|
First Appeared Wednesday, 21 December '05
Tell Us Your Story: UCSF and Chile
A personal account by Alex Engel
Despite being the Saturday of a three-day October weekend, the upstairs meeting room of Santiago, Chile’s Ciencia para la Vida was packed with researchers. As presentation slides flashed — with a smog-obscured view of the Andes as backdrop — those in attendance could take satisfaction in what was the first-ever formal scientific meeting between a contingent of UCSF researchers and graduate students and their Chilean counterparts.
The UCSF visitors were led by faculty members Bruce Alberts, professor of biochemistry; Peter Walter, professor of biochemistry; and Keith Yamamoto, executive vice dean of the School of Medicine and professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology. The 22 UCSF graduate students represented six different programs.
To tell the story of how this international meeting came to fruition requires the weaving of personal histories, the biotechnology explosion and the economics of industrializing nations. Perhaps most responsible for its inception is Pablo Valenzuela, whose rich contributions to science and health exploded decades ago here in the Bay Area. After earning a PhD degree in chemistry,Valenzuela came to UCSF for his postdoctoral training in the lab of William Rutter. Rutter’s work on hepatitis B set the stage for vaccine development.
After co-founding Chiron in 1981, Valenzuela served as its research director, overseeing the development of the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine, the sequencing of the AIDS virus and the discovery of the hepatitis C virus. With Chiron successful and growing, Valenzuela, a native of Chile, went home to found the biotechnology company Bios Chile.
To achieve his vision of building a strong intellectual economy to help Chile industrialize, Valenzuela hopes to tap top American universities to establish collaborations and elevate Chilean science. But who could act as a liaison at one of these institutions?
|
| From right to left: Bruce Alberts, Sebastian Bernales, Kathleen Yamamoto, Keith Yamamoto
|
Valenzuela knew just the person: UCSF biochemistry and biophysics fifth-year graduate student Sebastián Bernales. Bernales was raised in Chile, where he attended Universidad Católica before moving to the United States to work at Chiron and eventually enroll in the UCSF Tetrad program. He now works in the laboratory of Peter Walter.
Bernales was responsible for recruiting the senior UCSF researchers for the trip and organizing the selection process that assembled a scientifically diverse and energetic group of graduate students.
As the actual program began, it became obvious that the small scientific community in Chile was already making big contributions to the national economy. One such project completed at Ciencia para la Vida tackled the problem of fish pathogens that were creating losses in salmon farming totaling $150 million each year.
|
| Valparaiso Bay
|
With an investment of only $1 million, a highly effective vaccine was developed that solved the pathogen problem and generated $25 million per year in vaccine revenues. Other projects seek to mitigate the environmental consequences of copper mining, another large industry in Chile, by developing bacterial leaching methods to reduce energy costs and toxic substances.
Not all of the Chilean science presented was industrially applied in nature. One particularly promising piece of work was presented by Luis Burzio, research director of Bios Chile. His lab has discovered a hairpin RNA that may provide new diagnostics for identifying cancer cells, as well as a selective means of killing them.
Talks by the UCSF faculty were broad and encompassed their entire scientific careers. Alberts, who served as president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1993 to 2005, revealed he had no idea that he would end up in Washington, DC, when he wrote a letter early in his career about scientific creativity and laboratory size — using bread making as a metaphor. Alberts felt that small groups were more likely to perform innovative research, while large laboratories would churn out filler material. “I didn’t know I was starting a career in policy...I was just thinking of Wonder bread,” Alberts said.
|
| Visit to the public school |
After the Columbus Day holiday, a symposium entitled Science & Science Education was held in the majestic law library at Universidad Católica, where Jorge Allende, president of the Chilean National Academy of Sciences, introduced Alberts and Patricia Caldera. Caldera is the academic coordinator of the Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP), an organization initiated by Alberts that pairs San Francisco Unified School District teachers with volunteer UCSF scientists to improve science education at all levels.
When asked about implementing an SEP-type program in Santiago, Caldera emphasized the self-sufficient nature of the system: “SEP is a model that can be applied everywhere. To initiate it, it can start small with a few interested teachers and scientists planning together what they want to accomplish and it can grow from there.”
Looking past the short-term successes of poster session suggestions or seminar question epiphanies, the extreme differences between the two communities encouraged reflection on the positions of scientists in the global community. Alberts felt the meeting “enable[d] our graduate students to experience how science can contribute, as well as how it might best be structured, in developing nation environments. For many students, this may profoundly affect future career directions.”
|
| Poster session
|
Already a few Chilean participants have arranged for positions in UCSF labs, and time will reveal whether any of the UCSF participants begin careers in Chile. With Chilean science developing rapidly and the spectacular Chilean landscape of volcanoes, high deserts and hot springs to explore, the thought likely crossed every student’s mind on the long flight home.
|
RSS News Feed
