Science
Related: About this forumAnother of Nature's 10: Uruguay's Gonzalo Moratorio: Coronavirus hunter
From Natures 10: ten people who helped shape science in 2020, (Nature, December 14, 2020.)
Excerpt:
They are grateful because Moratorio helped Uruguay dodge the worst consequences of the pandemic. Moratorio, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute and the University of the Republic, both in Montevideo, and his colleagues designed a coronavirus test and a national programme for administering it that has helped to keep COVID-19 cases at bay as outbreaks have swept through Latin America including Uruguays closest neighbours, Argentina and Brazil. Uruguay continues to record one of the worlds lowest death tolls only 87 people by 10 December.
Were some sort of outlier, he says. Were buying time. And all the time we buy will be precious until drugs or vaccines arrive.
Moratorio was excited to start the year as head of his own laboratory for the first time, having completed a postdoc in Paris in 2018. He was planning to study how viruses mutate and how to make them less harmful. But in the first days of March, he and other Pasteur researchers from across the Americas met online to discuss what to do about the rapidly growing coronavirus outbreak.
Some researchers werent terribly worried. Carlos Batthyány, a pharmacologist who leads the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo, told his colleagues that he thought Uruguay would be largely spared by the pandemic. I wasnt very convinced of the impact it would have, he says.
His confidence made sense. Uruguay a country with universal health care, a robust epidemiological surveillance system and a relatively small population, of 3.5 million has mostly evaded yellow fever, Zika and other infectious diseases that have plagued its neighbours.
But Moratorio understood the risk. Gonzalo dashed out of the meeting and got to work, says Batthyány. When hes convinced that something needs to be done, he knocks down mountains. Hes a Don Quixote in that way....
Imagine that, a country where people buy a scientist a beer for doing science...
Uruguay sounds like a civilized country, particularly when compared to a prominent North American country where a vast nuclear arsenal is put in the hands of a puerile insane person.
I excerpted another part of this fine article earlier: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: A force in physics confronting racism in science.
Yes indeed, I was posted in Montevideo for 3 years and it is definitely a little-known gem. It has a long and proud history of progressive democracy, higher literacy rates than all its neighbors, amazing culture and friendly people. Its unlike any of its unstable neighbors who go from crisis to crisis. Its simply a model of stability.
NNadir
(33,477 posts)It's probably against their practice to invade other countries to "protect democracy," but as a prominent North American nation has a history of invading Latin countries for this ersatz reason, a little turn around on the concept might be theoretically justified.
The only factor that leads to serious internal strife in Uruguay is which soccer team wins the weekend games.
NNadir
(33,477 posts)...for their infectious disease work is definitely a gem of a country.
It's funny that one never hears about it, but perhaps, because it's so civilized, that is understandable.
We certainly hear endlessly about our boorish and ignorant President in this country. "Boorish and ignorant" seems to garner attention; civilization does not.
My son interned in a lab in France before his sophomore year where many of the graduate students and post docs were Brazilian. After never having cared about Soccer before growing up, he suddenly developed this huge passion for it. It went away when he came back to the hinterlands, the US.