The seventh annual Vilcek Prize for Biomedical Science is awarded to Carlos Bustamante, PhD, in recognition of his groundbreaking research into the inner workings of the cell and movement of individual molecules within cells.

Carlos J. Bustamante is a natural tinkerer, with a penchant as a child for taking apart and reconstructing toy cars, and building and launching rockets powered by explosive chemicals of his own concoction. Not much has changed. He still likes to tinker; only now he uses magnetic beads, atomic-force microscopes, and laser “tweezers” to explore the inner workings of the cell and the physical forces behind DNA replication.

The young Bustamante’s scientific drive went into high gear when, as a teenager, he learned about Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the Spanish neuroscientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for Medicine in 1906. Cajal’s work motivated him to buy his first chemistry set and microscope.

He had found his “true calling.” He obtained his Bachelors in Biology in 1973 from Cayetano Heredia University, in Lima, Peru, his hometown, then his Masters in Biochemistry, from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.

In 1975, he was admitted to the Biophysics Graduate Program at the University of California, Berkeley, the same year he was named a Fulbright Scholar. After completing his PhD in Biophysics in 1981, he stayed on briefly at Berkeley for postdoc work before joining the faculty of the Chemistry Department at the University of New Mexico, in 1982. It was during his years in New Mexico that Dr. Bustamante first became interested in the forces at work in DNA replication. Using then-new fluorescence staining techniques and wire electrodes, he and his collaborators induced DNA to move under a microscope. What they saw raised the curtain on the next stage of Dr. Bustamante’s research: DNA was elastic, remarkably so.

The experiments he devised subsequently produced a breakthrough discovery: it was possible to manipulate single molecules of DNA and precisely measure their mechanical elasticity, enabling “a more realistic view of the cell’s inner workings.” Previously, scientists could only study massive populations of molecules. His research direction now clear, Dr. Bustamante joined the University of Oregon, in 1991, as Professor of Chemistry and member of the Institute of Molecular Biology. Three years later, he was appointed Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. In 1998, he returned to UC Berkeley, as Professor in the Physics, Chemistry, and Molecular and Cell Biology departments, where he remains today. Reappointed HHMI Investigator in 2000, Dr. Bustamante continues to develop novel methods of single-molecule manipulation. His work, considered to have produced a renaissance in biophysics research, has been duly recognized.

Time magazine nominated him one America’s Best in 2001. In 2002, the same year he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society awarded him the Biological Physics Prize. He received the Alexander Hollaender Award in Biophysics from the National Academy of Sciences in 2004; a year after that, the Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award by the American Association of Physics Teachers and a Doctor honoris causa by the University of Chicago. He is Director of the Advanced Microscopies Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Burroughs-Welcome Fund. As for Dr. Bustamante’s plans for the future, he intends nothing less than to build a living cell, using mitochondria. “It’s a crazy idea,” he admits, “but I like crazy ideas.”

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Spanish changes are scientific suicide

If research continues to be sidelined, Spain will be left with little domestic expertise, warns Amaya Moro-Martín21. 15 February 2012

Spain no longer has a ministry of science. In the last days of 2011, its new government transferred national science policy to the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, a duty for which this ministry seems most unsuited. Science was an unwelcome addition that absorbed more than half of the €1,083-million (US$1,438-million) budget cut imposed on the ministry. This sends an alarming signal of the sacrifices that science may face when the government releases its budget for 2012 next month.

This is the first time that neither 'science' nor 'research' have featured in the name of any top Spanish government department. It is not just a symbolic shift: it continues our country's trend of deliberately undermining and playing down the importance of science.

The official line is clear: science is not a priority in Spain. Of course, we are immersed in an economic crisis and austerity measures are needed. However, the government's irrational and draconian actions will cause long-term damage to the scientific infrastructure and send contradictory messages to other countries and investors. Although its rhetoric promises a shift to a knowledge-based economy, every step it takes is in the opposite direction. The results will be a borrowed-knowledge economy with little domestic know-how.

The problems did not start with the new government: the previous administration attempted to pass a Kafkaesque by-law for public universities that would have created a merit-evaluation system that diminished the weight assigned to research and technology transfer. The by-law stated that trade unions would negotiate the criteria for faculty promotion, making academic careers “more predictable and more egalitarian”. It would have been the death of meritocracy. The same by-law would also have ballooned bureaucracy to such a level that it would have threatened to swamp any university administration.

The previous government also opposed attempts to create a genuine tenure-track system for researchers in universities and national laboratories, on the grounds that tenure track is unconstitutional because access to civil service should be “egalitarian” so tenured jobs should not be targeted to tenure-track researchers. This is a consequence of the narrow-minded thought that all researchers in the public sector should be civil servants, but civil service is unsuited to research activities.

Spain likes to boast that it has an equivalent to tenure track: the Ramón y Cajal programme. Launched in 2001, this is the only nationwide programme that has managed to attract and retain highly qualified researchers from Spain and abroad. However, drastic cuts in hiring over the past three years and a hiring freeze announced this year will kill this first attempt at a tenure-track programme. The prospects are so grim that despite being eager to return to Spain, some of my Spanish colleagues in the United States are rejecting Ramón y Cajal positions.

The hiring freeze is suicidal. Researchers who retire will no longer be replaced. Unlike many of its neighbours, Spain has a very limited science and technology industry in which to absorb highly qualified workers, so scientists aged 20–40 years will have no choice but to leave if they want to further their career. The country will therefore face a multigenerational brain drain, with corresponding losses in innovation, inspiration and credibility. The damage from this decision will take decades to reverse.

The new government is now effectively trampling on the best hope that Spanish researchers had for the future. Legislation in the pipeline could have improved the situation, but the government has, abruptly and without explanation, closed the two political science commissions — one in the Senate and one in the Congress — that would have been responsible for steering through this legislation.

The legislation includes moves to allow universities and research centres to be funded privately, to develop a new science and technology strategy and to create a proper national research agency with a multi-year budget. We urgently need such a system in Spain, where severe and unpredictable fluctuations in year-to-year funding make medium- to long-term planning impossible. The strategy is crucial if Spain is to coordinate its increasingly anarchic 18 sets of science policies — laid out simultaneously by the 17 regional governments and the central government — and to introduce a smarter, top-down, approach to tackling national problems.

Spain must bring its science and technology investment (currently 1.39% of gross domestic product) in line with European standards (2%) and closer to the 3% goal set by the European Council Lisbon Strategy for 2010. It also needs a science council, similar to the German Wissenschaftsrat, constituted mainly of scientists who have been elected by the scientific community to take the lead in delivering the national science and technology strategy. Spain's situation is summed up by a poster for a recent Hollywood blockbuster: “No plan. No backup. No choice. Mission: Impossible. Ghost Protocol.” Spanish science cannot afford ghost protocols. Without the proposed strategy there is no plan, and without a well-funded and non-political national research funding agency, there is no backup. The results leave research in Spain with a mission impossible. Journal name:

Nature Volume: 482, Pages: 277 Date published: (16 February 2012) DOI: doi:10.1038/482277a