Juan Modolell, the calm daring in science

Juan Modolell, in a file photo from 2007.Silvia Varela

Despite having a good showcase, especially in the written press, scientists have a high degree of social and political invisibility in Spain.

However, they exist and move.

In fact, they do it well, with levels of production and quality well above what would be expected for what they receive.

But in the 1970s, science and scientists seemed absent even in the press.

They celebrated our living Nobel Prize winner, Severo Ochoa, who was enjoying his retirement in his homeland, and prayed to Ramón y Cajal without knowing exactly what he had done.

Those who dedicated themselves to science then did so by vocation, without seeking recognition and with very limited means.

At that time, biology was in the midst of a revolution: molecular genetics was being forged that would illuminate many discoveries about our essence and our origins and would lay the foundations for the technological revolution that we now call CRISPR.

Once again, Spain was missing the boat.

It was at that time that Juan Modolell Mainou (Barcelona, ​​1937), a CSIC career scientist, made a decision that from his laboratory at the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center would lead him to be a pioneer in Spain and in the world.

Modolell passed away on Tuesday in Madrid at the age of 85.

Juan obtained a double PhD in Chemistry from the Complutense University of Madrid and in Biochemistry from the Ohio State University in the United States.

In 1970 he began his career at the CSIC, where he would continue until his retirement.

He began his scientific work studying protein synthesis and its relationship with antibiotics, but in the late 1970s he felt that he was getting intellectually leveraged.

He is overcome with a need to do something more exciting than wrestle with the biochemistry of bacteria.

His concern leads him to a conversation with Antonio García-Bellido, founder of the Spanish school of developmental biology, who suggests a problem that, at first glance, sounds arcane.

The fruit fly,

, is a tool of geneticists.

One of its characteristics is that it is covered in setae: sensory hairs that decorate its body, positioned precisely and reproducibly from one fly to another.

The questions are simple: where does this order come from?, where is it codified?, how does each of the quetas know where to appear?

The challenge that García-Bellido poses to Modolell is to answer these questions.

For many years geneticists had collected mutant flies that remove setae, add more or change their position, always in a precise, controlled and reproducible way.

The set of mutations is associated with a region of fly chromosome 1 with the acronym Achaete-Scute Complex (AS-C).

The collection of mutants and their analysis are complex, but where there are mutants, there are genes and the conclusion of these studies, in which García-Bellido had invested a lot of time, is that if there is order there is a mechanism and the way to find it has to be be through genes.

The roadmap is clear and has implications beyond the setas.

If we learn how the fly's setae are placed, maybe the answer will show us the way to understand how the arms, eyes, fingers are positioned.

The problem is how to get to the genes.

At that time in Spain, that of silent science, there is good genetics and good biochemistry, but very little or none of the technology that was being forged at that time to analyze and manipulate genes.

Juan accepts García-Bellido's challenge, abandons the antibiotics, takes his suitcase and goes, in the middle of his career and his life, to Matt Messelson's laboratory at Harvard (United States), to learn the new techniques that allow find and detail genes.

It is important to stop and realize what he is doing.

With a determined career and a quiet life,

he ties the blanket over his head and goes abroad with his family to pursue his curiosity.

That is science.

Juan Modolell, with his collaborator Sonsoles Campuzano, in a file photo. Denis Duboule

Upon his return from the US, Juan brings the technology to manipulate DNA and with Sonsoles Campuzano, his collaborator for so many years, reinvents his laboratory with the purpose of immersing himself in the DNA of the mysterious AS-C.

The techniques are still under development and Juan's laboratory participates in it.

From that moment, through several generations of students that he trains, he does a job that hasn't changed much over the years: he studies, discovers, educates.

His laboratory was the radio focus of DNA technology in Spain.

Everything, as those of us who knew him know, were done with method, calm, elegance, patience and an exceptional human category.

During the 1980s and 1990s his laboratory was a hive of scientific activity that produced discoveries that are now in textbooks.

Juan and his team solve the enigma of the location of the setae: in the DNA there are stretches that direct the activity of a few specific genes to defined positions in the body of the fly.

The mutations that eliminate change the position of the setae, destroy or alter the information in these sections.

Today similar sequences have been found in all genes, they are called regulatory sequences and are thought to be the most common targets of mutations in many diseases.

Furthermore, the study has an additional prize, the AS-C genes not only make setae, but also endow them with a neuronal character that allows them to perform their function, and not only in adults,

but also in the embryo.

The AS-C genes are the key to beginning to understand how a nervous system is made.

The next step was to find the code, the landscape that those regulatory sequences read.

Juan and his laboratory find how the landscape that leads to the global pattern is built.

In doing so they create paradigms that are extrapolated to other systems of pattern constructions.

Juan does all his work in Madrid and although at the end of the 20th century he is barely known in Spain beyond the CSIC, his work has international repercussions.

The genes that Modolell and his group identified have been found in all animals and with function and function similar to those described by his group in Drosophila.

Juan is a pioneer of the connection between classical and molecular genetics, between what is called the genotype (the genes) and the phenotype (what we see).

As a modest person, Juan never missed a well-deserved national recognition but his work could not go unnoticed and was recognized with several awards, including the Jaime I for Scientific Research (2002) and the National Research Award (2006).

However, his greatest scientific prize was undoubtedly the pride of having solved a fundamental problem of biology and the success of the long line of students who are researchers today doing what Juan taught them, working on interesting things, never getting leveraged and always doing it. with consideration and respect for the object of study and fellow students.

His disciples and friends always had him on hand or on the other end of the phone, always accessible for a conversation or advice.

Juan was Catalan and remained closely linked to Catalonia, although as he said he felt like "the Catalan of Madrid".

This relationship with his roots led him to make a singular contribution to the important boost in biomedical sciences that took place in Barcelona at the beginning of the 21st century and that today reaps its fruits in a vibrant biomedical community.

He did so as an adviser at the Center for Genomic Regulation and, until recently, at ICREA, an institution with a central role in the research explosion in Catalonia.

He also played an essential role in the founding of the Andalusian Center for Developmental Biology in Seville, another of the leading centers in this field in Spain.

In addition to his flies and his genes, Juan had passions and interests that he carried with his proven sobriety.

The first, his wife and his daughters, with whom he always shared everything.

One step below, nature photography, especially butterflies, which he enjoyed.

He was a great photographer and the sign of his appreciation to his friends was always a beautiful, sharp, well-framed photograph of a butterfly in the field or in the mountains, with its scientific name in a text describing the conditions of the photo. .

He was also a collector of explorers' books, especially from the late 19th century, and wherever he went he prowled used bookstores looking for such volumes.

Secretly, perhaps because of Jose Luis Gomez Skarmeta, his brilliant Chilean disciple recently deceased at the wrong time, he was in love with Chile.

Juan was diagnosed with stomach cancer at age 54.

In an interview with this newspaper in 2007, he recalled what he did at that time with amazing wisdom.

“My reaction was curious, because, once the operation was over and knowing that the cancer was contained, I did not want to read anything about this type of tumor, I wanted to forget.

I didn't want to investigate and I was very grateful that nobody told me about odds, because odds don't mean anything when you only have one card, they mean when you play many times, but I only had one card”, he explained.

And Juan survived another 31 years, until another prostate tumor that he had been fighting since the pandemic took him away.

Juan belongs to a generation that is abandoning us and that, in our country, did a silent and unrecognized work —and not only in Science— from which many of us are descendants.

People like him, calm, who talks to his work and who shows that daring does not have to be strident, goes unnoticed, but as that proverb says, those who walk through the desert leave their footprints in the sand, although sometimes they carry the wind

This is not the case of Juan Modolell whose figure, personality and company lives on in his example and in his dynasty and scientific legacy.

Alfonso Martínez Arias

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