The schoolyard acrobatics of Carles Puigdemont are not only distracting you from the real news that came out of Barcelona on the same Thursday that they occurred – that Catalan politics has entered a path of normality – but also from the most important issues that are happening right now in the world, that thing that is beyond the borders of your province. The fault is not ours on this occasion, but yours, for the insufficient attention you devote to getting information from reliable sources. My colleagues from International are explaining to you what the largest incursion of Ukraine in Russian territory means, the civic response of the British against the far right or the concern about Iran’s response to the assassination of the leader of Hamas in the middle of Tehran. Read all that, like a good informed citizen. I am going to contribute a couple of scientific issues here, which is my thing. They are not provincial either, in case you want to change columnists.
One of the central problems of current medical progress is that there are increasingly more effective but more expensive treatments. For example, there are therapies that cure painful and deadly genetic diseases, but they can cost up to three million dollars. This is a pressing issue to which we are not paying enough attention, but which will require a comprehensive transformation of our health systems, both public and private. And if this is the case in the developed world, looking at Africa can plunge us into paralyzing ethical reflections. Unless we are intelligent and help push the necessary policies.
In Ede, a small town (160,000 inhabitants) in southwestern Nigeria, there is Redeemer University, a private institution of the Pentecostal church that, surprisingly, houses a Center of Excellence in Genomics and Infectious Diseases (ACEGID) that has been working hard for 10 years to live up to its name. The center has first-class laboratories where predoctoral and postdoctoral students from five African countries conduct research.
The ACEGID It was founded to study emerging infectious diseases in Nigeria and its neighbors, such as Ebola and Lassa fever, but already includes others such as Covid and MPOX (monkeypox), and has trained 1,600 African scientists in genomics, As Jon Cohen and Abdullahi Tsanni show in a report for ScienceThey have developed diagnostic tests and traced the evolution of the genomes of several viruses during epidemics. They are a small, but world-leading centre.
There are Western scientists who have helped set up the centre. They belong to Harvard University and the Broad Institute (a central node of the genome project), and they have trained those who later train others. This chain of knowledge is a pillar of science, which is an international endeavour in which new knowledge is based on old knowledge, sometimes by eroding it, by qualifying it, by changing it even in fundamental ways, but never by destroying it, because what was true in the times of Galileo and Newton is still true in the times of Einstein and Bohr, only we have learned to see it from a deeper and more fertile prism, more useful for the advancement of knowledge.
Perhaps you are a scientist and can do something to help African science. The countries of the continent have developed an understandable allergy to colonialism, and there are sections of their population radically opposed to any initiative that smacks of it. But science is not colonialism. There is no African science, just as there is no Chinese science. Science is one, and the best African geneticists are at the forefront of the world. They deserve the support of the rich world: your support, idle reader.
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