Geneticist Francisco J. Ayala dies at 88 years of age

Francisco José Ayala, one of the most prestigious Spanish scientists, has died at the age of 88, according to what the scientist Lawrence Krauss has published on his website.

Graduated in Theology and Physics, he had been ordained as a Dominican priest in 1960, but a year later he hung up the habit to go study in the United States with Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the fathers of the current understanding of evolution.

He had been interested in genetics at the University of Salamanca, researching the vinegar fly with Fernando Galán, and was attracted to evolution under the influence of the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin.

He was director of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of California at Irvine since 1989, and among his contributions is a better understanding of the molecular clock, which allows estimating the moment in which two species separated during evolution.

He has also made important contributions on the reproduction of

, which causes Chagas disease, or the evolution of Plasmodium, which causes malaria.

As a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, which he entered at the age of 45, he participated in the beginnings of the Human Genome Project, which would end with the complete sequencing of the first genome.

“One of the things that was considered was sequencing the genome, but we didn't know how to do it.

In the mid-1980s, sequencing methods began to appear and they thought about doing it, and they asked the Academy if it should be done, and our committee said yes, let it be done.

It was calculated that it would take 15 years and that it would cost about 3,000 million dollars.

Then it was finished two years earlier and at a lower cost, ”she recalled in an interview in EL PAÍS.

Ayala lost all his positions and recognitions at the University of California at Irvine (UCI), in 2018, due to accusations of sexual harassment made by four women.

The scientist had to resign after an internal investigation into a series of allegations of sexual harassment against him that was completed after interviewing more than 60 witnesses from the institution, in addition to the complainants.

After that investigation, the US National Academy of Sciences expelled him by considering it proven that he sexually harassed his companions.

The so-called

broke out on June 28, 2018, when the University of California at Irvine (UCI), to which he has dedicated more than 30 years and donated 10 million dollars, announced the withdrawal of all honors to the most important professor of that institution.

In a note, he assured that Ayala, a US national, had received four complaints of sexual harassment from as many employees of the center.

After half a year of research and more than 60 interviews, carried out by two specialists, it was decided to approve three of them because the report considered it proven that it had violated university regulations dedicated to protecting its staff against sexist behavior.

science and religion

Throughout his career, the scientist has published dozens of books on scientific subjects, but he has also been interested in ethical issues or the relationship between science and religion.

In his opinion, Catholicism is compatible with the teachings of biology, although he does not believe that this is the case for creationism.

For these contributions to the dialogue between science and religion, he received the Templeton Prize in 2010, worth 1.2 million euros, more than the Nobel Prize.

Among many other awards and recognitions, the deceased scientist received, in 2001, the National Medal of Science, awarded by the President of the United States to people with outstanding contributions to the advancement of knowledge.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences or the American Philosophical Society, and was awarded honorary doctorates at universities around the world.

He was also president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the institution that publishes

magazine .

Ayala also found success as an investor in California vineyards, where he bought a piece of land in the 1980s on which he produced highly regarded wines.

That allowed him to accumulate a considerable fortune.

He donated part of that money, around ten million dollars, to his university, a figure that is the largest contribution by a Spanish researcher to a public university and broke the record of the University of California at Irvine itself, in a country where Private donations are much larger and more frequent than in Spain.

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