SCIENCE: Uruguayan Scientist Wins Major US Prize

By Dario Montero Reprint | | Print |

Dario Montero

MONTEVIDEO, Feb 16 1999 (IPS) - An engineer and graduate of the University of Uruguay has collected the U.S. “Young Scientist of the Year” award which is worth 1 million dollars.

Guillermo Sapiro earned the prize – officially known as the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) – for his work at the University of Minnesota.

It marks the second time he has won the award and underlines the “brain drain” in Uruguay which has gone on for 30 years, even though per capita Uruguay surpasses every country in region for scientific production except Chile.

Sapiro is a professor at Minnesota’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Minneapolis, but retains an honorary professorship at the Institute of Electrical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at the University of the Republic of Uruguay, the country’s only public university.

A specialist in image processing, Sapiro maintains a close collaboration with the Image Processing Group at the Urugayan institution.

He has also worked at other institutions in the US and Europe, and is often invited on tour of the academic circuit in countries such as India and Israel.

The 36-year-old Sapiro also has been awarded a “Gutwirth Fellowship for Excellence in Graduate Studies”, a “Rothschild Fellowship for Post Doctoral Studies”, and an “Early Career Development Award” from the National Science Foundation.

Although Uruguayan scientists have been the subject of international acclaim recently, there is little public or private support for research in their homeland.

Uruguay invests one of the smallest amounts of any country in Latin America and the Caribbean in research and development. In the 1970s, however, scientists at the University of Uruguay made several important breakthroughs useful to industry and agriculture. Their inventions, however, have all been exported.

One of the most widely-disseminated was developed by the university’s rector, engineer Rafael Guarga, who invented a system to combat winter crop freezes, a serious problem in southern Latin America. The system consists of a fan which blows cold air away from the ground through openings at its base and sends it high into the air, away from the crop.

The public university is the home of 80 percent of scientific research in Uruguay, and among the 1,756 scientists who remain in the country, 81.2 percent of them are on its staff.

Private universities here have existed for fewer than 20 years, and account for little scientific research. For example, the Catholic University that was founded in the early 1980s specializes in the liberal arts and social sciences. The ORT, which attracts mainly members of the Jewish community, emphasizes computers and administrative studies.

The percentage of public university budget dedicated to research has increased from 5 percent at the start of the 1990s to 20 percent.

According to Hector Lescano, a veterinarian and a former adviser in agriculture to the rector of the state-run university, the creation of the Sectorial Commission on Scientific Research was an important watershed. It has resulted in the development of advanced technology for deafness which beats the cost of treatment in the industrialized north by a third.

It also is responsible for Genexus software, which makes 10 million dollars a year for its creator, and the development of biotechnologies which improve diagnostic immunology techniques for cancer.

The Sectorial Council is an institute of the university, whose mission is the promotion of scientific development and technology in agrarian science, medicine, technology, and the basic and social sciences.

The research activities are coordinated with the Special Program of Basic Science and the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research, both of which are governed by the executive branch.

According to the World Report on Science issued by UNESCO, Uruguay invests the equivalent of .15 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on research, one of the lowest rates in Latin America.

Cuba and Costa Rica both invest 1.25 percent of their GDP, Brazil, .88 percent, Chile, .78 percent. The only countries which spend less on research are Haiti, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

The report emphasizes that Uruguay has a good academic infrastructure for research and is among the countries which have distinguished themselves in scientific production, as its relative standing with Chile indicates.

In spite of this, only 1,100 dollars on average is spent per student on university education, far below the other Mercosur countries. Brazil expends 11,500 dollars per student, according to Jorge Brovetto, ex-rector of the University of Uruguay and president of the Montevideo Group, which has chapters at public universities throughout the southern common market.

University officials emphasize that educational spending has leveled off, and that institutions are surviving only due to personal and institutional sacrifices on the part of students, staff, and other interested parties.

There are 500 full-time professors at the state-run university, who are responsible for all teaching and research duties but low pay also militates against the profession.

The highest-paid professor earns about 1,800 dollars per month, less than two and one-half times the salary of his Brazilian counterparts. This is a prime cause of scientists leaving here for higher-paid jobs in neighboring countries and the industrialized north.