The director of the Cancer Center makes her position available after the scandals uncovered by ABC

Blasco, who has been in charge of the center since 2011, has assured that he places his position in the hands of the center’s board of trustees, which presides Eva Ortega-Paínogeneral secretary of Research of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, according to El País. However, he is not planning to resign.

The CNIO needs to invest in equipment to renew its equipment, counting on one million euros for this, which María Blasco considers «clearly insufficient« and that forces the center to choose purchases “according to the most urgent needs.”

Accompanied by the vice directors of the center Óscar Llorca and Óscar Fernández Capetillo, and by the director of the Biotechnology program, Fernando Peláez, María Blasco has clarified that in no case will she resign from her position. «My contract is renewed every five years by the CNIO Board of Trustees after a prior evaluation as director. They are the ones who have to decide if I have to continue or not” but the last two evaluations “have been very good,” he argued.

As ABC published this Wednesday, the CNIO spent almost a million euros on buying works of art and hiring specialized staff in this matter, despite the fact that said “artistic” activity has nothing to do with the original mission of the center, oncological research, as reported by the works council on the organization’s transparency portal. Furthermore, at least three people have been hired for this task and dozens of works have been purchased, in what the aforementioned works committee considers an “unjustifiable activity” of the investigating body.

The CNIO He not only bought the works of art and hired this staff despite suffering a policy of very important cuts in the research field, but also launched an important international itineration of the works with multiple trips attended by its top managers and which represented a significant expense for the center, officially calculated at more than 20,000 euros.

As recognized in the public body’s own transparency portal, «the works have been exhibited at the Cervantes Institute in New York, the Spanish embassy in the United States, in Washington DC and at the Cervantes Institute in Chicago. In addition, last year trips were also made to the Arctic and Oslo (6,503 euros), Chicago (4,523), Mozambique (5,524) and Washington (4,177).

Support from Diana Morant

On Friday morning, Minister Diana Morant assured that the center has the “support” of the Executive. “You will never find me speaking badly about our research centers,” Morant explained. The CNIO is “the main center of cancer research in Spain, the second best in Europe”, according to various rankings. In addition, the minister considers that she is having »the largest fundraising in history.