The flu came with the cold. And to my body this pre-Christmas week. While the Minister of Health explained on Monday that in the end the common plan against respiratory viruses it had remained just a few recommendations Due to the lack of agreement with the communities, I was between paracetamols, ibuprofens and broths. Today, Friday – I prepare this newsletter the day before it arrives in your mailboxes – I finally begin to see the light and the truth is that it is a splendid sun.
Where this week there is little light is the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO), the flagship of public cancer research in Spain. The institution is mired in a serious crisis after a group of scientists denounced that they do not have the basic equipment – they give the example of confocal microscopes – to carry out their work. The complaint, which even assumes that the CNIO is losing scientific drive, points directly to the center’s director for 13 years, María Blasco, who is held responsible for poor management.
The CNIO is in the red. This is a reality: it has a deficit of 4.5 million euros and difficulties in purchasing all the necessary equipment, Blasco admitted a few hours after the first information appeared. The visible head of the center, however, attributes it to the fact that the budget they have has not been updated.
These first explanations were not enough and on Monday around twenty main researchers at the center asked for the replacement of the scientific management team, led by Blasco, in a letter addressed to the Ministry of Science. A day later, the Board of Trustees of the CNIO, a body under the umbrella of Science, made a move: paralyzed the accounts for 2025 and asked management to present a comprehensive report on its management within four weeks.
In an interview with my colleague Antonio Martínez Ron, the first after the crisis broke out, Blasco assures that he is “a victim of a campaign.” It is in the eye of the hurricane and not only because of the materials. The Board of Trustees also decided to suspend the CNIO Arte program, an initiative about which rivers of ink are flowing: it is a program based on producing works of art from donations, which are then donated to the CNIO and put up for sale to achieve benefits, according to Blasco. One of the criticisms is that none of the works had been sold – an assertion that the person responsible denies – or that she had made international trips related to this activity.
“Of course, no euro allocated to the fight against cancer or from the CNIO has been allocated to buying art. The CNIO does not buy art. We have a finalist donation, which means that it can only be used for what the foundation or organization that gives us the money indicates: the CNIO Arte program. And that implies the production of a work of art by an artist, and that artist then donates the work,” he justified in the interview.
The crisis has many tentacles. In the troubled sea there is also an open investigation in the institution for abuse of power after a complaint from an employee or the paralysis of the distribution of benefits (royalties) for the performance of innovations. In the coming weeks we will see how this controversy unravels, which is complex and stinging, because it has touched the heart of research – battered, precarious and yet cutting-edge – in Spain.
While you were doing other things…
- Health is going to reform the pharmaceutical co-payment: it wants to make it more progressive by reducing the contribution for the lowest incomes (less than 35,000 euros) and increasing it for the following ones. Here I tell you the details.
talk about fear
Talking about fear is always a challenge. Especially when that fear is difficult to capture even with words and thus avoids being told. Three oncology patients, recovered from three different types of cancer, wanted to challenge the limits of language and in this report they tell what forms fear takes in the paths of illness and recovery that they have traveled.
The emotion does not end with the end of the treatments, but remains long beyond. The fear, after all, is of relapsing. For the cancer to return. Thanks to Ció, Eva and Violeta. I recommend you read it until the end, until the sword of Damocles becomes a razor.
And here I leave it for today. I wish you happy holidays, joy, dances and health to celebrate them. To those who do not feel this way this year, or do not have the best circumstances, may these dates pass quickly for you and in the least painful way possible.
A very strong hug,
Sofia.
#happening #CNIO
