Juan Manuel García Ruiz has received 10 million euros from the EU to study the role of silica in the origin of life in the earth. The geologist has lived more than 30 years in Granada, as a researcher at the Andalusian Institute of Earth Sciences.

The scientist recites from memory verses from Poeta en Nueva York, the 1929 collection of poems in which Lorca denounced the dehumanization of the great industrial city. “Murdered by the sky, / and the forms that seek the glass, / I will let my hair fall.”