Antonio Lazcano, biologist: "The idea that there is a good science of the wise people is populism"

Conversing with the Mexican biologist Antonio Lazcano (Tijuana, 72 years old) is hardly limited to talking about the origin of life, the subject to which he has dedicated his research career.

Cultured and refined, Lazcano defines himself as a "monarchic anarchist" ("If you're going to have a despot as ruler, you'd better have an enlightened despot," he comments sarcastically).

He talks about philosophy, history, politics and art with the same ease and depth with which he drags the listener to discover the frontiers of research on the first cell conglomerates that we can consider "alive".

Lazcano visited Barcelona a few weeks ago to give a lecture at the CosmoCaixa Science Museum dedicated to the centenary of his friend Juan Oró (1923-2004), the Catalan biochemist who made a fundamental contribution to understanding chemical processes related to the synthesis of the first molecules of life, such as amino acids.

At the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he is a professor emeritus, Lazcano leads the Origin of Life Laboratory and is considered the Mexican researcher with the most publications in the leading scientific journals

and

.

When asked for a definition of "life," he quotes the English poet Alexander Pope: "Fools dare to walk the paths angels fear to tread."

Contrary to what some think, he believes that there are disciplines that allow a "phenomenological description" instead of a definition.

More information

Found in an asteroid one of the four letters of RNA, the essential molecule for life

given by Euclid

in his

2,000 years ago is valid now and will be valid in 10,000 years.

However, the biology books of 100 years ago hardly included mentions of genetic material, something unthinkable today.

In biology you can give a series of characteristics, and that list will depend on the historical moment in which you are”.

Ask.

So how could we give a

definition of life?

Answer.

The list of properties should include being a system, never a single molecule, endowed with a clear individuality, capable of evolving through Darwinian mechanisms, which implies hereditary mechanisms, and with bioenergetic mechanisms that allow it to take advantage of environmental precursors to maintain itself and breed.

I am aware that it is an unsatisfactory definition, but an enormous merit is that it recognizes its own limits.

Q.

Is the point of view of astronomers about life close to that of biologists?

A.

Astronomers exercise the right to extraordinary freedom of thought and think that if you have a planet, you already have intelligent life that is going to develop telescopes to communicate with us.

The NASA rule is that if you have liquid water, you already have a condition for life to appear and develop.

We biologists are more skeptical because we realize that this is only part of the scenery for life to appear and the concrete example is meteorites.

In meteorites you find organic material, you find amino acids, you find components of nucleic acids, you find components of membranes.

That is, you have what mathematicians call necessary conditions, but not sufficient ones.

Q.

The pandemic has provided an opportunity to study an RNA virus very closely.

Has it been done in your lab as well?

A.

We know that, at some point in very early evolution, the genomes we now see with the DNA double helix, which stabilizes genetic information, were preceded by RNA genomes.

RNA is a bit of a handyman to the cell: RNA viruses are a model for how those ancestral genomes might have worked.

I admit that deep down I am an intellectual egoist.

At the beginning of the pandemic we thought: let's look at all the information on the virus that we can get and try to extrapolate it to the early Earth.

Never losing sight of the fact that this does not mean that viruses are old or that they are the perfect model, but they do give us information.

I think that eclecticism is common in those of us who work at the origin of life.

There is not a single country that can do without an academic apparatus, a scientific apparatus, as solid as possible.

Antonio Lazcano, evolutionary biologist

Q.

How did you live those very difficult months of the pandemic?

R.

During the pandemic my laboratory published five articles.

That is due to the very generous decision of my lab students not to stay home.

They said: “We know a lot about RNA genetics and about bioinformatics: we are going to try to understand the SARS-CoV-2 virus from an evolutionary point of view.”

I was moved by how the

reviewers engaged in wonderfully constructive criticism so that a paper led by my former student and physician Rodrigo Jácome on how a drug to inhibit the hepatitis C virus also acted on a molecule of the hepatitis C virus was published to the best possible standards. coronavirus that helps it replicate.

It was part of the community's commitment to help control the pandemic.

Antonio Lazcano, on March 1 in Barcelona.

MASSIMILIANO MINOCRI

Q.

What lesson have you taken from that commitment?

R.

Given the very generous reaction of the scientific community, with all the disciplines that turned to find how to help from their point of view, I think that the great lesson that this has to teach us is that no contemporary society is isolated from the others .

There is not a single country that can do without an academic apparatus, a scientific apparatus that is as solid as possible.

Science must be supported, not because science is the solution to all our problems, but because without a strengthened scientific apparatus we cannot even define them.

Q.

But it doesn't seem so idyllic.

Some did stay behind.

R.

There were things that still seem extremely painful to me.

A neighbor of Mexico is Haiti.

The Mexicans, despite the brutal mistakes of the Ministry of Health, managed to get vaccines bought and distributed.

In Haiti only 5% of the population is vaccinated.

The vaccine came to demonstrate what we already know: we are in a totally unequal world, where the medical benefits do not apply to everyone.

When you have a problem, like the pandemic, that is killing people on a daily basis, you have painful lessons of the need for much fairer systems.

It also came to pose fascinating scientific problems for us because, for example, the number of people infected or killed by the pandemic in the sub-Saharan case is not as large as we expected.

He came to show us that when you have a global problem like climate change, you have a problem that requires the cooperation of all nations.

Q.

Of all nations, but also of men and women.

R.

Just reviewing the history of immunology, the female figures jump immediately.

The English aristocrat Lady Montagu [Mary Montagu, 1689-1762], a brilliant and enlightened woman, extraordinarily well educated, discovers that those who were called the Greeks were women of the Ottoman Empire who came from Central Asia and who toured the houses of Istanbul in autumn, where she lived, since her husband was the English ambassador.

They went around the houses knocking on the doors: they carried scabs from people who had suffered from smallpox.

The crusts were dissolved in walnut shells and in water;

They made small wounds on the children and spread that paste on them.

Nothing happened to some, others had a fever that lasted two or three days, but all were immunized.

She was close friends with the Princess of Wales, the wife of the heir to the British throne;

she too a German princess product of the Enlightenment.

She decides to vaccinate her children and Voltaire, who was in exile at the time in England, writes the

and Catherine the Great, another enlightened German princess who was a friend of Voltaire, sees the letters and decides to vaccinate herself first, then vaccinate the Grand Duke Paul, who was the son of the heir to the throne.

When the Russian aristocracy takes notice, there is a whole ritualized ceremonial that is almost like a communion.

Because they gave them part of the empress's scars in little boxes.

Maria Fedorovna, who is the daughter of Tsar Alexander, learns that [English doctor Edward] Jenner has developed a better vaccine.

She asks to be brought to Russia, and when she arrives, she leaves with an entourage from the Kremlin to a Moscow orphanage where they take a child, vaccinate it, and name it Vacunoff the Little Orphan.

Here, in the Spanish Empire, the private doctor of Carlos IV, another enlightened man, suggests vaccinating all the inhabitants of the Empire.

And another extraordinary woman, Isabel Zendal, embarks on a mission with dozens of immunized children to bring the vaccine to Cuba and Mexico, among other countries.

And finally, those who developed the messenger RNA vaccine are also women.

I don't want to exaggerate the point, but I feel that female concern for children has always been intense, and it is what leads all these heroines of medicine, with a social vision of the State's commitment to vaccination.

Science is like democracy: over time it corrects its mistakes.

And this makes it extraordinarily participatory.

Antonio Lazcano, evolutionary biologist

Q.

In these years you have always had a strong political commitment.

magazine

.

Where is Mexican science going?

R.

The situation is tremendously worrying.

We are witnessing the destruction of State instruments to make culture, science, and education a common good.

The current Mexican scientific apparatus is relatively young, it will be about 50 years old.

The National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) is a governing body for science that certainly has had many flaws, but which had a virtue from the beginning: the idea of ​​peer review, community participation in defining evaluation project policies.

Science cannot be democratic: you cannot vote if a vaccine works or not, if the continents move or if lightning can synthesize organic compounds.

But it is participatory.

One of the triumphs of the founders of the Royal Society in England or the Accademia dei Lincei in Italy is the recognition that you need to have a critical attitude.

Scientists are evaluated all the time, by students, by colleagues, by the reviewers of your articles, by the devices that give you funding.

Science is like democracy: over time it corrects its mistakes.

And this makes it extraordinarily participatory.

The biologist Antonio Lazcano photographed in Barcelona, ​​on March 1.

MASSIMILIANO MINOCRI

Q.

And what is the problem in Mexico?

R.

The big problem is that politicians with extraordinary selfishness and lack of vision, and this is valid for the politicians of the PRI, those of the PAN, and of course now with the Morena party, have not realized that science requires projects that transcend the period of government.

In the previous six-year term, [Enrique] Peña Nieto's six-year term, the first four years there was money for science.

The last two years the budgets were shaved.

When Andrés Manuel López Obrador became president, a presidency won with a legitimacy that no one can doubt, some of my colleagues were confident that the apparatus would improve.

At first, I was very pleased to have an active scientist directing CONACYT, María Elena Álvarez Buylla, the first woman to do so.

Suddenly we realized that, even before taking possession of her, she was already beginning to try to influence the development of science and for the worse, in an almost capricious attitude.

And then they began to remove directors of public research centers with accusations that have never been proven.

She began to try to subvert this evaluation method.

At one point she appointed a person who advertised herself as a professional astrologer as one of the public relations managers.

And, well, astrology is interesting if you see it in a surreal painting by Leonora Carrington, but you don't want these kinds of people at CONACYT.

During the pandemic, CONACYT remained absolutely silent because a dissemination program was never developed at such a delicate moment.

Antonio Lazcano, director of the Laboratory of Origin of Life at UNAM

Q.

What model of science does Morena defend?

R.

Directly a Stalinist model, with the idea that we now have a totally centralized state science.

For the first time in our history, she wants to put representatives of the Army and the Navy on a government Board where there are no investigators.

The participation of the scientific community is suppressed and now it is only the ministers who are going to decide CONACYT's policies.

Wonderful programs for young students have been abolished.

Mexican students were able to participate in the mathematics Olympics because the film director Guillermo del Toro gave the money so they could travel.

During the pandemic, CONACYT remained absolutely silent because a dissemination program was never developed at such a delicate moment.

Those who moved were the scientific societies,

Q.

Has the criticism had consequences for you?

R.

She tried to make me run from a commission, where she had no power because I had been chosen by my colleagues, and I won the legal protection.

But what we see is an authoritarian vision, with a very coarse nationalism, which plays with the feelings of the original peoples.

This is a myth repeated over and over again: the original peoples have wonderful knowledge about herbal medicine or the nutritional properties of a series of plants.

But that is not in contradiction with contemporary science.

This idea that you have a good science that is the pure, spontaneous science of the wise people is pure and simple populism.

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