<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br clear="all"></div>New President Michel Temer — who replaces impeached Dilma Rousseff — is fusing the science and telecommunications ministries.
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<span class=""><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/demotion-of-science-ministry-angers-beleaguered-brazilian-researchers-1.19910#auth-1" class="">Claudio Angelo</a></span></li></ul>
<div class="">12 May 2016</div><br><p>Brazil’s scientists, already <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/brazilian-science-paralysed-by-economic-slump-1.18458" target="_blank">struggling to absorb massive funding cuts</a>,
are protesting against another blow: the country’s science ministry has
been demoted by interim president Michel Temer, who took over the
government on 12 May after a Senate impeachment vote ousted Dilma
Rousseff from the presidency.</p> <p>Among Temer's
first actions was to announce the fusion of the federal Ministry of
Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) with the ministry that deals
with telecommunications and Internet regulations. Science is now a main
office within a ‘superministry’ led by Gilberto Kassab, a former mayor
of São Paulo.</p><p>The move, which Temer began hinting at a few days ago, has angered some
Brazilian researchers. On 11 May, 13 scientific associations, led by the
Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC) and the
Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC), sent a letter to Temer warning that
the fusion would be “detrimental to the country’s scientific and
technological development”. Researchers say that it would corrode the
authority of the MCTI, which has formed the backbone of federal support
for science and innovation in Brazil for the past three decades.</p><p>“An administrative reorganization should stem from a vision for the
country. It shouldn’t simply be an artificial lumping of disparate
activities,” says ABC president Luiz Davidovich. The move is “a step
backwards”, he says.</p> <p>Temer had first raised
concern among scientists last week, when he hinted to local media that
he might appoint a creationist evangelical bishop to lead the science
ministry — a suggestion that led both the SBPC and the ABC to ask Temer
to spare the agency in eventual reforms.</p> <p>“Unfortunately,
the science ministry is usually among the first bargaining chips in
every new government,” says José Eduardo Krieger, dean of research at
the University of São Paulo.</p> <p>Brazil has had
three science ministers in the past 16 months — and each was seemingly
appointed for political ends rather than for any particular expertise.
In January last year, Rousseff picked <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/political-appointments-spur-concerns-for-amazon-1.16701" target="_blank">Aldo Rebelo, an avowed climate sceptic</a>
in the Communist party (the closest ally of Rousseff’s centre–left
Worker’s Party). He was followed by Celso Pansera, whose nomination was
regarded as an attempt to lure votes from Temer’s Brazilian Democratic
Movement Party (PMDB) party against Rousseff’s impeachment. And Emília
Ribeiro, former vice-minister of the MCTI, has been science minister
since April 2016.</p> <p>Pansera admits that such high turnover is detrimental to research. “It gives you a lot of discontinuity,” he says.</p> <h2>Funding slashed</h2> <p>The
most hurtful discontinuity for Brazil’s researchers has been startling
cuts to federal funding. Last year, as the nation’s fiscal crisis began
to bite, the MCTI’s budget was chopped by some 1.9 billion reais (US$540
million), to 5.4 billion reais. Its budget for this year was set 37%
lower than last year’s — and its authorized spending has been chopped by
another 6%. The collapse of oil prices and a bribery scandal that
involves Petrobras, the behemoth state-run oil company, have further
reduced cash flows for Brazilian research, which partly depends on oil
revenue.</p><p>A major victim of the economic downturn is the flagship exchange
programme Science Without Borders, which by the end of 2015 had sent
nearly 94,000 Brazilian undergraduate and postgraduate students to
leading institutions abroad. The programme intended to send a further
100,000 students abroad by 2018, but its second phase, scheduled to
start this year, has been called off.</p> <p>To
revive science spending, the government had authorized the MCTI to
negotiate a US$1.4 billion loan from the Inter-American Development
Bank, headquartered in Washington DC. But that operation has been reset
because of the impeachment, Pansera says. “Now we’ll have to renegotiate
everything with the new government’s economic team.”</p> <p>Research
institutes are struggling to survive. At the Brain Institute at the
Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal, researchers split
basic maintenance expenses such as Internet bills among themselves and
buy equipment with their own money, says institute director Sidarta
Ribeiro.</p><p>And some
scientists are already planning to leave the country. Suzana
Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist at the Federal University of Rio de
Janeiro, launched a crowdfunding campaign last year to buy new parts for
a microscope. But she has now decided to move to Vanderbilt University
in the United States: this September, she will shut down her lab in
Brazil, which had been running for a decade.</p> <p>Brazilian
scientists are familiar with economic crises. In the 1990s, budget
constraints were the rule, recalls Paulo Artaxo, a physicist at the
University of São Paulo. But before the current crisis, the country’s
research had been experiencing unprecedented expansion, with funding on
the rise and the number of PhD students soaring. In 2011, Brazil jumped
to 13th in the world in terms of research-paper production, up from 17th
in 2001.</p> <p>That trend is already reversing,
says Rogério Meneghini, a specialist in science metrics and scientific
director of SciELO, a subsidized collection of mainly Latin American
journals. Brazil’s research-paper production grew at a steady rate of
16% between 2011 and 2014 — but his preliminary figures suggest that it
had dropped by 4% in 2015.</p> <p>“What is cruel
about this is that, when you cut off on science, you can never resume
from where you stopped”, Krieger says. “You lose position.”</p>
<dl class=""><dd class="">Nature</dd><dd class=""><abbr title="Digital Object Identifier">doi</abbr>:10.1038/nature.2016.19910</dd></dl><p><a href="http://goo.gl/2svQHn">http://goo.gl/2svQHn</a><br></p>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>carlos palombini, ph.d. (dunelm)<br>professor de musicologia ufmg<br>professor colaborador ppgm-unirio<br><a href="http://www.proibidao.org" target="_blank">www.proibidao.org</a><br><a href="http://goo.gl/KMV98I" target="_blank">ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini</a><br></div><div><a href="http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Palombini2" target="_blank">www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Palombini2</a><br><a href="http://scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=YLmXN7AAAAAJ" target="_blank">scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=YLmXN7AAAAAJ</a><br></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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