthetic Paradoxes of a Definitive Niemeyer) (2008). “He brings together all of Le Corbusier’s principles of structural logic, the importance of nature and landscape, and the significance of history

pESQUISA FAPESP z 71

and tradition, which are complemented by the rationality needed to solve the architectural problems of the work. After studying the terrain, the cost, the materials and the relationship with the urban or natural setting, an idea arises, the final innovative proposal that merges intuition and rationality,” writes Segre. “He reinvented modern architecture.”

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rofessor Julio Katinsky of the University of São Paulo School of Architecture and City Planning (FAU-USP) and author of Caminhos do desejo: desenhos de Oscar Niemeyer na FAU-USP (Paths of Desire: Oscar Niemeyer drawings at FAU-USP) (2007) agrees that Niemeyer’s architectural career trajectory transcends the internal and external limitations of creating architecture. “There is no shortage of comments in Niemeyer’s essays on what is meant by beauty and the tasks imposed on contemporary architects. But, as we have said, we will never arrive at a valid and lasting definition for his concept of beauty,” noted the study Técnica e arte na obra de Niemeyer (Technique and Art in the Work of Niemeyer) (2007). “Moreover, his work as an architect — along with revealing a remarkable consistency beginning with the works prior to Pampulha, but then showing us that a germ of the future architect was already in them — also reveals to us an architect that throughout his life, always knew how to creatively incorporate the innovations of his time.

He adhered to a process of ongoing self-creation and renewal, from his first published works to those that are still coming out today.”

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1 Columns of the Palácio do Planalto in Brasilia 2 Oscar Niemeyer Cultural Center in Asturias, Spain 3 Copan Building, downtown São Paulo

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The theme of recurrence also drew the attention of Edson Mahfuz, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and author of O clássico, o poético e o erótico: método, contexto e programa na obra de Oscar Niemeyer (The Classic, the Poetic and the Erotic: Method, Context and Program in the Work of Oscar Niemeyer) (2011). In the essay “Cinco razões para olhar com atenção as obras de Oscar Niemeyer (Five Reasons to Look Carefully at the Works of Oscar Niemeyer),” Mahfuz analyzes the principal features of the architecture of Brasilia’s creator.

“One of the most striking characteristics of Niemeyer’s work, what sets it apart from the work of 99% of other architects, is that it has a strong sense of formal identity. This quality comes from the presence of clear formal structures based on the organization of his designs, the use of basic forms in configuring their constituent elements and the fact that the number of elements in his designs is always limited,” writes Mahfuz. “These characteristics define a highly plastic work, easy to understand and remember — and therefore having highly symbolic power — which never yielded to the temptation to make extravagant designs in an era classified by some as NeoBaroque,” he says.

Revisiting his works is one of Niemeyer’s virtues, according to Mahfuz. “Although there is much talk of the originality of Oscar Niemeyer’s ideas, a close examination of his work is enough to show that its characteristic feature is recurrence, reusing his own solutions

PHOTO CREDITS: 1 ALAN MARQUES / FOLHAPRESS 2 BERNADOS / WESTEND61 / GLOW IMAGES 3 MARCOS ANDRÉ / OPÇÃO BRAZIL IMAGES

or those of other architects, as was the case with the work of Le Corbusier early in his career. Like any self-respecting artist, Niemeyer was slowly developing his own way of solving architectural problems, expanding his repertoire, adapting and recycling solutions that had already been used,” says Mahfuz. “The obsession with originality implies that constant innovation is expected from Niemeyer’s architecture, and at all levels. But because of its evolutionary nature, his work is predictable and easily recognizable. Far from being a defect, this seems to me to be one of its virtues.

Although he said his goal was to surprise, an encounter with most of his complexes conveys the comforting feeling of a reunion with something already known,” Mahfuz observes.

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his feeling born of architectural forms was examined in another essay by Lauro Cavalcanti, an anthropologist at the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), which broke new ground by analyzing Niemeyer’s designs through a prism that combined architecture, aesthetics and society, as in A doce revolução de Oscar Niemeyer (The Sweet Revolution of Oscar Niemeyer) (2007). “All architects in their mature phase revisit some of their main themes. Niemeyer does this with domes, architectural promenades and structural lightness. But he always surprises with new solutions that are able to recreate languages, in which the solution is unique and rare. There is a coherence to the diversity of the various phases, combining structure and architecture in favor of form,” he says.

This coherence led Carlos Dias Comas, a professor at UFRGS, to analyze in O direito à diferença (The Right to be Different) (2007) how the architect used foundations, ceilings, curves, and open spaces. These examples are illustrative of how Niemeyer expanded the vocabulary and syntax of modern architecture.

“For Niemeyer, the curve is not episodic or sporadic, it does not unite the ephemeral or casual nature of the compartmentalization in contention with the permanence of the orthogonal structure. The curve may dispense with the straight, overpower it, balance it, without so much as appearing. Aside from valuing extreme opposites as equal, the ambivalence is also ambiguous. The interstices of the completely curved design and the totally straight design command one’s attention,” he says. The creative genius of assumptions and solutions, however, does not always remain free from criticism. “By 1970, Brasilia had become the symbol of everything that seemed wrong with modern architecture, condemned

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One of the characteristics that distinguishes Niemeyer’s work, setting it apart from the work of 99% of other architects, is its strong formal identity

as elitist, frivolous, superficial, formalistic and inhumane like the author of its palaces,” he writes. “The recovery of his prestige began in 1990, at the same time as, to some extent, the recovery of modern architecture itself and the understanding of polyphony, where there is room for asceticism and formal diversification,” says Comas.

To Cêça Guimaraens, a professor in UFRJ’s School of Architecture and City Planning, the polyphony is remarkable, but it was repeated more than was desirable in Niemeyer’s architectural gestures in the final decades of his life. “We must recognize that, beginning with the disconcerting volumes of the Integrated Centers of Popular Education (Cieps), the architect continued to redesign his own unusual forms,” he asserts in Sobre o novo em Niemeyer (On the New in Niemeyer) (2007).

Sylvia Ficher, a professor at the University of Brasilia (UNB) and author of Guia de obras de Oscar Niemeyer: Brasília 50 anos (Guide to the Works of Oscar Niemeyer: Brasilia 50 years) (2010), also questioned the later designs, many of which she sees as “useless or oversized plans.” Neither does she accept the freedom given to Niemeyer to intervene in a landmark area of Brasília “with questionable results.” “In general, an architect intervenes in the work of another. In this case, he is intervening in his own work and the effect is negative.

But how can we be certain that, in the future, Brasilia will not resent having so many of his works?” she asks, already knowing, to some extent, the answera. n Carlos Haag pESQUISA FAPESP z 73

Art

Austerity and intuition in balance Tomie Ohtake turns 100 this year with a permanently experimental character and in sync with her time Maria Hirszman photos DIVULGACIÓN Instituto Tomie Ohtake

Published in March - 2013

74 z special issue July 2013

On the left, sculpture in the Ibirapuera Theater, in São Paulo. Above, untitled creations from 1952 and 2013

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rtist Tomie Ohtake will be 100 years old in November 2013. “Painting is my daily routine,” Ohtake likes to say; she has spent over six decades investigating the primordial aspects of painting with a near-devotional zeal. Ohtake did not become a painter until she was nearly 40 years old, more than 15 years after leaving Japan to come to Brazil. She married in São Paulo, had children and became a Brazilian citizen. The artist’s first figurative compositions date back to the early 1950s, but she quickly adopted informal abstraction as her voice and went on to doggedly explore the containment and materiality of gesture. Throughout her extensive career, Ohtake explored various ways of addressing a very limited range of issues: her geometric shapes are nearly always curved, marked by the sinuousness of the circle and the spiral; the colors tend to be placed not in contrast, but rather in balance; and gesture is normally contained and elegant, reminiscent of a choreographed dance or a musical movement. n

Tomie Ohtake: markedly self-taught work