Special Issue April 2011

Spe

cial

Iss

ue A

pril

20

11

Special Issue April 2011

The state of São Paulo seeks to increase collaboration overseas and attract talent

PESQUIS

A F

AP

ES

P

Ethanol from sugar cane bagasse

Peptide inhibts vascular spreading

BRAZILIANSCIENCE OPEN TO THE WORLD

001_CAPA_ingles_2011.indd 1 11.04.11 19:51:00

FAPESP, the São Paulo Research Foundation, is one of the main research funding agencies in Brazil. With a 2010 budget of US$ 450 million, it supports more than 11,000 scholarships and 8,000 research awards. FAPESP’s Young Investigators Awards envisage creating new research groups led by highly promising early-career scientists in any fi eld of knowledge and from any country. Selected candidates receive competitive fellowships and sizable research funds. Candidates are encouraged to develop their projects with higher education and research institutions from the State of São Paulo, Brazil. Highlighted research areas are: biodiversity, bioenergy, climate change, neurosciences, cancer, urban studies, materials science, optics and photonics, urban studies and violence. Proposals in other fi elds will be considered and all will be selected through a peer-reviewing process.

YOUNG INVESTIGATORS AWARDS in São Paulo, BRAZIL

For guidance and further information: [email protected] Additional information: http://www.fapesp.br/en/materia/4479

in São Paulo, AWARDS

002_anuncio_ingles_2011.indd 2 11.04.11 18:42:41

28 COOPERATION Thesis discusses the

reasons for the lack of growth in Brazilian research in international networks

32 ENERGY An abundant by-product

of the sugar cane industry provides Brazil with a competitive edge in the search for second generation ethanol

42 PHYSIOLOGY Attacking undesirable

veins and arteries could fight cancer and blindness

46 IMMUNOLOGY Inflammation unleashed by

sepsis damages the heart

SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL POLICY

SCIENCE

MAY 2009 / DECEMBER 2010 WWW.REVISTAPESQUISA.FAPESP.BR

SECTIONS 5 Letter from the editor 6 Memory98 Art

INTERVIEW10 In José Roberto Mendonça

de Barros’s opinion, infrastructure and the production of knowledge will help the state to drive growth in Brazil

COVER18 Initiatives seek

to make research from São Paulo more competitive abroad

37 INTERVIEW The US researcher

Lee Lynd says that cellulose ethanol and sugar cane ethanol promise to be more complementary than their competitors

50 ENVIRONMENT Mathematical models help

predict the effects of

global warming in Brazil

56 ECOLOGY Volatile compounds control

the interaction between

vegetables and insects

60 BIOCHEMISTRY Mechanism that makes

mushrooms glow leads to a method for detecting contamination

66 PHYSICS Group from Rio de

Janeiro proposes equation that describes a reduction in the quantum phenomenon due to environmental influence

68 ASTRONOMY Astronomical

instruments made in Brazil equip the SOAR telescope in the Chilean Andes

76 OPTICS Researcher publishes

article in leading international journal on the new generation of optic fibers

TECHNOLOGY

80 OIL Petrobras and Unicamp

are studying bacteria from oil wells that break down oil

82 AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

New monitoring camera made by Opto for Cbers-3 to be tested in China

HUMANITIES

84 LITERATURE Project reviews

Mário de Andrade’s creative path

90 SOCIOLOGY Seminar discusses

the dilemmas of social segregation in Brazil

94 HISTORY Database maps out

the migratory flow of qualified labor that furthered São Paulo’s post-1945 industrial development

003-004_indice_ingles_2011.indd 3 11.04.11 18:50:31

90

37

18

32

42 50 56 60

76

949084

68

28

003-004_indice_ingles_2011.indd 4 11.04.11 18:50:45

PESQUISA FAPESP n Special iSSue may 2009 / dec 2010 n 5

celSo laferPresident

eduardo moacyr kriegervice-President

ExEcUtIvE BoArd

celSo lafer, eduardo moacyr krieger, Horácio lafer piva, Herman jacobuS corneliS voorwald, maria joSé SoareS mendeS giannini, joSé de Souza martinS, joSé tadeu jorge, luiz gonzaga belluzzo, Sedi Hirano, Suely vilela Sampaio, vaHan agopyan, yoSHiaki nakano

AdmInIStrAtIvE BoArd

ricardo renzo brentaniPresident director

carloS HenriQue de brito cruzscientific director

joaQuim j. de camargo englerAdministrAtive director

EdItorIAl BoArdcarloS HenriQue de brito cruz (president), caio túlio coSta, eugênio bucci, fernando reinacH, joSé arana varela, joSé eduardo krieger, luiz davidovicH, marcelo knobel, marcelo leite, maria Hermínia tavareS de almeida, mariza corrêa, maurício tuffani, monica teixeira

ScIEntIFIc commIttEEluiz HenriQue lopeS doS SantoS (president), cylon gonçalveS da Silva, franciSco antônio bezerra coutinHo, joão furtado, joaQuim j. de camargo engler, joSé roberto parra, luíS auguSto barboSa cortez, luiS fernandez lopez, marie-anne van SluyS, mário joSé abdalla Saad, paula montero, ricardo renzo brentani, Sérgio Queiroz, wagner do amaral, walter colli

ScIEntIFIc coordInAtorluiz HenriQue lopeS doS SantoS

EdItor In chIEFmariluce moura

mAnAgIng EdItorneldSon marcolin

ExEcUtIvE EdItorScarloS Haag (Humanities), fabrício marQueS (policy), marcoS de oliveira (tecHnology), ricardo zorzetto (science)

SPEcIAl EdItorScarloS fioravanti, marcoS pivetta EdItorIAl ASSIStAntdinoraH ereno

rEvIEwEr And trAnSlAtordeboraH nealerEvIEwEraliSon mary emily aSkew

Art EdItorlaura daviña e mayumi okuyama (coordinator)

Artmaria cecilia felli and júlia cHerem rodrigueS

PhotogrAPhEreduardo ceSar

on-lInE EdItormaria guimarãeS

wEBmAStErdanielle gomeS fortunato

colABorAtorSandré SerradaS (data Bank), braz, gonçalo junior, Salvador nogueira, yuri vaSconceloS

thE ArtIclES do not nEcESSArIly rEFlEct thE oPInIon oF FAPESP

thE rEPrIntIng oF tExtS And PhotoS, EIthEr In totAl or PArtIAlly, ArE ProhIBItEd, wIthoUt PrIor AUthorIzAtIon

to contAct the editors or send A letter(55 11) [email protected]

to Advertise(55 11) [email protected]

subscriPtions(55 11) [email protected]

Printersrr donnelley editora e gráfica ltda.

distributiondinap

AdministrAtion mAnAgementinstituto uniemP

PesQuisA fAPesPruA JoAQuim Antunes, nº 727 - 10º AndAr, ceP 05415-012Pinheiros - são PAulo – sP

fAPesPruA Pio Xi, nº 1.500, ceP 05468-901Alto dA lAPA – são PAulo – sP

secretAriA de desenvolvimento econômico, ciênciA e tecnologiA

govErno do EStAdo dE São PAUlo

instituto verificAdor de circulAção

iSSn 1519-8774

são PAulo reseArch foundAtion

Increasing collaboration, attracting talent

T his is the sixth special English ver-sion Pesquisa Fapesp magazine. The first was published in 2002;

the second, in early 2004; the third, in late 2005; the fourth, in September 2007; and the fifth, in late 2009. In this edition, we are bringing together 18 of the most important articles published in our monthly issues in Portuguese from May 2009 to December 2010, in order to provide English speaking readers with an overview of Brazilian scientific and technological production during this period.

We have maintained basically the same editorial structure as in our domestic issues. Thus, the magazine opens with texts on scientific and tech-nological policy, followed by articles on science, then on technology and finally on the humanities.

A quick-witted interview with an expert on Brazilian development, economist José Roberto Mendonça de Barros (page 10), and the issue’s cover story (page 18) precede this set of articles. Mendonça de Barros talks about the new Brazilian economic geography in which the state of São Paulo and the Southeast region of the country will push ahead the process of national development from 2011 on. He recognizes that other regions and states were more decisive for Brazilian growth in the last few years, but now, he says, São Paulo will lead Brazilian growth at annual rates of 4% or 4.5%, because of its infrastructure and sys-tem of knowledge production. Both are fundamental factors to support invest-ment in dynamic and high technology sectors, such as agribusiness linked to second generation ethanol and oil ex-ploration in the pre-salt layer.

As for the cover feature, our maga-zine relates important strategic steps and some interesting stories for São Paulo scientific research to increase its internationalization. With FAPESP at the head, the state is taking measures to

stimulate collaboration among scien-tists from São Paulo and their col-leagues from other countries and to attract talent from abroad to improve the Brazilian scientific environment. If São Paulo contributes almost 50% of the Brazilian production of scientific knowledge and if it is true that in this part of Brazil there are thousands of researchers producing science at the frontier of their fields, this knowledge should have a corresponding impact on world science. The internationalization of research seems to be the best way.

From the total of 10 articles in the science and technology sections, I would like to highlight, first, the one on the development of a peptide that brings significant qualities in a poten-tial pharmaceutical substance and the possibility of exterminating blood ves-sels that develop in the wrong place and in an untimely fashion at the same time. As I talked about collaboration, curiously this achievement results from the collaboration between the biochemist Ricardo Giordano, from the Chemistry Institute at the Univer-sity of São Paulo (USP) and a couple of Brazilian researchers who jointly coordinate a laboratory at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, USA: the molecular biologist Renata Pasqualini and the oncologist physi-cian and researcher Wadih Arap.

In second place, I would like to draw our readers’ attention to the article on the astronomical instruments made in Brazil that equip the SOAR telescope in the Chilean Andes. It is a real and beautiful demonstration of the capac-ity of Brazilian industry incorporating technological innovations to advance the process of knowledge.

And finally I propose to our readers a short dive into Brazilian culture in the text about Mário de Andrade, one of the main writers of modernism in our country, and his process of creativity.

Enjoy your reading!

Mariluce Moura - Editor in Chief

letter of the editor

005_Expediente_Editorial_ingles_2001.indd 5 11.04.11 18:52:12

6 n Special iSSue may 2009 / dec 2010 n PESQUISA FAPESP

memory

Neldson Marcolin

Published in September 2009

Chagas100 years ago, a Brazilian physician discovered the full cycle of the disease named after him

Doctor Carlos Ribeiro Justiniano Chagas arrived in Lassance in June 1907, with a mission to battle an outbreak of malaria that had interrupted the work on the extension of the Central do Brasil Railway in the northern part of the State of Minas Gerais. This was a very poor region, where most of the people lived in houses made of wattle and

daub. While spending time there, Chagas would live in a train carriage parked near the train station. The carriage was also used as a doctor’s office and a laboratory. The doctor was interested not only in the prophylaxis but also in disease-causing insects and parasites. He would collect specimens of animals and investigate patients that apparently had symptoms that were not related to malaria. The results of his research work were published in the form of a note in the periodical Brazil Medico on April 14, 1909. In the article, he announced the discovery of an unknown disease, the parasite that causes it and the insect that transmits it. Ever since then, this finding has been considered as a unique feat in the history of medicine – because it described the full cycle of the malady, Chagas Disease – and the finding was the result of one person’s work.

Carlos Chagas, a native of the town of Oliveira, State of Minas Gerais, had always been interested in malaria. The

Chagas observes Rita, the child from Lassance, one of the first identified cases of the disease. In the background is the train that was both lodging and laboratoryF

un

da

çã

o o

Sw

al

do

cr

uz

- c

aS

a d

e o

Sw

al

do

cr

uz

- d

ad

, im

ag

em

Fo

c (

F)7

-3

006-009_memoria_ingles_2011.indd 6 11.04.11 18:53:53


disease was the object of his doctorate thesis, the advisor of which was Oswaldo Cruz, at the then Instituto Soroterápico de Manguinhos (renamed Instituto Oswaldo Cruz) institute in Rio de Janeiro. In 1905, a malaria epidemic occurred in the city of Itatinga, State of São Paulo. Cruz, who was also the head of the Diretoria Geral de Saúde Pública, Public Health Department, recruited Chagas to battle the disease. “This was the first anti-malaria campaign conducted in Brazil, based on the knowledge of the role of the mosquitoes as transmitters of the disease,” says Simone Petraglia Kropf, a professor and researcher in the history of health and science at the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz institute at the Fiocruz foundation.

In February 1907, the young doctor was once again summoned to deal with an outbreak of

malaria in the Baixada Fluminense region, together with entomologist Arthur Neiva. In June, he went to the north of Minas Gerais with the same objective. This time he went with Belisário Penna, a physician from the Diretoria Geral de Saúde Pública, Public Health

Department. The two physicians set up base in Lassance and started to work. An enthusiastic student of tropical diseases, Chagas would analyze the blood of local animal species during his free time. In one of these tests, he identified a new protozoa of the

Trypanosoma genus in a marmoset. He named this protozoan Trypanosoma minasense. The species was not pathogenic.

The chief railway engineer, Cantarino Motta, introduced the researchers to a blood-sucking bug commonly found in the region. As the nights in that region are cold, the face is the only uncovered part of the body, and prone to being bitten by the insect. Hence the nickname “barbeiro” (barber); this insect hides in the cracks of the walls of the wattle and daub houses during the day and roams at night to feed. Chagas knew the importance of blood-sucking insects as transmitters of parasitic diseases and started dissecting the “barbeiros”. He found a protozoa that could either be the insect’s natural parasite or the evolutionary phase of a disease-causing trypanosoma.

There was no good laboratory available in Lassance to clarify

Fu

nd

aç

ão

oS

wa

ld

o c

ru

z -

ca

Sa

de

oS

wa

ld

o c

ru

z –

da

d -

ioc

(ac

-e)

6-3

3.1

-1

Fu

nd

aç

ão

oS

wa

ld

o c

ru

z -

ca

Sa

de

oS

wa

ld

o c

ru

z -

da

d, i

ma

ge

m F

oc

(V

pc

c-F

) 4

-11

The last photograph of Oswaldo Cruz (sitting, in the middle), surrounded by Adolfo Lutz (left) and Chagas (right), in 1916

On the banks of the Negro River: expedition to the Amazon Region, in 1913 (the scientist is the one with the tie)



memory

Chagas, Penna and Motta (seated, from right to left): this is the house where the doctor first became acquainted with the “barbeiro,” in 1908

Albert Einstein (middle) was hosted by Chagas in Manguinhos when visiting Rio de Janeiro in 1925

the doubt, so Chagas sent some insects to Manguinhos for experiments. Oswaldo Cruz performed an experimental infection on lab animals and told Chagas that he had found forms of the trypanosoma in one of the animals that had gotten sick. Chagas went back to the institute and confirmed his suspicions: the protozoa was unknown, with a different morphology than that of the T. minasense. The parasite was named Trypanosoma cruzi in honor of Cruz.

But the sick people still had to be found. Chagas went back to Lassance and discovered the trypanosoma in the blood of a two-year old girl called Berenice, who was sick with a fever. The child’s illness led the doctor to describe the clinical symptoms of the disease for the first time: acute anemia, general edemas, swollen lymph nodes, among others. This work resulted in the note published in Brazil Medico in April and soon thereafter in Germany’s Archiv für Schiff und Tropenhygiene, and in

France’s Bulletin de la Société de Pathologie Exotique.

The discovery of the American trypanosomiasis, as Chagas called it, had an extraordinary impact on the doctor’s scientific, institutional and political life. In 1910, he was accepted as full member of the Academia Nacional de Medicina (ANM, National Academy of Medicine), and was the winner of the competitive selection, by

merit, for “head of service” at Manguinhos. In 1912, he was granted the Schaudinn Award, from the Tropical Medicine Institute in Hamburg, Germany. The Schaudinn Award was granted every four years for the most important contribution to protozoology.

When Oswaldo Cruz passed away in 1917, at the age of 54, Chagas was appointed as director of

Manguinhos three days later, a post he would hold until his death in November 1934, at the age of 56. In 1918, when the Spanish flu was assailing Brazil, he organized a special service to set up emergency hospitals and sent an appeal to doctors and medical students to aid the population of Rio de Janeiro. His action was one of the factors that led him to the position of director of the National Public Health Department (DNSP) in 1920.

“Chagas had already been talking about the poor sanitary conditions in

Fu

nd

aç

ão

oS

wa

ld

o c

ru

z -

ca

Sa

de

oS

wa

ld

o c

ru

z -

da

d(F

Fc(F

) 6

-2)

Fu

nd

aç

ão

oS

wa

ld

o c

ru

z -

ca

Sa

de

oS

wa

ld

o c

ru

z –

da

d -

Fo

c(V

pc

c-F

)4-9



With his sons Evandro (left) and Carlos. Both sons also became leading researchers

Brazil’s hinterland since 1909, when he started studying the disease, and continued drawing attention to this issue during his entire life,” says Simone Kropf, who recently launched the book Doença de Chagas, doença do Brasil: ciência, saúde e nação (1909-1962), published by Editora Fiocruz. The scientist remained in this post until 1926. During his term in office, he prepared the extensive sanitary code that modernized the existing Brazilian sanitary laws, and launched a battle against endemic diseases in rural regions. “Other important actions included the opening of the first professional nursing school in Brazil and investments in the training of medical doctors specialized in public health, who were hired after concluding their training program.” As a member of the Health Committee of the League of Nations, he suggested the creation of the International Leprology Center in 1922; the center was inaugurated in 1934, and was housed in the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz until 1939. In 1925, he became full professor of tropical medicine at the Medical School in Rio de Janeiro, on merit.

Chagas’ scientific production and public health management were applauded. However, he was also greatly criticized. In 1919, researcher Henrique Aragão suggested that Chagas Disease was not as serious and widespread as had been announced, and

there were very few patients who had proved to be infected, unlike that which had been stated by the discoverer of the disease. In 1922, Afrânio Peixoto, writer and full professor of hygiene, said at a plenary session of the ANM that nobody knew those sick people and called the disease “Lassance disease.” Deeply offended, Chagas asked the academy to set up a committee to evaluate his studies. In 1923, the scientist from Manguinhos obtained a favorable opinion.

Such issues could have caused less disappointment to Chagas if he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. In 1999, Marília Coutinho, who was at the University of Florida at that time, Olival Freire Jr., from the Federal University of Bahia, and João Carlos Pinto Dias, from the Centro de Pesquisas René Rachou, a research center in Minas Gerais, published an article on the Nobel Prize nominees who were unknown in Brazil. The first formal nomination requested by the Nobel Prize committee, made in 1911, nominated Pirajá da Silva, a scientist who was widely respected in Europe. The nomination was valid for the award to be granted in 1913. However, the winner was France’s Charles Richet. The second official nomination was in 1920 for the award in 1921, nominating Manoel Augusto Hilário de Gouvêa, from the ANM. Although Chagas had been the only scientific nominee that year, once again he

was disregarded and nobody was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine that year. Two other informal nominations were put forward, but there are no details on them.

Nobody knows why the Brazilian was not chosen. “Chagas achieved recognition and success very early on, held government positions that were sought by other people, and attracted a lot of bad feelings,” says João Carlos Pinto Dias. There is an unproven hypothesis that the Nobel Prize commission had consulted the scientist’s enemies and had been advised not to nominate him. In the opinion of biochemist Walter Colli, from the Chemistry Institute of the University of São Paulo, and a specialist on Chagas Disease, there is no

doubt that Chagas deserved the Nobel Prize. “I am convinced that he did not win because Brazil is on the sidelines. It would have been different if the same work had been conducted in the United States or in Europe,” he believes.

“When I presented our article in Manguinhos in 1999, the most interesting fact was the surprise and emotion of Carlos Chagas Filho, who was 89 years old at the time, and of other very elderly researchers who knew nothing about the nominations,” says Marília Coutinho. When she concluded her speech, she says she felt that the prize had been awarded. “Those old gentlemen were so happy when they learned this that it seemed as though Carlos Chagas had actually been awarded the Nobel Prize.”

Fu

nd

aç

ão

oS

wa

ld

o c

ru

z -

ca

Sa

de

oS

wa

ld

o c

ru

z –

da

d -

FFc

(F)1

-29

Scientific articles

All the papers by Carlos Chagas are available at the site http://carloschagas.ibict.br/



José Roberto Mendonça de Barros

São Paulo and the new economic geographyin the economist’s opinion, infrastructure and the production of knowledge will help the state to drive growth in Brazil

On the last Sunday of May, econo-mist José Roberto Mendonça de Barros published an article in O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper with the title “Nova geografia econômica” [New Economic Geography], in which he ar-

gued that from 2011 onwards, the South-east Region – and particularly São Paulo – would drive the country’s growth in the forthcoming years at estimated rates of 4% to 4.5%. He explained in detail the main reasons for the state to become the epicenter of this change, which include the infrastructure available in São Paulo and the quality of the state’s system of the production of knowledge. These are two fundamental factors that support invest-ments in the technology-driven dynamic sectors that are about to boom, such as agribusiness linked to the production of second-generation ethanol or the exploi-tation of oil in the pre-salt layer.

The positive prognosis for São Paulo and the Southeast region followed an analysis of why the Northeast Region, “where the country’s highest poverty rates are concentrated,” was the winner in the national growth process from 2003 to date. He explained that the income-related improvement of the E, D and C classes was linked to real minimum wage p

ho

to

S e

du

ar

do

ce

Sa

r

IntervIew

gains (78%, from December 2000 to May 2010), to the dizzying growth of Social Security expenses and to the enormous expansion of income transfer programs – all of which produced an extraordinary impact on the economy of the Northeast. “It is widely known that the economic life of countless communities only moves forward when the population gets the family benefit and social security checks,” the economist wrote in the article.

On June 20, three weeks later, O Es-tado de S. Paulo published the following headline on the first page of its Sunday issue: “Industry brings the Southeast back to its leading position in terms of growth,” followed by the explanation “Less dependent on income transfer programs, the Southeast outdoes the Northeast as a hub of expansion.” This statement had been voiced in a study pre-pared by the MB Associados consulting firm, which had provided the empirical basis for the article’s analysis.

José Roberto Mendonça de Barros is a founding partner of the consulting firm. However, his curriculum goes beyond his work as a consultant. Barros has a doctor-ate in Economics from the University of São Paulo (USP) and did his post-doc-toral studies at Yale’s Economic Growth Center. He is a former professor at USP’s

School of Economics and Management and was the Ministry of Finance’s Eco-nomic Policy Secretary (1995-1998) dur-ing the first term of former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. In 1998, he was named Economist of the Year by Brazil’s Economists Association.

In the interview below, Mendonça de Barros explores the new economic geog-raphy that he envisions for the country and tries to establish the relationship be-tween scientific research conducted in São Paulo (i.e., one half of the knowledge produced in Brazil) and the reorganiza-tion of the economy’s dynamics.

n The notion of the new economic geogra-phy that you refer to is broader than just the Brazilian case, right? This new geogra-phy has an international dimension.— [When writing the article for O Estado de S. Paulo] I was focusing on Brazil, even though the economic geography is always changing. In these terms, an existing uni-versal phenomenon is the emergence of the Asian world, although the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are not an analytical category as such because these countries have some similarities – in spite of their gigantic differences. Their similarity is their great potential to absorb people from the rural sector,

Mariluce Moura and Neldson Marcolin

Published in August 2010

010-017_entrevista_ingles2011.indd 10 11.04.11 18:56:49

who become integrated into the produc-tive system. This leads to the growth of consumption and to the creation of a consumer market with huge potential. This was thought about mostly in terms of Asia, especially China and India, the world’s two most populous countries; but the phenomenon of emergence exists.

n Is it the same view of economic geography that Paul Krugman, the Economics Nobel Prize laureate, originally developed?— He wrote a famous book on economic geography, but before Asia became so important. He wrote this book about ten years ago. Economist Jim O’Neill, from Goldman Sachs, was the person responsible for the notoriety of this concept. So, although the BRICs lack an organic relationship among themselves, they have a basic similarity: the capacity to incorporate people and to transform this capacity into a huge domestic market. And this is the opposite of the rest of the world – even prior to the 2008 crisis – in the sense that this region is a center of growth and of changes in power, on ac-count of the dynamic domestic market, which is exploited better in some places and less in others. In short, very strong leverage results from the domestic mar-ket, generating deep changes in the pro-ductive system, which in turn leads to the generation of wealth. The BRICs issue was ultimately erroneously interpreted, when people said that the BRIC coun-tries would grow as if their growth were independent from the rest of the world. When the crisis blew up, the reaction was something like this: ‘See? The idea of the BRICs doesn’t work,’ because they were not supporting the world as a whole. But in my opinion, this was never the idea; the concept behind this issue is much more modest: it is the potential to grow quickly, at a given moment, which will produce transformations. The geography is new in the sense that the world is growing to-ward Asia, from the Pacific, so to speak, as opposed to the Atlantic – I think there is something really important here that will generate dynamism for a long time. Brazil is somewhat distant from this model. We now have a major relationship basically with suppliers of natural resource chains, whether they are foodstuffs or industrial raw materials. But this was the initial part: as time goes by, economic relationships, especially with China, will grow stron-ger and this year Chinese investments in Brazil began to show. To some extent

010-017_entrevista_ingles2011.indd 11 4/12/11 12:40:07 PM


everything to daily inflation,” also true. I was quite impressed by these words and after the TV show, I asked myself, “did Vicentinho really say that?” Inflation gen-erated a race that he knew he was losing...This perception by society created room for stabilization. The Bresser, Cruzado and Verão monetary stabilization plans were feeble attempts.

n When did this conversation take place?— In 1989. The lesson learned from this period led us economists to profes-sionally add two more things that were the basis for what came later on. The first was to exorcize monetary adjust-ment – and the three plans were clumsy measures that sought to undo the view everybody had of monetary adjustment and which was definitively eliminated by the Plano Real, the monetary stabi-lization plan. And finally, a definition was given to the inflationary coalition; this definition was largely based on the experience of Argentina, which had also dealt with hyperinflation in the period, and it was exactly what Vicentinho had described: even though he had managed to negotiate attractive salary increases, the automobile industry raised its prices accordingly and thus the inflationary process was constantly being fueled.

n That was the major discussion on the Brazilian economy from 1985 to 1990, wasn’t it? How to effectively break infla-tion and the factors that fueled it?— Exactly. Two things were perceived in the late 1980s: one was that monetary adjustment could not be eliminated by measures that could be fought over in court – this would have meant a huge step backwards. The various attempts at do-ing so were unsuccessful. The second was that the economy had to open up so that competition with imported goods would take place. This is a quality-related shock. Easy to say, difficult to do. The fact is that, given the world’s situation at that time – the crises in Asia, Russia, etc., it took ten years for the stabilization process to take off. And what happened in 2008, the global economic meltdown, when the US dollar to the real exchange rate suddenly shot up from R$ 1.60 to R$ 2.40 – with-out provoking inflation –, that was the best stabilization we could have had. For this to happen, it was necessary to open up the economy, eliminate indexation, align prices, improve the State’s fiscal matters, reduce the foreign debt... And in the meantime, we experienced very

similar to what happened between Japan and South Korea, a country first begins as a supplier of exports to a given country; the domestic market starts to grow until at a certain point it makes sense to start producing goods locally. The exporting of capital becomes increasingly important as countries become wealthier. This does not happen to the detriment of the export-ing of goods, but the exporting of capital becomes more apparent. This happened in England, the United States, Japan; it is now happening in South Korea, and is beginning to happen in China. These are important relationships, hence my cur-rent perception that economic growth with a double base has consolidated in the country – the two bases add up and do not exclude each other. Many of my peers believe that there is a dynamic of exclu-sion between the exporting of products of the so-called natural resources chains and the domestic market.

n Does the domestic market grow on the basis of the leverage provided by currently existing re-distribution programs?— In principle, not only because of the re-distribution programs but, more re-cently, the domestic market has grown on its own. Now, more than ever, lever-aged by the real possibility that Brazil will grow – and this is where productivity and technological innovation come in... This is not only growth in terms of extension, but also in terms of depth, which is the result of these new activities, of produc-tivity gains. And, by doing so, we are transferring this potential to buy, and this willingness to buy, to the domestic market. I think Brazil has this plurality; it’s nothing new. Continental-sized coun-tries tend to have strong domestic mar-kets – only rarely does a continental-sized country depend on imports, as might be the case of Holland, Belgium, Singapore, tiny countries that import and export...It’s different in continental-sized coun-tries – most of the local needs, by far, are met by domestic production.

n The paper that we mentioned, prepared by MB Associados, identifies three factors that might cause the shift of the dynamic center of the Brazilian economy in forth-coming years to the Southeast, with special focus on São Paulo: the exploitation of the pre-salt layer, the availability of infrastruc-ture in general, and a broad educational system that results in the generation of knowledge. Could you please provide more details on this?— The stabilization process was a long one, because the increase in foreign im-balances started years ago, as evidenced by inflation. I’m talking about the 1990s onwards and not about the 1986 Cruzado monetary stabilization plan, an unsuc-cessful experiment. The opening of the economy to foreign investments, initiated by Fernando Collor, broke away from the import substitution model, which had become obsolete. The academic commu-nity will spend the rest of their lives dis-cussing why that model became outdated, but some things cannot be explained by anyone in definitive terms. The increase in inflation rates was the most visible sign of this obsolescence; the State crisis had reached an absurd level and the fis-cal crisis was also part of the inflationary process. To this was added a drastic drop in growth from the 1980s onwards. All of this is somewhat interconnected and, if we look at the sequence of the break with the old model, I think that the first step, still in the 1980s, was the perception that there was no solution with such high inflation. I was once on a TV show with Vicentinho [Vicente Paulo da Silva], at the time the president of the then power-ful Steelworkers Union in São Bernardo do Campo; during the break, he told me something like this “Zé Roberto, I’m the president of the most powerful labor union in Brazil,” which was true, “and I deal with the most powerful industry in Brazil,” the automotive industry, which was also true at that time, “I negotiate the best collective labor agreements in Brazil,” which was equally true, “but I lose



limited growth for 20 years, because in the pre-1990s we were going through hy-perinflation and after 1990, 1993, we were exorcizing everything, eliminating all the deep-rooted barriers in the economy.

n So your evaluation at that time was that it was impossible for the country to grow during the 1990s?— I think so. Of course, economic policies make many errors. The positive point for those who look back afterwards is that they realize what was wrong. Today, for example, the economy is booming. But the fact remains that certain things take a long time to work out. Fiscal adjust-ment, for example. It is far harder for the economy to grow when the budget is be-ing cut back than when it is expanding. Now, all our budgets are growing – the state and city budgets and certainly the federal budget; for the last eight years, these budgets have been openly expand-ing. One can discuss whether the expen-ditures are appropriate or not, but when expenditure is higher, the economy moves ahead. The opposite happens in the case of fiscal adjustment. Therefore, it was difficult for the economy to grow more, because of these major crises abroad. In short, it has been a long stabilization process that has not ended yet because we still have some indexation residuals. But most of the work has been done, such as the fiscal adjustment processes, the opening up of the economy, and the reduction of the foreign debt. The income gap becomes even more perceptible when we take away inflation. Shortly before the readjustments, the minimum wage stood at US$ 60, or R$ 100 in today’s currency. But the truth is that it was such a tough battle to readjust, readjust, readjust, that nobody had a clear perception of this. One of the discussions of the stabilization plan [which created the real, the new currency] was that stabilization in itself is akin to income redistribution. This is illustrated by the fact that the country’s economy grew quite significantly in 1995 and 1996. However, as income distribution was so unequal, this was merely the beginning of a process that had to continue.

n But weren’t there any problems related to the policies for the opening of the econ-omy and to privatization during this long, drawn-out stabilization process, problems that postponed stabilization itself?— There were some mistakes made in the privatization process, and the best example of this is the electric power

sector. But in general, the privatization process was highly successful; the fact that the State withdrew from situations that only generated deficits is something that very few people remember nowa-days. The state-owned steel industry had wasted US$ 20 billion. Privatization doesn’t only mean paying taxes – it means that no deficits are generated. Although the privatization of the electric power sector was less successful, the telephony industry is a good example of successful privatization. However, in my opinion, the most complicated issue at that time was maintaining the overvalued exchange rate of the real relative to the US dollar for a long time, which implied keeping real interest rates high for too long, be-cause one held back the other. During my term in government, this was one of the issues that the Central Bank grappled with and, unfortunately, the bank dealt with it inappropriately, with the 1999 cur-rency devaluation. This devaluation was unplanned; it happened and I think this – more than anything else – is what delayed the process. Once inflation dropped, the second issue that needed to be addressed was income distribution. This is when the social network issue grew enormously.

This, in my opinion, ultimately resulted in the construction of two pillars of growth: the first was the competent production of the so-called natural resource chains, of which agribusiness is a component, min-erals and metals are another component, and, more recently, oil and gas. And all of these are the result of a construction pro-cess that took 30, 40 years. The technol-ogy developed here – deep water offshore drilling for oil, the ability to farm in the Cerrado savannas, the work with high-quality minerals – all of this requires a lot of knowledge. I would like to add some-thing to destroy the link that everybody makes between natural resources and underdevelopment and low productivity. This may have been true in the past, but today it definitely isn’t. All these chains have very significant knowledge embed-ded in them, most of which comes from research. I think it is unfair to say that the states had no part in agricultural research, especially as regards São Paulo. Embrapa was instrumental in the development of grain and in the agricultural development of the Cerrado region; yet Embrapa never dealt with sugar cane, oranges, or coffee. Embrapa recently started doing research on fruit and vegetables. If we consider the major crops, all the technology for at least three such crops was generated in the State of São Paulo.

n Transgenic soya, the use of biotechnology in so many crops – all of this was crucial in the last five years, wasn’t it?— They were decisive. One of the ex-amples I often draw on to contradict the commonly voiced opinion that natural resources mean underdevelopment is the existence of an international evaluation according to which there are four sectors that have witnessed the most significant R&D efforts and advanced the most in the last ten years: aeronautics/astro-nautics, information technology, deep water oil drilling, whose technological paradigm is entirely different from land technology, and biotechnology. Two of these four sectors are related to natural resource chains.

n If we take the example of citrus fruit crops in São Paulo, we are talking about investments in studies that began in the 1960s, or even earlier, with research into the citrus greening disease in the 1950s.— That’s right – 50, 60 years; this is not a project that started now. The same thing happened in the case of sugar cane and coffee. Soyabeans are a newer crop. I be-

the association that is always made between natural resources and underdevelopment and low productivity is false. this might have been true in the past, but today it certainly is not



gan writing my doctoral thesis in 1971 and submitted it in 1973. In my thesis, I argued that Brazil’s soya exports could reach US$ 300 million, which at the time was considered insane; this was a time when only people familiar with Japanese cuisine knew what soyabeans were. To-day, soya is a huge business. Soya was responsible for the trilogy – farming in the Cerrado; direct planting; and grain rotation – that produced a revolution: this work was done by Embrapa from the 1970s onwards.

n Why was soya included in your thesis?— Affonso Celso Pastore, who had some contact with agriculture, was my advi-sor. From 1968 to 1973, commodities boomed; however, this ended on a sour note because of the 1973 oil crisis. We had some familiarity with agriculture and Pastore suggested, “Why don’t we study non-traditional exports?” I studied sev-eral crops: rice, peanuts...I didn’t know much about soya when I started, but I re-alized that something extraordinary had happened. In the 1950s, the Americans had developed technology to produce battery hens. Poultry production needs animal feed and animal feed is produced by mixing minerals and corn, to provide bulk, plus some protein. The protein came from fishmeal, basically from anchovies fished off the coast of Peru. But a meteo-rological phenomenon occurred in that region and the anchovies disappeared. The market lacked a source of protein for animal feed and, as soyabeans are a good-quality vegetable protein, farmers began to use soya meal. In Brazil, soya-beans were planted mainly to replenish nitrogen in the soil, in the middle of the coffee crop. And the renowned researcher Johanna Döbereiner started to conduct pioneering research studies on the fixa-tion of nitrogen in the soil.

n Going back to the natural resource chains... — In the early 2000s, this chain of natural resources became stronger due to the ex-porting of these products and to the cre-ation of growth centers. Why? First, the 1999 currency devaluation allowed the export sector to reorganize itself more ef-ficiently, with a floating exchange rate and everything else. Second, the supply side had already been strengthened through technology, knowledge, etc. Third, the 2001 recession was short and intense, and the world entered a growth phase, and – more than ever, China consolidated

that quick growth. The world’s growth, together with that of Asia, produced this phase that is now consolidated. I think there are two erroneous perceptions: one concerns the level of technology involved in these chains, which is much greater than people realize. People think of a farm and of soya, of a mining company and of iron ore. However, if we look at the chain, we realize that we have increas-ingly sophisticated products. The fact is that we have renewable energy, because of water, and because we burn sugar cane bagasse thanks to increasingly improved technological development (high pres-sure). Not to mention oil drilling tech-nology, which is highly sophisticated.

n Here we can see a great amount of ac-crued competency, including that resulting from the relations between research centers and the universities.— Exactly. I think the second erroneous perception is when one believes that nat-ural resource chains are restricted to ag-ricultural and mineral production. They go way beyond these and, therefore, the level of employment that they generate

directly and indirectly is enormous. In the soya chain, estimates indicate that we are getting close to 1 million jobs. As for sugar cane, I prepared a flow chart (see page 18) to illustrate exactly the chain’s sophistication.

n But why did São Paulo grow less than the national average, even though it has experi-enced a stable scenario since the year 2000 and the country is prepared to grow? — Just to conclude what I was saying: once exports and agribusiness were con-solidated, we could focus on the entire economy in greater detail. On the other hand, also mostly due to stabilization, some things began happening right from the start. First came the sound re-dis-tribution of certain economic activities, a result of the move to regions where salaries were lower. Thus, a substantial part of the footwear industry, previously concentrated in Franca and in Vale dos Sinos, relocated to the Northeast. The footwear industry is now based in the states of Bahia, Paraíba, Ceará, etc. The same thing happened with the textile industry, the best example of which is Coteminas, which has an industrial complex in the city of Campina Grande. Concurrently, production costs in São Paulo began to grow significantly, one of the reasons why activities were relocated. The ABC [the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo] was totally occupied and, dur-ing the industrial expansion phase, which began when the Real monetary stabiliza-tion plan went into effect, industry was able to spread nationwide. Tax incentives consolidated the industrial complex in the State of Minas Gerais, took Ford to the State of Bahia and General Motors to the State of Rio Grande do Sul. When a car assembly plant relocates, the com-pany must have its suppliers in the same region, according to the just-in-time pro-duction technology.

n This coincides with the moment when São Paulo’s GDP share began to decrease. — The downturn had started earlier, but these events drove it. This is when the income redistribution programs stepped in, leading to the dizzying growth of con-sumer goods markets. The Northeast is the prime example, but it wasn’t the only region. What I mentioned previ-ously concerning the textile, footwear and automotive industries – refers to the rationale of production. And now we are witnessing the rationale of demand: the consumption growth rocketed and this

São Paulo is much less susceptible to sudden fluctuations because it has a mature institutional structure that is the basis of its research studies, which actually began in the nineteenth century



has made the Northeast Region grow even faster, though it is still importing many of the goods consumed there. This is the peak of the process. This kind of growth naturally results in an investment boom in commercial expansion to meet the needs of the new emerging class. It is important to point out that the growth was primarily a growth of demand rather than of production.

n Does the money that drives demand come from the government? — Yes, it comes from the government, in the form of INSS social security benefits, minimum wage, and the Bolsas Escola, Família, etc. allowance programs. I would like to add a comment: in the chart that I prepared [see www.revistapesquisa.fapesp.br], the exporting of soyabeans, beef, forest products, sugar, ethanol and some individually smaller industries in 2009 accounted for US$ 17.2 billion. Meat exports generated US$ 11.7 billion; forest products, US$ 7.2 billion; sugar and etha-nol, US$ 9.7 billion; and coffee, US$ 4.2 billion. I wanted to show the sugar cane industry. We analyzed its production, the industry’s relation to the machinery and equipment industry, inputs, services, and the technological gains that result from research and from the interaction of re-search with machines, fertilizers, and ev-erything else. Extraction from sugar cane is higher than it was 20 years ago, which is related to the nature of the equipment. The industry that only produced sugar in the past now makes juice, bagasse, and straw. Juice is used to make sugar, ethanol, bio-plastics – when the appropriate mi-croorganisms are used –, and now we are witnessing research on second-generation fuels that come from cellulose.

n And this is unique to Brazil, correct?— Yes, there is nothing else like it in terms of size. In India, the sugarcane industry is small and basically produces sugar. Africa is at the very beginning of the process. Brazil is the only place in the world with a fleet of millions of ethanol-fuelled ve-hicles, which is an innovation. The dual fuel automobile, even the simple kind, is an innovation that has helped us deal with the crisis. There is an endless de-mand for bioplastics, if we look at it from the current standpoint. Existing projects in this respect are still rather expensive and future bioplastics will have to come from a renewable source and be biode-gradable six months after being buried in the ground.

no longer 12 million families to enroll in the Bolsa Família, family allowance, program. Second, if I am right, the Trea-sury will no longer have the leeway in terms of funds that it has enjoyed so far, because expenditures have increased sig-nificantly and the government plans raise the minimum wage, which has a positive effect, but increases costs, Social Security, and all the rest. In this sense, the Bolsa Família program is the least problematic program: R$ 12 billion a year is not that much. But it’s the combination of things. So I believe it will be difficult to maintain the same income transfer growth rate because there will be less money avail-able and because most of the population that qualified for inclusion has already been included. From now onwards, our needs will be much more closely related to education and incorporation into the job market. In my opinion, the North and the Northeast – the regions to which most of the inclusion program funds are allocated – will no longer ben-efit as much as they did in the past. A second point that one must add to this situation is that the traditional growth centers of the Northeast have matured. This doesn’t mean that they will be mov-ing backwards, but they are mature, as is the case of the petrochemical complex in the State of Bahia, or the fruit-growing complex in the region of Petrolina, which took a great leap forward. However, now, the pace of growth has slowed down; the chlorine chemical complex in the State of Alagoas, another traditional industry is also growing slowly nowadays. The Ford business in the State of Bahia, for example: either Ford decides to build another plant or its business will not expand. There is one exception to this in the State of Pernambuco.

n Linked to the port.— Yes – to the Suape Industrial and Port Complex. Recife was already dynamic, because of its reputation as the leading medical center in the Northeast; it also has a mature IT complex, but Suape and everything that revolves around it is the most important thing. The world’s biggest PET resin manufacturing plant, owned by the Italian group Mossi & Ghi-solfi, is there. Suape houses an enormous shipyard, one of the biggest owned by the Camargo Correa company; the first of the new Petrobras refineries is being built there. There are many significant business activities taking place in Per-nambuco, but this is not true across the

n Bioen, the Bioenergy Research Program, is one of FAPESP’s top priority programs. — As it should be, because this is a real breakthrough. In the said chart, I show the production gains in the sugar cane chain, which is linked to variety, the re-gional nature of research, optimization of research (the sugar cane that generates energy is different from the sugar cane that produces sugar), transgenic vari-eties, new players, production system, outsourcing, mechanical harvesting, irri-gation, extension of the harvest, organic sugar cane, relationship with equipment, list of inputs, biological control of pests... All of this adds gains. Let me resume what I was saying earlier; to summarize the first part, the combination of stabil-ity, credit, and income transfer programs generated an expansion in consumption that was far stronger in the North and in the Northeast. And now comes the second line of reasoning: why would the growth of the Southeast and of São Paulo rebound naturally? There are two sets of reasons. The first is simple: this movement, which we can refer to as in-clusion, is reaching its limits. There are



entire Northeast. In my opinion, demand will no longer be as buoyant as it has been and, in terms of supply, according to various studies we have conducted on this, there is nothing going on at the mo-ment – other than Suape – that will drive supply significantly.

n Have you analyzed projects that are about to start or that have already started?— We have analyzed many projects, some of which are already under way. The Transnordestina Project is running behind and changing the course of the São Francisco River is apparently not going anywhere. We believe that the oil refinery in São Luís and the other refin-eries basically involve political decisions and are unlikely to materialize. The Luís Eduardo Magalhães agricultural produc-tion complex in the western part of the State of Bahia still has room to grow.

n Let us concentrate now on the reasons for the probable growth of the Southeast.— Why is the Southeast– particularly São Paulo – going to grow more? First of all, because of nature: the pre-salt layer is concentrated in the region that extends from the State of Espírito Santo to the State of São Paulo. If we analyze the Petro-bras projects, most of the related invest-

ments are to be made in Santos. Not only because of the oil wells, but also because – and rightly so, in my opinion – Petro-bras doesn’t want to depend too much on the State of Rio de Janeiro. The company was strongly affected by the two adminis-trations of the two Garotinho governors [state governors Anthony Garotinho and later Rosinha Garotinho], who increased state taxes and threatened to levy higher VAT tax on equipment, which would have made many projects unfeasible... Strategi-cally, the company increased its expenses in the State of Espírito Santo. The South-east as a whole will grow because of the pre-salt layer, but the major leap will occur in São Paulo. Petrobras is build-ing a huge office facility and is investing enormously in human resources. And oil is not only oil, but everything that comes with it. The impact on universities, on research, on capital goods producers, on vessels... And then the impact on the soft-ware industry. The oil business is based on massive hardware, but hardware is run on software. Norway is the benchmark refer-ence in this respect: the country had never produced any oil until it was found in its territory, but the country’s oil supplies are declining and today Norway exports oil technology. Petrobras is doing the right thing in this sense.

n Given that more than more than 50 theme-related research projects are sup-ported by Petrobras at Brazilian univer-sities, this will probably be disseminated more extensively and deepen knowledge on oil.— Exactly. Concurrently, the percep-tion nowadays is that one must train intermediary-level technicians, besides supporting research projects conducted by universities. The platform opera-tor needs to undergo specific training because he deals with a complicated system. This is not manual labor; it is something much more sophisticated. Therefore, the impact of the pre-salt layer should be huge. In fact, I think this impact is already being felt, in an-ticipation of an important new activity. For example, the real estate market in the city of Santos has already changed. Santos is going to become a city where big business deals will be conducted.

n Will this situation extend to the entire southern coast of the state?— Yes; this will affect the town of Cara-guatatuba as well, where the gas fields are located; Santos, however, will be the main hub. The state government set up a committee nearly two years ago to dis-cuss how to maximize the benefits to be

the expansion of sugar canethe Gdp of the sugar/ethanol industry amounted to uS$ 28.2 billion in 2008, or nearly 2% of Brazil’s Gdp

Sugarcane production

industry

Juice Bagasse

Slops

animal nutrition

Filter cakesyeast

electric power

Sugar ethanol

BioplasticsSecond-generation biofuels

Second-generation biofuels

technological gains

machinesequipmentinputsServices

residues



had from the Petrobras investments. And this is not only related to infrastructure, but also entails human resources. As a result, many courses are being created at colleges. The core of this major research effort will be at the UFRJ [Federal Uni-versity of Rio de Janeiro], but there will be more action in this respect. Regard-less of how quickly the pre-salt layer is developed, this is a huge business and it is primarily located in the Southeast. And the innovation is in São Paulo. I repeat: Petrobras is interested in diversifying its three areas: Vitoria, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, to dilute risk.

n How much of the R$ 110 billion that Petrobras plans to invest in the pre-salt layer will be allocated to São Paulo? — At least 40%. Fund allocation is never a sure thing, because Petrobras makes slight changes from one document to the next.

n Is this what is going to drive São Paulo’s move to the geographic center of the new economic geography?— No. The move stems from a combina-tion of three or four concurrent factors. First, there is the pre-salt layer issue. Sec-ond, still in terms of natural resources, comes the growth in added value of the sugar cane chain. Because of this new reality, Santos will be consolidated as an exporting complex. Three ethanol pipe-lines are being planned, all of them run-ning to Santos, because São Paulo State has the infrastructure and the center of information.

n About exporting?— Yes. Nowadays, most of the sugar is exported through Santos. And most of the ethanol will also be exported through Santos. Going back to the new economic geography, another fact is the growth of the sophisticated service industry in São Paulo, and this growth will intensify. I am referring to healthcare, for example. The Brazilian population is growing older and there is a growing demand for these kinds of services. This is not only related to hos-pitals, but to healthcare clusters, including software, equipment, maintenance, hospi-tals, and pre- and post-surgery facilities. And this extends to the concept of well-being, prevention, which involves physi-cal fitness... This is a huge business and a highly productive one. We have prepared some studies about this and undoubtedly São Paulo is the hub, because of the con-centration of knowledge, of new services,

excellent hospitals, etc. That doesn’t mean that these services aren’t available else-where; but São Paulo is the hub.

n Does this have a major impact on the service industry?— This has a considerable impact; the latest survey conducted by IBGE on this issue was done in 2007. This survey still doesn’t encompass everything that has been going on in this respect. If it were possible to include real estate construc-tion linked to this impact, we would see that this is concentrated in São Paulo.

n São Paulo is becoming a hub for a part of the world.— That’s right, and this generates high quality employment and income. The in-ternationalization of healthcare services is beginning to take hold here. This means that an individual comes from abroad for health treatment here – medical treat-ment, dental treatment – at accredited hospitals, because healthcare here is less expensive; this treatment is covered by the individual’s American health insurance. Nowadays, the Sírio-Libanês Hospital and the Albert Einstein Hospital have interna-tional directors for the sole purpose of in-creasing their international services. Costa Rica has a huge business of this kind, but the biggest business is in Malaysia. More than one million people go to Malaysia for healthcare services, which are generally basic ones, but much less expensive. And this business doesn’t stop at healthcare; the post-surgery part turns into a tourism industry, as is the case in Costa Rica. Of course, the hospitals have to be competent, be accredited in the United States, and so on. São Paulo has more and more people in this line of business. Another example concerns creative activities in general. I recently read an article in the O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, which stated that São Paulo had become the world’s foremost center for comic books. However, other activities such as advertising, films, inter-net production, fashion and architecture can be included.

n The production of a global city, right?—That’s right. This is what we call cre-ative economics. And this doesn’t only occur in São Paulo; Rio de Janeiro has this status as well, because of the Rede Globo television network, especially when it comes to creative activities. But the epicenter is here, because of the so-phistication of demand, income level, technical skills... Infrastructure is the

third element that will lead São Paulo to being the center of the new econom-ic geography. Relative to the rest of the nation’s precarious infrastructure, São Paulo is slightly better off in terms of the transportation of goods.

n What about the research-related infra-structure in São Paulo, within the new role that the study attributes to the state? — I think that all these highly produc-tive activities – whether related to ser-vices or to natural resources – obviously demand and are supported by the abil-ity to generate knowledge, in terms of training people and especially in terms of the research sector. I think São Pau-lo is a pioneer and has maintained its leadership in this respect. This includes biological, agronomy and agricultural research. This is what makes São Paulo special – first, the institutional scenario is very powerful and FAPESP is one of its pillars. The state is less susceptible to sudden fluctuations; it has a mature in-stitutional structure that is the basis of its research studies, which actually began in the nineteenth century with agricultural research. The research conducted by the Polytechnic School led to the creation of IPT, the Institute of Technological Re-search. Research studies have been con-ducted for one hundred years already. Therefore, we have a tradition and a sound institutional model for funding that runs parallel to open-mindedness regarding new forms. The network of laboratories, the projects developed by networks, such as those on the yellowing disease exemplify this ability.

n Isn’t it necessary to invest in personnel training to keep up the growth that your study has projected? — I think that economists have learnt that the strong or weak points of a country are nowadays measured by two characteristics: infrastructure (it’s impos-sible to import a highway) and talent. I mean talent in general, encompassing the simplest to the most sophisticated training programs. You can import a thousand, 2 thousand, 5 thousand, 10 thousand talented professionals but you can’t import 5 million talented profes-sionals – it’s impossible. This means that the State, companies, everybody has to focus on training talent. The hardware is in the infrastructure but the real battle is a software battle, which means people. This is a software world and that is where the value is. n



Research from the state of São Paulo is taking measures to stimulate collaboration among scientists from São Paulo and their colleagues from other countries and to attract talent from abroad to improve the Brazilian scientific environment. One example of this strategy was seen in São Paulo, in early August, when 350 Brazilian and foreign graduate students

plus 20 experts of several nationalities met, to honor the American mathematician John Nash and to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Nash Equilibrium, the theorem that forms the cornerstone of game theory. The speakers included four Nobel Prize laureates: John Nash himself, who was awarded the prize in 1994, Robert Aumann, the 2005 laureate, and Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, the 2007 laureates. This was the fourth event held as part of the ESPCA program (São Paulo School of Advanced Science Program), a form of FAPESP aid designed to increase the international exposure of those areas in which São Paulo research has achieved competitiveness of a world standard. Released last year, the program enables São Paulo researchers to organize short courses that are one or two weeks long, to which professors from around the world and from São Paulo state should be invited. It is a requirement that the courses be attended by a certain number of students, at least half of whom must be from abroad. “In this way, we plan to garner global exposure for these research areas, in order to awaken foreign students’ interest in working as scientists here in São Paulo,” said the scientific director of FAPESP, Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, in an interview to Pesquisa Brasil [Brasil Research], a Pesquisa FAPESP radio program. “We want to show them what is best here in São Paulo. The public calls establish that each event is to include a reserved session in which someone from FAPESP presents the Foundation and the research opportunities available in São Paulo state. I made this presentation at three such events and had an excellent reception. There were lots of questions and the students from several places abroad, such as Chile, the United States, France, China and India, seemed genuinely

initiatives seek to make research from São paulo more competitive abroad


Fabrício Marques

Combined effortscover

018-023_Pol-Combined-Attracting_ingles_2011.indd 18 11.04.11 18:59:49


Foreign

institutions

are showing a

growing interest

in partnering

São Paulo

researchers

interested” he states. The program pro-vides for two public calls a year.

To attract foreign researchers, op-portunities for FAPESP post-doctoral grants are offered in monthly advertise-ments in the journal Nature and in the Foundation’s website, in Portuguese and English. The Foundation’s major initia-tives, such as the Biota program, which studies São Paulo state biodiversity, the Bioen program, which researches bio-energy, and the Program of Research into Global Climate Change have been holding workshops and seminars at-tended by foreign researchers, in order to encourage the participation of São Paulo state researchers in international networks and to keep them in contact with the state of the art in their respec-tive fields of knowledge. “There’s no silver bullet to solve complicated prob-lems, because their solution depends on combined efforts. That’s why, when it comes to the issue of making São Paulo research more international, it’s impor-tant to maintain several linked initia-tives,” stated Brito Cruz.

The Foundation’s internationaliza-tion strategy brings together a set of other efforts, such as cooperation agreements with agencies, companies and/or scien-tific institutions in Germany, Canada, the United States, France, Mexico, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Switzerland (see list of agreements at www.pesquisadores.fapesp.br/materia/102/a-instituicao/convenios-e-acordos-de-cooperacao-

da-fapesp.htm). One such example is the cooperation agreement signed in 2004 with France’s CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), which aims to encourage an interchange of scientists and the submission of joint projects of researchers from São Paulo institutions and their French colleagues. To date, this has given rise to four calls for proposals and has provided grants for 27 projects. Likewise, FAPESP has an agreement with DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemein-schaft), Germany’s main research pro-motion agency. In 2009, the Foundation established a bridge to British research, when it signed cooperation agreements with RCUK (the Research Councils of the United Kingdom) and with King’s College London, which became the first British university to partner FAPESP.

In 2009, among the 3,953 grants and the 5,995 new scholarships from the Regu lar Line of research by FAPESP, 1,214 were characterized as scientific ex-changes for research: 904 were grants to take part in scientific meetings abroad, 202 were grants for overseas researchers coming from abroad, 92 were Research Scholarships and 16 were from New Frontiers, a program which supports long term study visits in centers of excellence abroad, in areas of research not yet avail-able in the state of Sao Paulo, by research-ers who completed their doctorates more than ten years ago. Of the total projects, 309 are exchange programs with the United States, followed by Europe (170 projects) and Latin American and Carib-bean countries (122). By country, those which had the greatest number of proj-ects were Portugal (100) France (77) Spain (74) Italy (70) and Germany (61). The total number of projects with Asian countries was 79.

Foreign institutions have been show-ing a rising interest in partnering São Paulo researchers. Last month, for in-stance, six representatives of CAS (the Chinese Academy of Sciences) visited FAPESP headquarters in São Paulo with the aim of initiating scientific collabora-tion. “We wanted to find out how agencies such as FAPESP operate,” commented Pan Jiaofeng, the CAS secretary-general. “We are especially interested in biomass, biodiversity and the neurosciences.” Ac-cording to him, this was the first visit to Brazil. “There is concern as to how we select the priority areas,” said Celso Lafer, the FAPESP chairman. “We talked about the possibility of future cooperation and agreed to explore this at a later date.” n



At a time when the importance of becom-ing international for Brazilian science is being increasingly discussed, the group of researchers led by physicist, Marcelo Kno-bel, a full professor at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), is showing how the interchange of experiences between post-

graduate students from different nationalities has the ability to breathe new life into a research envi-ronment and attract more researchers from outside, in a virtuous circle. Since 1990, Knobel, 42, has been coordinating a group dedicated to research into new magnetic materials that is based in the Laboratory of Magnetism and Low Temperatures (LMBT) of the Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics, at Unicamp. As the group has collaboration agreements with scien-tists from several countries and is internationally rec-ognized, Knobel often receives messages from foreign students interested in doing Master’s degrees, PhDs and post-doctoral studies at Unicamp. He always assesses requests with interest and with the help of the university and research funding agencies, has managed to attract people from various countries to his laboratory – currently it has PhD students and post-doctoral fellows from India, Spain, Chile,

Colombia and Canada. “In addition to the interest of researchers, it helps a lot that we have scholar-ships that provide amounts that are very competitive internationally,” says Knobel. “They come to Brazil stimulated by the chance of working in an environ-ment where it is possible to carry out cutting edge research and even build up a little nest egg,” said the professor, who is now also Unicamp’s Undergraduate Studies pro-dean.

Canadian Fanny Beron is one of the post-doctoral fellows working in Knobel’s group. She did under-graduate and Master’s degrees and her PhD in engi-neering physics at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal and in 2007 she was looking for a university in a foreign country to do post-doctoral studies. It was her tutor, Arthur Yelon, who was collaborating with Knobel, who suggested Unicamp. “I didn’t want to go to the US, because I already knew the way of Ameri-can life very well and I couldn’t fi nd place in Europe that had a good laboratory in an interesting city,” says Fanny, who does not regret her choice. “I have easy ac-cess to equipment that I didn’t have in Montreal, I’m working with a good group that produces a lot and I have the opportunity to collaborate with several high-level researchers,” she says. Recently, she exchanged

Group from the institute of physics at unicamp distinguishes itself by bringing researchers from other countries


Fabrício Marques

AttrACtinG tALent



the post-doctoral scholarship she re-ceived from a Canadian institution for one from FAPESP, which is worth R$ 5,028.90 a month. “The amount was similar but FAPESP provides a very useful technical reserve for going to conferences,” she explains. “I know that research conditions at Unicamp are better than elsewhere in Brazil. Bra-zil is not a traditional choice for young foreign researchers, who generally pre-fer the United States and Europe, but here I found everything I needed and I also had the opportunity to get to know South America better,” she concludes.

Another foreign researcher who is satisfi ed with his experience at Unicamp is Spaniard Jacob Torrejón Diaz, who has just completed a year-long post-doctoral program in Knobel’s group and is preparing to undertake new post-doctoral studies at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides in Paris, at the French National Center for Scientifi c Research (CNRS). In 2009, when he fi n-ished his PhD in nanostructured mate-rials at the Autonomous University of Madrid, he saw that the alternatives for post-doctoral study in Europe were lim-ited. “It was the beginning of the eco-nomic crisis and most of the scholarship programs and research contracts were drastically cut,” he recalls. He knew Pro-fessor Kleber Pirota, from Marcelo Kno-bel’s group, who suggested Unicamp to him. “He told me about open fl ow research grants from FAPESP, which were approved very quickly, within one or two months, while in Europe most agencies take a year to award a scholar-ship. I thought the research project, the equipment in the Laboratory of Mag-netism and Low Temperatures and the economic conditions of the scholarship were all very attractive and interesting. So, I came to Brazil,” he says. On the eve of leaving the country, he consid-ers his time at Unicamp to have been very useful to him. “I learned different magnetic characterization techniques, cryogenics, measurement techniques in the Synchrotron and the use of power-ful apparatus, in addition to learning Portuguese and about the wonderful Brazilian culture,” he says. He also de-veloped work in different areas, from ferromagnetic resonance to isolated

getting a post-doctoral grant in biol-ogy, also from FAPESP,” he states. The group also has students like Chilean, Lenina Valenzuela, a physicist from the University of Santiago, who since 2007, with Knobel as her tutor, has been doing a PhD in magnetoimpedance, with a grant from the Coordinating Offi ce for the Improvement of People with Higher Education (Capes). All foreigners work with Brazilian Master’s and basic scien-tifi c undergraduate research students, who, according to Knobel, benefi t not only from the shared knowledge and experience but also from the opportu-nity to become acquainted with other languages and with an international research environment.

Bureaucratic tasks – Knobel says that it is not enough to be willing to bring in foreign researchers; institutional support is also fundamental. “In other countries, the leader of a research group receives a grant and has the autonomy to manage the funds and bring people from outside. Here in Brazil that is not how it happens. It has only worked be-cause Unicamp has strong globaliza-tion goals and actively looks for new partnerships for student exchanges,” he says. The researcher warns, how-ever, that there are still several hurdles to be overcome, which often end up overloading the group leader with bu-reaucratic tasks, such as obtaining visas and even helping guest students fi nd a place to live. The pro-dean of Research at Unicamp, Ronaldo Pilli, confi rms that there are still diffi culties. “I had to be the guarantor of the rent for a foreign guest researcher I brought into my group,” he said.

Knobel’s group attracts attention because of the diversity of its foreign researchers, but his is far from being an isolated example at Unicamp. A PhD grant program established by the CNPq in partnership with the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) has brought in groups of Paki-stani students who are interested in do-ing a PhD at the university’s Institute of Chemistry (IQ). “The interesting thing is that this process has a knock-on ef-fect and I’m getting more and more requests from Pakistanis interested in

Brazilian

students benefit

from the shared

knowledge

and experience

and become

acquainted with

an international

environment

nanowires, which is being published in international journals. “I’m happy to have contributed to improving the equipment in the laboratory. I played an active part in assembling the nanostruc-tures manufacturing lab. My time here served to establish a collaboration that I hope will be long-lasting,” he states.

According to Marcelo Knobel, the concentration of students from Latin America has meant that two languages have been adopted in the laboratory: in addition to English, which is the lin-gua franca of science, “portunhol” can also be heard. Fanny and Torrejón Diaz worked with researchers, like Indian, Surender Kumar Sharma, who did his fi rst degree, Master’s and PhD in phys-ics at the Himachal Pradesh Univer-sity, and who, since 2007, has been at Unicamp, with a grant from FAPESP. “I started collaborating with Surender when he was doing his PhD and then he decided to come here,” recalls Kno-bel. “There’s an interesting aspect in his case. He has just managed to bring his wife here, who has also succeeded in



coming to Brazil,” says Pilli, who is a professor at the IQ. There is another successful example in the fi eld of ba-sic undergraduate scientifi c research, also in the area of chemistry. This is a pilot program from FAPESP and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which promotes the exchange of un-dergraduate students in chemistry from universities in São Paulo and the US. The opportunity, in this case is two way: students from Unicamp do intern-ships in the US and American students come to Brazil to do the same. One of the students who participated in the program, Ricardo Barroso Ferreira, 21, was recently the co-author of an article in the journal, Science. Because of the internship he did at the Univer-sity of California, in Los Angeles, he participated in a project that resulted in the creation of a three-dimensional synthetic crystal capable of capturing carbon dioxide emissions, which was the theme of the Science article.

Unicamp has a strategy to expand its globalization. According to the pro-dean, Ronaldo Pilli, in 2009 a project started that aims to attract foreign vis-iting professors to teach short courses. A public bid notice, issued last year in partnership with the Undergraduate Pro-Dean’s offi ce, received 60 propos-als from departments interested in

It is not

enough to be

willing to bring

in foreign

researchers;

institutional

support is also

fundamental

bringing visiting professors to teach on post-graduate courses lasting at most two months. Twenty-seven proposals were selected and Unicamp is going to invest R$ 400,000 in the fi rst year. There is also an effort to attract visit-ing researchers for longer periods. The goal is to offer scholarships for one to two years for people who are of inter-est to departments, with the chance of the person becoming a candidate for a teaching position at the end of the

scholarship period. Advertisements in international scientifi c journals, like Nature and Science, attracted more than 50 interested people, who sent their résumés to Unicamp, which were scrutinized by the departments. Those selected were invited to visit the university and there are already two of them, a Canadian and a Frenchman, who will spend up to two years at Unicamp as from March. “We are not only interested in bringing foreigners here, but also in repatriating Brazilian researchers who are working abroad,” says Pilli. To facilitate the inclusion of these researchers, Unicamp is planning to change the selection rules for certain categories of teachers, to allow the tests to be done in a foreign language.

Also in the education fi eld, Unicamp is working hard towards globalization. Each semester the institution receives about 100 foreign undergraduate and post-graduate students, most of them from Latin American countries with which the university has agreements; the total number of foreigners study-ing at Unicamp ranges between 800 and 1,000 students. “Demand is great from students from countries like Peru and Colombia, who see Unicamp as a ref-erence point in the exact sciences and engineering,” says physicist Leandro Tessler, who is responsible for the In-stitutional and International Relations Coordination Offi ce (Cori). He said that the university has made efforts to establish agreements with American and European universities. “There is room to grow, especially with the United States,” he says. The idea, according to Tessler, is to apply in education the same strategy that is used in research. “The university shows its credentials when it gets expo-sure in the outside world. In research, we adopt international standards and we have become recognized. We are now doing the same with education,” he says. One of the advantages is having students from Unicamp make contact with dif-ferent ideas. “Brazilian university groups are very homogeneous and it is good to have more diversity,” he says. But the fundamental goal is to ensure a global-ized higher education. “Students become more competitive when they have inter-national experience,” Tessler states. n


Glass tower of BaBel Federal University of São Carlos attracts foreigners to research materials engineering

The network of collaborators from abroad of the Vitreous Materials Laboratory (LaMaV) at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFS-Car), coordinated by materials engineering professor Edgar Dutra Zanotto, comprises researchers from France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, the

United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, Colom-bia, and Argentina. The basis of this international inclusion is the scientific and technical production of this 34-year old laboratory, one of the world’s five most productive groups in the field of glass nucle-ation and crystallization, according to the Scopus database. The group has a strong partnership with the private sector for product development.

This explains why researchers of five different nationalities are currently working at LaMaV in São Carlos. This group comprises visiting professors and students. “Many doctoral and post-doctoral students, along with renowned visiting professors from abroad, apply for research positions and internships at La-MaV. Several of them have already worked with us. This on-going exchange is important because science is universal,” says the 56-year old Zanotto, a native of the city of Botucatu in São Paulo State. Zanotto founded the research center in 1977, when he was doing his master’s degree at the Physics Institute of USP São Carlos. Currently, he shares his lab coordina-tion duties with two colleagues, Ana Cândida Martins Rodrigues and Oscar Peitl Filho.

Published in December 2010

Fabrício Marques

024-027_Pol_Babel de Vidro_ingles_2011.indd 24 11.04.11 19:01:29

One of the visiting professors, invited thanks to financial aid from FAPESP, is France’s Jean-Louis Souquet. A retired professor from France’s Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, Souquet has maintained a long collaborative partnership with Ana Cândida Rodrigues, ever since she did her doctorate at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Électrochimie et Électrométallurgie de Grenoble. When he retired, the French professor donated the glass melting furnace – the technology of which was not available in Brazil at the time – that he had used in his laboratory to LaMaV. “The furnace is still here and working,” says Zanotto. In 2007 and in 2009, Souquet spent some time at the Brazilian laboratory. He has been back in São Carlos since August, and is currently working on a research project run by LaMaV, “Mecanismos de transporte elétrico em vidros e vitrocerâmicas” [Electrical transport mechanisms in glass and glass-ceramics]. The research project is coordinated by Ana Cândida. Nowadays, visiting professors get a monthly stipend of as much as R$ 8,536.50, in the case of researchers with qualifications equivalent to that of full professors at São Paulo State universities.

Russia’s Vladimir Mikhailovich Fokin, a re-searcher at the Vavilov State Optical Institute in St. Petersburg, will come in January 2011, also thanks to FAPESP financial aid. Fokin has been a long-time LaMaV collaborator. This will be his sixth time as a visiting professor at the laboratory – the first was in 1998. “We’ve worked together on about 30 papers,”


says Zanotto. “He is one of the most highly experienced and prolifi c re-searchers in our fi eld. If you type in the words “nucleation” or “crystal growth in glass” in the Scopus database, you will see that he ranks among the world’s fi ve most productive researchers in this fi eld,” Zanotto states.

“Fokin likes Brazil very much and is highly motivated to work in São Paulo because we have modern and up-to-date lab equipment. In addition to the equipment at our lab and at various other labs at UFSCar, he can also use the equipment at USP, Uni-camp, Unesp and the Synchrotron Laboratory,” says Zanotto. “The re-search conditions in Brazil are better than in Russia, especially when it comes to salaries and equipment, which makes us competitive and thus able to attract him,” he adds. Vladimir Fokin praises the dynamic aspects of Brazil-ian research, which is the opposite of the infl exibility of many traditional institutions in Europe that he is ac-quainted with. “I’m always deeply im-pressed by the enthusiasm and the will of Brazilian students to learn and do their best,” he states. “One of the most attractive aspects of my research work at LaMaV is the excellent opportunity to come into contact and establish col-laborations with young researchers and students.” In his opinion, his visits to Brazil have helped him implement his scientifi c ideas. “And this has been pos-sible not only because of the excellent technical conditions to conduct ex-periments, but also because of the friendly and productive environment in the lab,” he adds.

Israel’s Itay Dyamant, who attended a post-doctoral program with a grant from FAPESP, arrived on November 1st and is the latest newcomer at La-MaV. Dyamant, who has a doctorate in chemical engineering from Ben Gu-rion University in Negev, had written to Zanotto asking for a post-doctoral scholarship. “I have to admit that I never answered his letter. Many young researchers send these letters of request to various places. We make an effort to bring them here and they end up accepting offers from US labs,” says Zanotto. Professor Kenneth Kelton, of Washington University, in Saint Louis, was a recipient of such letters. He sug-

technical staff that allows you to work productively,” he adds. In principle, he plans to return to Colombia to work in research after he concludes the doctoral program. “But I want to maintain my ties with LaMaV,” he says.

Source of knowledge – Jonas Kjeldsen, a Danish student, came to São Carlos for six months for his master’s degree in chemical engineering, on a Danish government grant. He had heard about the São Carlos group from a German professor, Ralf Keding, who taught at his university in Denmark. “Keding had spent two years in São Carlos at the beginning of his career and knew the

gested that Dyamant insist on contact-ing Zanotto again, because his research interests were tailor-made to the work being done at this UFSCar laboratory. “I told him that I would only make an effort to submit a project to FAPESP if he promised he would come. Dya-mant came with his wife, having paid for the trip and the hotel accommoda-tions, and stayed in São Carlos for a week. He enjoyed his stay and so we submitted the project to FAPESP,” says Zanotto. At present, FAPESP provides a monthly stipend of R$ 5,028.90 for post-doctoral students in Brazil.

José Luis Narvaez Semanate, from Colombia, has a degree from the Uni-versity of Cauca. He has been at UFSCar since 2007. He had been recommended by a professor who had studied in Brazil and came on his own to this country to take the entrance examinations. He was given a grant from Coordinating Offi ce for the Improvement of People with Higher Education (Capes) after he had passed the tests. “I studied for one term as a special student before I entered the master’s degree program,” he recalls. He concluded his degree in 2009 with a grant from Capes and is now attending a doctoral program, with CNPq grant. Professor Ana Cândida Rodrigues is his advisor. “It would be almost impossible to attend a gradu-ate program in Colombia, because no such grants are available there,” he says. “Brazil offers many opportunities and LaMaV is one of the best labs in the world in this fi eld. It has excellent infrastructure and a highly qualifi ed

Edgar Zanotto: focused research

ed

Ua

Rd

O C

eS

aR

26 n SpeCial iSSUe may 2009 / deC 2010 n PESQUISA FAPESP


PESQUISA FAPESP n SpeCial iSSUe may 2009 / deC 2010 n 27

place and the people,” says Kjeldsen. “I had the impression that the university was very serious, and sometime after I had arrived here, I knew I was right. LaMaV is a source of knowledge and I’m happy to be part of it,” he says. This is a two-way street. At present, two La-MaV undergraduate students are on an internship program in Germany; in 2011, a doctoral student will spend some time in the United States and a post-doctoral student will go to Por-tugal and Spain.

In Zanotto’s opinion, the consisten-cy of his group is related to dedication in the same field for the last 34 years. “We have a focus – we study glass, espe-cially the nucleation and crystallization process. We have solid, consolidated know-how in this matter, which ranks us among the world’s major groups in the field,” he states. “Things here are different from other similar groups, which change their fields of interest every two or three years: they migrate from the study of ceramic toughness to superconductors, from fine films and nanotechnology to graphene; the result is that they lack specific knowledge in these fields and have no real expertise,” says the professor. He adds that his in-ternational network is the result of the contacts he made while he was abroad. In the early 1980s, he did his PhD at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. He also attended research

internship programs at the University of Arizona, in the United States (1987), at the International School of Advanced Studies in Polymer Science of the Uni-versity of Ferrara, in Italy (1993), and at the University of Florida, also in the United States (2005). “In addition, I made international contacts during congresses and incorporated contacts made by my fellow colleagues and stu-dents,” he says.

LaMaV has made several impor-tant contributions to the fields of basic research – nucleation and the growth of crystals in glass and the physical and chemical properties of glass – all of which are applied in glass-ceramics. Examples of basic research include two papers by Zanotto, published in the American Journal of Physics in 1998 and 1999. The topic of the first paper, commented on in Science, deconstruct-ed the myth that medieval churches such as Notre-Dame, are proof that glass can flow at room temperature because the glass on their stained glass windows is thicker on the base than at the top. He does not disagree that glass is a viscous liquid. However, he proved that it would take millions of years for glass to flow to the point of achieving the thickness observed in the churches. Based on his analysis of the composition of 350 medieval stained glass windows, he concluded that the differences in the given thick-

ness occurred only because of defects in the manufacturing of the glass.

In the field of applied research, the laboratory has made important contributions to the development of glass-ceramics, a sophisticated material with a non-porous crystalline struc-ture that is based on glass and can be used to manufacture artificial bones and teeth, substrates of hard disks for laptops, mirrors for giant telescopes, luxury flooring, transparent, heat-resistant cooking pans, and plates for modern electric stoves that replace the traditional gas burners (see Pesquisa FAPESP nº 76).

Industries – LaMaV also has close cooperation ties with industries. Two dozen research and development projects were conducted in the last 20 years in conjunction with more than 40 companies, including Pirelli, Usiminas, Companhia Baiana de Pesquisas Min-erais (CBPM), Alcoa, Nadir Figueiredo, Saint-Gobain (France) and Optigrate (USA). The latest research project in-volving corporate research concerns biosilicate, a bio-active material than can bond with tooth enamel and pre-vent the hypersensitivity of dentine (see Pesquisa FAPESP nº 158). The biosili-cate research led to the creation of a company in São Carlos.

Recently, international recognition of the research work conducted in the lab came in the form of an invitation from the Elsevier Publishing Company for Zanotto to become one of the edi-tors of the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids (JNCS), the leading publication in the field of research into vitreous materials. As of October, Zanotto has become one of the journal’s editors, along with B. G. Potter, from the Uni-versity of Arizona, and J. W. Zwanziger, from Dalhousie University. This is the first time that a foreigner has taken on this position. The five former editors of the journal in the last 50 years were all Americans. According to Zanotto, the fact that he was invited for this re-flects the reputation of LaMaV, “which is on par with that of the most repu-table international labs specializing in this field. We hope that this will help attract more funding and bright stu-dents and collaborators from Brazil and abroad.” n

The group has

focused on the

same field of study

for the last 34

years, having made

progress in basic

research and

technological

applications


028-031_Construcao da teia_ingles_2011.indd 28 11.04.11 19:04:05


Whereas several nations have managed to expand their scientific production in inter-national networks, the articles of Brazilian researchers written jointly with foreigners have stabilized at the level of about 30% and have been growing, in absolute terms, more slowly than domestic collaborations,

i.e., the joint work of scientists of the same nationality. This is one of the highlights of a PhD thesis on Brazil’s scientific collaboration networks, defended last year by Samile Vanz, a researcher and professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and produ-ced under the guidance of Ida Stumpf. Samile analyzed 49,046 Brazilian articles published in journals indexed on the Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science base from 2004 to 2006, and found that 95% of these were based on some type of collaboration. Partnering arrangements within the country itself has accounted for about two thirds of the articles and has remained stable in broad terms, having posted only a slight growth, from 69.2% of the total in 2004 to 70.1% in 2006. As for the level of international collaborations, it dropped slightly.

The proportion of Brazilian articles with at least one foreign author, which stood at 30.8% of the total in 2004, slipped to 30.1% in 2005 and to 30% in 2006. Stability at this level drew this researcher’s attention, given that, during this period, Brazilian scientific output rose by as much as 8% annually, currently accounting for 2% of global production and for 45% of Latin American production, and considering also that policies were put in place to expand international participation: in the early 2000s, Capes (the Coordinating Office for the Im-provement of People with Higher Education) started to rank more highly grades (6 and 7) only those graduate programs that maintained international collaboration. “Collaborative work is rising in Brazil and accounts for

Network building Thesis discusses the reasons

for the lack of growth in Brazilian research in international networks

almost all the indexed scientific production; the inter-national partnering agreements, however, fluctuate but don’t really advance,” concludes Samile Vanz.

The number of co-authored articles is used as an indication of scientific collaboration among countries, institutions and researchers or among sectors (academia, government and private-sector enterprises). Although there are ways of increasing the international contribution to research without this necessarily leading to the publi-cation of articles, such as graduate student exchange pro-grams and participation in congresses and workshops, the importance of the co-authorship indicator for Brazilian research has been observed in several studies. One of these, published in 2006 by Abel Packer and Rogério Meneghini, from Bireme (the Latin-American and Caribbean Center of Health Sciences Information), analyzed the Brazilian articles with more than 100 citations on the Web of Scien-ce base from 1994 to 2003. It found that 84.3% of them resulted from partnering with other countries. Another study by Rogério Meneghini, published in 1996, showed that articles resulting from international collaboration have, on average, four times more citations than those that only involve domestic collaborations, which, in turn, have a 60% greater impact than those published by a single author. “Brazil needs to fight for its research to achieve greater international participation, because this will lend more visibility to the country’s output and will mean gaining access to resources and equipment that are not available when one conducts research in isolation,” states researcher Samile, whose work had the collaboration of a group from China that specializes in bibliometry – she did a one-year PhD internship in the lab at the Technological University of Dalian, where she learned data treatment and analysis techniques that she used in her thesis.

According to the literature, several factors explain the trend toward collaborative work. These range from the ne-

Published in March 2010

Fabrício Marques

[ cOOpeRaTiON ]

scientific and technological

policy



ed to share equipment costs and main-tain contact with researchers from other fields of knowledge for interdisciplinary studies to expanding access to financing and the desire to expand one’s academic credentials, learning new methodologies and developing skills through contact with more experienced people. The advent of the Internet and of wireless networks have made it easier for rese-archers who are far apart to maintain contact. The drivers of collaboration, says Samile, are not the same in all fields of knowledge. In Mathematics, as it is a theoretical discipline, partnerships tend to result from the need to exchange ideas and debate problems. In physics, on the other hand, the need to share expensive equipment, such as particle accelerators, heavily underscores collaboration.

T he roughly 30% of collaborations achieved by Brazil are far from being a trivial figure. “These figu-

res’ stability shows that we have a con-solidated scientific community, with strong groups that are able to advance on their own in several areas,” says Ja-cqueline Leta, a professor from the Fe-deral University of Rio de Janeiro, who was on the examining board of Samile’s thesis. “One possible explanation is that the formal scientific community, which is the one that establishes partnering, is fairly stable. What has been rising is not the number of researchers, but of gra-duate students, for whom collaborative production is harder,” she states. Ac-cording to Jacqueline, small countries tend to have very high collaboration ratios, indicating the dependence of their scientific community. Brazil’s 30% exceeds the 25% of the United States, a country that accounts for one third of worldwide scientific production. Ho-wever, these figures are lower than those of other Latin American countries such as Chile, Argentina and Mexico. Europe too has been raising its collaboration ratios, which now stand at 50% of its production, twice the figure of two de-cades ago, thanks to European Union policies designed to bring together the scientists of its member countries. The European level is twice as high as that of countries such as the United States and Japan, whose level, nevertheless, has al-so been rising, indicating the growing internationalization of research.

Lea Velho, a professor at Unicamp’s Department of Scientific and Technolo-gical policy, says it is hard to assess the meaning of the 30% figure. “There isn’t any clear theory yet, to interpret data of this type,” she says. However, she states that the level can be useful to reflect on the reason why Brazil is unable to increa-se these indicators. “There is a lack of en-couragement for our scientific commu-nity to be more involved with the foreign community,” she says. “On one hand, we stopped sending PhD students abroad, which used to be a potential source of fu-ture collaborations, as we turned toward ‘sandwich’ doctorates [in which the doc-toral candidate only spends a segment of his/her time abroad] or post-doctoral studies abroad, which do not establish such strong bonds. On the other hand, we have a financing system that has in-creasingly been providing good oppor-tunities for grants and project funding in Brazil itself. This is rather different from what occurs in other countries, where taking part in international networks and the struggle for funding are crucial for the researcher to be able to continue to pursue his or her work,” she states. According to Lea, it is fundamental in Europe for a researcher to get funding from the European Union network based framework programs. “European univer-

sities go so far as to hire people to format the presentations of projects, such is their importance. Here in Brazil there is no such encouragement for partnerships.”

The internationalization of Brazi-lian research is an important element in the strategy of FAPESP, which main-tains cooperation agreements with agencies, enterprises and institutions in Germany, Canada, the United States, France, Mexico, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. One exam-ple is the cooperation agreement signed in 2004 with France’s CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), focu-sed on encouraging the exchange of scientists and the submission of joint projects involving researchers from São Paulo institutions and their French col-leagues. These have already given rise to four calls for proposals and have fun-ded 27 projects. Similarly, FAPESP also has an agreement with DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), Germany’s main research promotion agency. Last year, the Foundation established a link with British research, when it signed cooperation agreements with RCUK (the Research Councils of the United Kingdom) and with King’s College London, which became the first Bri-tish institution of higher education to enter into partnership with FAPESP. Additionally, FAPESP’s internationali-zation strategy includes bringing scien-tists from abroad to Brazil. Therefore, opportunities for post-doctoral grants are offered in monthly advertisements in the journal Nature as well as on the foundation’s website in Portuguese and in English. Some of the Foundation’s major initiatives, such as the Biota pro-gram (which studies São Paulo state biodiversity), Bioen (which concerns bioenergy research), and its global cli-mate change research program have been holding workshops and seminars with the participation of foreign resear-chers, to encourage the participation of São Paulo researchers in international networks and to keep them in contact with cutting-edge science in their fields of knowledge.

One of the aims of Samile’s work was to update the study on co-au-thoring, which had already been the subject matter of prior research. One such example is an article by Wolfgang Glänzel (a Hungarian), Jacqueline Leta

International

collaboration is

justifiable, amongst

other reasons, for

the opportunity

to share costs

on large projects

and to learn from

those with more

experience



(a Brazilian) and Bart Thijs (a Belgian), published in 2006 in the journal Scien-tometrics. This provided an overview of Brazilian science on the ISI base from 1999 to 2003 and showed that Brazil had the lowest percentage of publica-tions with at least one international partner relative to other Latin Ameri-can countries such as Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Venezuela. Ten years earlier, Jacqueline Leta and Hernan Chaimo-vich had analyzed Brazilian scientific production from 1981 to 1990. They found international collaborations rose during this time from 21.6% to 26.7%. This percentage, however, stabilized as from 1993, becoming divorced from scientific production. According to Samile’s thesis, the areas with the hi-ghest ratio of partnering are the geos-ciences, with more than 50% of articles involving international collaboration, followed by mathematics and physics, with some 40% each. Brazil’s most frequent partner is the United States, with 22% of the coauthoring. This is followed by France (with 8.2%), Ger-many and Great Britain (with 7.3%), Italy (with 4.3%), Canada (with 4%), Spain and Argentina (with 3.8%). As for the relative analysis of these data, which compares co-authored articles with total country production, it sho-wed, according to Samile, that Brazil’s chief partners are the United States and Argentina. Collaborations with the United States are concentrated in fields such as clinical and experimental medicine, biology and biosciences. In the case of France, the priority areas are physics and chemistry. Collaborations with Chile stand out in geosciences and space sciences (15.7% of the total), pro-bably because of Brazilian participation in consortiums responsible for the buil-ding of major telescopes in Chile.

D espite this stability on the inter-national level, there is plenty of evidence that research as part of

a network has been growing in Brazil. The thesis’ data show that the mean number of authors of Brazilian arti-cles reached 6.3, far above the global average of the year 2000, which was 4.16. Moreover, this indicator has been trending up: the mean was 5.9 authors in 2004, 6.4 in 2005 and 6.5 in 2006. Ac-cording to Samile, this can be explained by the Brazilian scientific community embracing cooperative work. Alterna-tively, it might be researchers’ response to the requirement that they publish more – increased co-authoring might help them fulfill this requirement.

An analysis of the web of domestic collaboration among the 16 Brazilian institutions with the highest scientific productivity showed several regional networks. São Paulo institutions, such

as USP (the most productive of all), Unicamp and Unesp clearly form a network. USP, for instance, produced 1,157 articles with Unicamp and 1,291 with Unesp. One exception is Unifesp; according to the author of the thesis, it is the most isolated, even though it produced 730 articles with USP. Samile ascribes the performance of São Paulo institutions to the state’s investment in science. In the South Region, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFR-GS) also seems to stand alone, whereas the Federal Universities of Santa Ca-tarina (UFSC) and of Paraná (UFPR) form a group that tends to collaborate with the Federal University of São Car-los (UFSCar) in inner-State São Paulo. Another group comprises the Federal Universities of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and Minas Gerais (UFMG), plus the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz). In the Northeast, the federal universi-ties of Ceará (UFCE) and of Pernam-buco (UFPE) are frequent collabora-tors. However, Samile Vanz warns that it is necessary to advance into longer series to draw more in-depth conclu-sions. She is committed to this task and plans to continue analyzing data from more recent years about collaboration in Brazilian research. n


Bagasse is the target

An abundant by-product of the

sugar cane industry provides Brazil with a competitive edge

in the search for second generation

ethanol

032-036_Pol-O alvo e o bagaco_ingles_2011.indd 32 4/12/11 12:49:59 PM

PESQUISA FAPESP n SpeciAl iSSue mAy 2009 / dec 2010 n 33

Brazilian research on second generation ethanol has achieved outstanding networking capac-ity. Restricted until a short time ago to iso-lated experiences conducted by companies and research groups, the search for ethanol extracted from cellulose is mobilizing a grow-ing number of researchers, encouraged by re-

search policies focused on increasing the productivity of Brazilian sugar cane ethanol. The target is to take advantage of sugar cane bagasse and trash, sources of cellulose that account for two-thirds of the plant’s en-ergy, yet are not converted into biofuels. “A global race is taking place to develop second generation ethanol,” says Rubens Maciel Filho, a professor at the School of Chemical Engineering of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), and one of the coordinators of the FAPESP Program for Research on Bioenergy (Bioen), the driver of the scientific community’s net-working in São Paulo. “This kind of research is rela-tively new in Brazil; nonetheless, it has comparative advantages in this race, such as the availability of an enormous quantity of cheap raw material, which is the pre-harvested bagasse, and an installed infrastructure prepared to produce ethanol,” he states.

Residues such as wood chips, sugar cane bagasse and corn cobs contain cellulose and can be transformed into biofuel when submitted to hydrolysis, a chemical molecule-breaking process. A major advantage of this approach would be to reduce the competition between biofuels and food, to produce – in the case of using ba-gasse – more ethanol per plantation. One challenge is to make ethanol production less expensive – in the United States, corn-extracted ethanol is strongly subsidized, unlike Brazilian sugar cane ethanol. From the technical point of view, several hydrolysis pathways have already been tested, but the current yields and investments do not make these operations economically feasible.

The networking involves initiatives such as the con-struction of several pilot plants to develop the techno-

logical pathways of cellulose ethanol. The Dedini Indús-trias de Base company is building a new acid hydrolysis plant – this is a process in which acid is used as a catalyst to break cellulose molecules. This plant will incorporate innovations related to materials and processes based on knowledge gained from 2003 to 2007, the period during which another plant owned by the company was in operation inside the Usina São Luiz mill in the city of Pirassununga, in São Paulo State. “The experi-ence showed that we need to lighten some of the severe conditions under which the unit had been operating,” says José Luiz Olivério, vice president of Dedini. “We’re testing more resistant materials, because the abrasive conditions of the process resulted in wear-and-tear that jeopardized the continuous functioning of the unit,” he states. According to Olivério, Dedini has maintained its belief in the commercial feasibility of its technology, which has been studied since the 1980s; this technol-ogy uses the Dedini Hidrólise Rápida (DHR), Rapid Hydrolysis Process, which was a pioneering process in the country. The company has a scientific cooperation agreement with FAPESP, involving the research of in-dustrial processes for the manufacturing of ethanol.

Oxiteno, one of the biggest Brazilian chemical com-panies, has shown interest in dominating the hydrolysis process of bagasse and trash to manufacture products used in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Oxiteno partnered with FAPESP in November 2006 to launch a bidding invitation – focused on 16 re-search theme areas – for the selection of projects in the field of sugar, ethanol and by-products production. The majority of the seven winning projects in course, which involve partnerships with researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP), the Institute for Technological Research (IPT), and the Laboratório Nacional de Luz Síncrotron, Synchrotron Light Laboratory, are working on

Bagasse in sugar mill in the State of São Paulo: promising raw material for cellulose ethanol

HÉ

lViO

RO

me

RO

/ A

e

Fabrício Marques


[ eneRgy ]

032-036_Pol-O alvo e o bagaco_ingles_2011.indd 33 11.04.11 19:06:14

34 n SpeciAl iSSue mAy 2009 / dec 2010 n PESQUISA FAPESP

processes related to cellulose ethanol. The Foundation’s partnerships with Dedini and Oxiteno are part of the Bioen program.

Petrobras is investing in enzyme hydrolysis, which uses enzymes in-stead of acids. These enzymes are pro-duced by microorganisms that break the sugar from the cellulose, which is then transformed into fuel ethanol after the fermentation process. A pilot plant installed at Cenpes, the company’s re-search center located in Rio de Janeiro, went into operation in 2007. The com-pany’s intention is to master this tech-nology and export cellulose ethanol in the forthcoming decade.

A pilot plant in Campinas, in the State of São Paulo, will be built by mid 2010. This pilot plant will be available to researchers from all states. A symbol of the networking efforts, the plant will be installed in the recently created Centro de Ciência e Tecnologia do Bioetanol (CTBE), Bioethanol Science and Tech-nology Center, linked to the Ministry of Science and Technology. The center’s infrastructure will comprise six mod-ules, ranging from the physical treat-ment of lignocellulose to the produc-tion of microorganisms, fermentation, and enzymatic hydrolysis. The idea is to allow researchers to conduct experi-ments using specific parts of the same platform. “The objective is to move for-ward simultaneously and thus overcome several technological bottlenecks linked to second generation ethanol,” explains Carlos Eduardo Vaz Rossell, coordina-tor of the CTBE’s pilot plant.

Basic research linked to second gen-eration ethanol is also moving forward. Researchers from Embrapa Agroener-

gia, for example, are working on studies to describe the cell walls of sugar cane. The studies are on course at the Labo-ratório de Genética Molecular, Mo-lecular Genetics Lab, at the Embrapa Recursos Genéticos e Biotecnologia, Genetic and Biotechnology Research Center, in partnership with USP’s Bo-tanic Institute. The objective is to gain a better understanding of the compo-sition and cell wall structure of sugar cane, to manipulate it in a specific way, aiming at increasing the production of second generation ethanol.

C ountries such as the United States, Canada and Sweden have more outstanding scientific production

than Brazil, in terms of the develop-ment of second generation ethanol. The United States, the world’s fore-most ethanol producer, is being criti-cized because it is depending heavily on corn, a source of human food, to extract biofuel; in addition, US corn is heavily subsidized and, as such, it can be sold at a reasonable price. The objec-tive of the search for cellulose ethanol, explored from farming residues or in-edible plants, is to guarantee the supply of renewable fuel without jeopardizing the country’s food safety.

Brazil’s interest in cellulose etha-nol has a different background. Brazil’s objective is to become even more com-petitive in terms of sugar cane ethanol, by increasing production without in-creasing the land necessary for sugar cane plantations in the same propor-tion. Studies conducted within the scope of the Projeto Bioetanol project, a research network funded by the fed-eral government, show that a distillery

that nowadays produces one million liters of ethanol from sugar cane juice could initially produce an additional 150 thousand liters of bagasse ethanol if it used the hydrolysis technology. In 2025, with improved technology, this same production would provide an additional 400 thousand liters from recovered bagasse. Sugar cane trash is another potential source for ethanol extraction. As slashing and burning of sugar cane becomes less frequent, the trash will tend to be used as a source of cellulose.

In Brazil, the existing technology has to reduce costs to offset the change in the currently efficient use of sugar cane bagasse, which is burned to gen-erate electricity at the sugar and etha-nol mills. Rubens Maciel Filho, from Unicamp, points out that it is not enough to find technologically fea-sible solutions – they must also be low cost technologies. “It is no easy task to justify huge investments to improve first generation ethanol, because the productivity of the existing process is quite high; an additional challenge is to produce second generation ethanol at a competitive price,” he says. However, it is important to point out that the first generation technology still has space for improvement. In spite of investing in the development of the hydrolysis pro-cess, Dedini has not stopped focusing on incremental technologies, that range from the creation of self-sufficient – in terms of water – ethanol plants to the production of a biofertilizer that incor-porates several residues, such as vinasse and soot. “Sugar cane is unbeatable in terms of storing energy,” says Olivério, from Dedini.

pH

Ot

OS

ed

uA

Rd

O c

eS

AR


PESQUISA FAPESP n SpeciAl iSSue mAy 2009 / dec 2010 n 35

I t is difficult to predict how long it is going to take before second genera-tion ethanol becomes economically

feasible, given the difficulties in learning about the details of the progress achieved by companies, as such progress is pro-tected by non-disclosure. “However, if a truly competitive process to transform sugar cane bagasse into ethanol actually existed, it would already be available for the market and the mills would already be using it,” says Rubens Maciel, from Unicamp. The researcher says that Brazil has five years to overcome the techno-logical challenges. “Otherwise, we are going to depend on imported processes and inputs. But the effort is worthwhile because our advantage lies in the fact that we have the raw material – the bagasse- available at the ethanol producing unit,” he says, referring to the price of a ton of dry sugar cane bagasse, which costs approximately US$ 15, in comparison to the US$ 35 that the same quantity of the available residue costs in the United States. Even transportation costs are a competitive advantage, as the bagasse does not have to be transported to the plant – it is available on site.

Bagasse and trash are comprised of cellulose, a glucose polymer formed by six carbons, the hexoses; of hemicel-lullose, comprised of five-carbon sug-ars, called pentoses, which are not used in sugar production; and of lignin, a structural material of the plant, and an integral part of the secondary cell walls of plants. Lignin is responsible for the plant’s hardness and impermeability and provides resistance to attacks on plant tissues. In order for the biomass-es to be used as raw material for chem-ical and biological processes, they have to be submitted to a pre-treatment able to disorganize the recalcitrant lignocel-lulose complex. Lignin is a major ob-stacle in this process. The breakdown of lignin releases substances that in-hibit fermentation.

Several bottlenecks have to be over-come to achieve an economically feasi-ble process. The first bottleneck is related to the pre-treatment of bagasse and trash. “The raw materials decompose slowly. The challenge is to

pre-treat this structure to increase its lability. The early processes were very destructive and led to significant sugar loss,” says Rossell, from CTBE. “We still do not dominate the chemical, physical, and mechanical properties of bagasse, trash and their fractions. We need to become more familiar with the raw material to then develop more efficient processes in the future,” he states.

The second bottleneck is related to the catalysts used to decompose the cel-lulose. In the case of hydrolic acid, it is necessary to improve the efficiency of the process, which does not allow a very accurate control of the breaking of the chemical bonds. “While sulphuric acid

One ton of dry bagasse costs US$ 15, less than half the price of the sources available in the USA

destroys part of the sugar that is formed, the more efficient chloridic acid has a problem related to corrosiveness, which requires high-cost metal alloys,” says Rossell. In the case of the enzymatic hydrolysis process, the bottleneck is the cost of the enzymes and the exagger-ated quantity needed to provoke the splitting of the cellulose into glucose. One of the challenges of the research studies is to find microorganisms able to produce more productive enzymes.

In the United States, research is fo-cused on a technique called consolidat-ed bioprocessing, in which the four bio-logical transformations involved in the production of bioethanol (production


36 n SpeciAl iSSue mAy 2009 / dec 2010 n PESQUISA FAPESP

of enzymes, saccharification, fermenta-tion of the hexoses and fermentation of the pentoses) happen in a single phase. Genetically modified microorganisms anaerobically produce enzymes with better activity than the ones used by other processes (read the interview on page 37). “These microorganisms need to be tested because even if they work well in the laboratory, they can be at-tacked by other enzymes that survive better in the environment,” says Maciel. “We cannot be left out of the develop-ment process of sophisticated micro-organisms, because they can help us understand the process better and work in our favor.”

O ther bottlenecks include taking ad-vantage of the five-carbon sugars, the so-called pentoses. “There is

no efficient pathway to transform these sugars into ethanol. Most of the yeasts do not have this pathway or the pathway is so small that it does not produce any impact,” says Rossell. “The creation of new yeasts or microorganisms is critical for the transformation of pentose into ethanol. Nowadays, from the commer-cial point of view, we would only have ethanol obtained from hexoses.” There are other pending issues to resolve, such as the need for high water consumption in the pre-treatment process and the disposal of vinasse, the residue that is left over from the distillation to recover the ethanol. When the production of ethanol comes from hydrolysis, the residue does not contain potassium or phosphorus and thus cannot be used as a fertilizer. As vinasse is polluting, another safe destination is an issue.

Rossell views the perspectives opti-mistically. “The number of researchers and technicians involved in research tends to grow exponentially,” he states. In the opinion of Maciel, from Uni-camp, the networking of efforts is fundamental to benefit the country’s competitive edge. “There has to be a certain amount of redundancy in any line of research so that the different ways of approaching a problem can be compared. However, in the case of cellulose ethanol, we might not need many pilot plants. With some plants and the integrated mobilization of many researchers, we can achieve bet-ter results,” he concludes. n

There is a wide field in which researchers from Brazil, Argentina and the United States can join efforts to understand and reduce the impact of biofuel production technologies on the use of water and land. But in order to make these collaborations feasible, it will be necessary to overcome obstacles such as the lack of a data standard that tracks comparative studies, the need to build a model able to explain the effects of complex phenomena, or the need to find ways to scientifically analyze correlations, such as the ones suggesting the influence of the increase in the size of the corn-planted area in the United States, on the deforesting of Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest. This conclusion was voiced during the final discussions of a workshop held in August, which drew scientists from three countries with great interest in biofuels – while Brazil and the United States are the leading producers of bioethanol, one a by-product of sugar cane and the other a by-product of corn, Argentina has huge potential to produce both ethanol and biodiesel.

“Together, these countries from the American continent want to define high-quality scientific strategies so that natural resources are used in a sustainable manner,” says Marcos Buckeridge, a professor at the University of São Paulo/USP’s Biosciences Institute and coordinator of the workshop. The event, held within the scope of the FAPESP Program for Research on Bioenergy (Bioen), was organized and sponsored by funding agencies such as FAPESP, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and the US’s National Science Foundation, as well as such institutions as the University of São Paulo, the University of Buenos Aires and Iowa State University.

“Water and land use, associated with the production of biofuels, has significant social, economic and environmental consequences and entails complex technological issues. New models, with multidisciplinary and multinational teams are necessary to address this issue,” said Robert Anex, a professor at Iowa State University.

Uniting for sustainabilityWorkshop brings together North Americans, Brazilians and Argentines to debate the impact of biofuels on water and land use

mig

ue

l B

Oy

Ay

An



The transition

will be smooth

Lee Rybeck Lynd is a pioneering researcher in the field of biomass used for the production of ener-gy. His interest in this matter began in the late 1970s, when the possibility of converting cellulose into biofuels inspired his graduate course disser-tation – and this interest has never waned. For the last 22 years, this professor of engineering and

biology has led a research group at the Thayer School of Engineering, at Dartmouth College, a 240-year old university located in Hanover, New Hampshire. His team has already produced more than one hundred scientific articles and a dozen patents; this team is responsible for an important part of US research studies on second generation ethanol, extracted from cellulose, which in-cludes the promise of producing biofuels from wood, agricultural residues and various kinds of plants, without jeopardizing the production of food.

While most biological routes being studied for the processing of cellulosic biomass focused on the separate production of enzymes, in a process which comprised several stages, Lynd’s group identified a simpler and poten-tially less expensive manner of achieving the same result by using another technique. The name of this process is consolidated bioprocessing (CBP), in which the four transformations involved in the production of bioethanol (production of enzymes, saccharification, fermentation of hexoses and fermentation of pentoses) take place in a single phase. In this technique, microorganisms produce anaerobically complex enzymes with higher activity than the enzymes used by other processes. Lynd’s group is one of the world’s most active groups using this approach.

In 2005, the researcher partnered with venture capital investors to create Mascoma, a company in the field of biofuel research; investment capital was provided by such

IntervIew wIth Lee Lynd


The uS researcher says that cellulose ethanol and sugar

cane ethanol promise to be more

complementary than competitive

da

rT

mo

uT

h c

ol

le

ge

037-041_Pol-O alvo e o bagaco-entrevista_ingles_2011.indd 37 11.04.11 19:09:43


n What are the most viable resources for lignocellulose conversion? What about sugar cane bagasse?— A broad range of lignocellulosic feedstocks are potentially attractive for conversion to ethanol, including grasses and other herbaceous plants, woody plants, and various process residues. Bagasse is one of the most attractive feedstocks for the emergent cellulosic biofuels industry as it is avail-able precollected in large quantities and could be processed using infrastructure available at an existing mill producing cane ethanol and/or sugar. Bagasse, of course, has value now as a source of heat and, increasingly, electricity. Incorporating biofuels needs to add value beyond current options for bag-gase processing. Although I have not analyzed this in detail, my preliminary assessment and that of others with relevant expertise with whom I have spoken is that this is probably achiev-able. Conversion of sugar cane trash is another potential opportunity for li-gnocellulose processing that is worthy of evaluation.

n Why do you believe that consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) is better than other routes to obtain cellulosic ethanol? Could you explain the advantages? — The CBP strategy achieves low operating and capital costs through elimination of costly added enzymes and process simplification, resulting in less equipment. As stated by an expert panel convened by the US Department of Energy (DOE Joint Task Force – 2006), CBP is “widely considered the ultimate low-cost configuration for

wik

ime

dia

co

mm

on

S

investors as Vinod Khosla, the founder of Sun Microsystems. The company owns the patent on enzyme producing microbes and, according to Lynd, will soon receive commercial application for this process.

In addition to his work as a research-er and entrepreneur, Lynd also acts as an advisor to government authorities. He testified at a congressional hearing on biofuels at the US Senate and was a member of the committee on biofuels during the Clinton Administration. He has also prepared reports together with non-governmental organizations, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council. His latest venture is acting as one of the leaders of the Global Sus-tainable Bioenergy: Feasibility and Implementation Paths, an international team of scientists who plan to explore the possibilities of using biofuels on a global level and on a large scale in or-der to achieve scientific consensus on the matter. The group will meet in five different countries – the United States, South Africa, Malaysia, Holland and Brazil (see Pesquisa FAPESP nº 162). Physicists José Goldemberg, former dean of the University of São Paulo (USP), from 1986 and 1990, and Car-los Henrique de Brito Cruz, scientific director of FAPESP, are members of the committee that organizes the project’s meetings. This study is important for Brazil because it provides an opportu-nity to discuss scientific evidence on the feasibility of producing biofuels on a large scale, including sugar cane etha-nol, a field in which Brazil is the leader, and cellulose ethanol, which could put other countries on the biofuels map.

The keynote speaker at a workshop organized by the Programa FAPESP de Pesquisa em Bioenergia, Bioenergy Research Program, scheduled for Sep-tember 10, Lynd gave the following interview to Pesquisa FAPESP:

n How close are we to producing cellulosic ethanol on a large scale? What are the major technical challenges that remain to be solved?— The purchase price of cellulosic bio-mass at anticipated prices, about US$ 60/ tonne, is competitive on an energy basis with oil at U$ 20/barrel. Thus, the ob-stacle is the cost of processing, rather than the cost of raw material. Conver-sion of sugars to ethanol is done now at a very low cost using mature technology on a large scale in both Brazil and the US, so that is not the barrier. A cellulosic ethanol industry would exist today if it were not for the difficulty of producing reactive intermediates, notably sugars, from this low-cost starting material. Low cost technology to overcome the recalcitrance of cellulosic biomass is the key, with the cost of cellulase enzymes the single largest component. Very recently, Mascoma Corporation has shown that the requirement for added cellulase can be reduced several fold, and eliminated for some cellulosic feed-stocks, using an approach called con-solidated bioprocessing or CBP. In light of this advance, I believe it is now clear that the recalcitrance barrier will fall, leading to a commercial cellulosic bio-fuel industry. There are paths by which this could occur quite quickly, but this will require alignment of interests and resources involving multiple parties.

Ethanol producing unit in the USA: Option for corn is being questioned



cellulose hydrolysis and fermentation.” Although there is broad agreement on the transformative benefits of CBP, there has been until recently a greater diversity of opinion on whether CBP represents a prospect for the near term or long-term. In CBP, cellulase enzy-mes are produced by the same micro-be that ferments sugars to ethanol so that all biologically-mediated processes occur in a single process step. Becau-se CBP is carried out under anaerobic conditions, costly and energy-intensive aeration is avoided and the metabo-lic energy for cellulase production is provided by fermentation resulting in ethanol. With CBP, producing ethanol from lignocellulose looks a lot like etha-nol production from cane, except that pretreated lignocellulose is fed to cellu-lose-fermenting microbes instead of ca-ne juice being fed to sugar-fermenting microbes. Alternative biological routes to cellulosic ethanol other than CBP involve multiple process steps with one of these devoted to cellulase produc-tion, and require aerobic cellulase pro-duction in which the metabolic energy for cellulase production is provided by respiration resulting in CO2, water, and loss of feedstock heating value as heat. There are non-biological ways to overcome the recalcitrance of cellulo-sis biomass, such as acid hydrolysis or gasification. Whereas CBP is enabled by transformative emergent advances in biotechnology and has only recently been demonstrated for the first time under near-industrial conditions, acid hydrolysis and gasification have been practiced industrially for decades and I have never seen a case for innovation-driven advances for these technologies with impacts comparable to CBP.

n Did your senior thesis already suggest this solution? — CBP was the central focus of my se-nior thesis completed as an undergrad-uate in 1979, although this processing strategy was referred to by a different name then, and I have been working on it ever since. I am delighted that this long journey appears close to fruition.

n What is the forecast for the technology patented by Mascoma? Is venture capital helping foster research for cellulosic ethanol?

— I anticipate that Mascoma’s CBP technology, including both in-hand advances as well as those in the pipe-line, will enable commercial cellulosic ethanol plants in the near future, while also providing a new value proposition for farmers and a platform from which to produce a diversity of products from lignocellulosic feedstocks. It is impor-tant to realize that the CBP approach is enabling for production of all fuels and commodity products from cellu-losic biomass, and not only for etha-nol. Venture capital has played a vital role in bringing Mascoma to where it is today, and I expect Mascoma’s early investors to reap handsome rewards. Looking forward, I anticipate further investment from strategic partners and institutional investors as well as VCs. Mascoma favors a “franchise” business model where we take an equity stake in a plant owned and operated by partners as opposed to a “build-own-and-oper-ate” model. For this reason, as well as opportunities stemming from linking Mascoma’s front-end technology with expertise of others involving conver-sion of sugars to a variety of products, strategic partnerships represent a natu-

ral and promising strategy by which to achieve a rapid market impact.

n Sugar cane has a good energetic balance and its production could expand in degraded lands or pastures in Brazil and in Africa. Its productivity has raised 4% per year in the last 30 years in Brazil. What, in your opinion, will be the future of sugar cane ethanol? Why not keep on investing in first generation ethanol research?— The growing worldwide demand for renewable, low GHG fuels necessitates that we explore and develop multiple feedstocks, including those that read-ily yield simple sugars and those that do not. Feedstock diversification will improve the overall business predict-ability for ethanol producers, by miti-gating the impact of price fluctuations for feedstocks, such as cane sugar, that have alternative markets – witness the recent doubling of worldwide sugar prices. Sugar cane ethanol is increasin-gly recognized as combining low gree-nhouse gas emissions, high fuel yields per hectare, and modest impacts on water pollution to a greater extent than other established biofuels. Cane etha-nol will thus be among the leading op-tions considered by countries looking to increase biofuel production. Cane ethanol and experience gained from its production is also important with respect to emergent technologies that produce biofuels from lignocellulose.Sugar cane bagasse is a logical point of entry and proving ground for such technologies. As well, close relatives of sugar cane including but not limited to Miscanthus have potential as feedsto-cks for lignocellulose conversion and can be produced in temperate climates where cane is not grown today. In addi-tion to the broad collective geographi-cal range of cellulosic feedstocks, a fur-ther driving force for cellulosic biofuel feedstocks in some parts of the world is the range of opportunities they offer for addressing concerns over land avai-lability. However lignocellulose proces-sing will need to advance a lot before it is cost competitive with cane ethanol production. For the near term, cellulo-sic ethanol and cane ethanol are much more likely to be complimentary than competitive. In the longer term, any transition to cellulosic ethanol from

Bagasse is used

as a source of

heat and

electricity. It is

necessary to

aggregate value

beyond these

options, in order

to incorporate it

to the production

of biofuels



cane ethanol is likely to be smooth ra-ther than disruptive and to occur only to the extent that processes and feeds-tocks offer improvements over current practice. As far as research, clearly we need to improve worthy things we are doing now while we also enable worthy things we are not yet doing. Consistent with this, it makes sense to continue research on cane ethanol, but also to include aggressive research to establish lignocellulosic ethanol, especially now that commercial implementation is wi-thin reach.

n In an article written by you and Nathanael Greene, you stated that “Biofuels are a modest part of the food price picture, consuming only 4% of world grain, and there is little evidence that food prices would be much lower if we did not produce biofuels.” What is the real size of the risk regarding food security?— Although issues involving food se-curity, biofuels and their interaction are complex, some salient observations can be made. I see increasingly compelling evidence supporting a recent statement made by a diverse group in Science that “We cannot afford to miss out on the global greenhouse benefits and the lo-cal environmental and societal benefits realizable through biofuels done right. But we also should not accept the unde-sirable impacts of biofuels done wrong.” It is particularly important in this con-text to understand two points: 1) land use and environmental risks associated with biofuels done wrong are avoidable rather than necessary consequences of biofuel production; and 2) there are risks to the environment and other im-portant interests associated with not pursuing biofuels. With respect to the latter, likely results of not pursuing bio-fuels include increased production of petroleum from shale oil and tar sands, diversion of green electricity away from coal displacement, and lost opportu-nities in rural economic development and energy security. Because of the de-arth of foreseeable alternatives to liquid fuels for heavy-duty vehicles, achieving a sustainable transportation sector wi-thout biofuels is substantially easier wi-th biofuels than without them.

n What do you expect from the Global Sustainable Bioenergy (GSB) project?

What contribution could researchers from Brazil, the Netherlands, South Africa and Malaysia offer?— There is currently great confusion and uncertainty about whether the world should look to bioenergy (bio-fuels, electricity) to play a prominent role in the future and, if so, what policy frameworks are needed to ensure a sus-tainable result. This is too bad, because it means that we are either distracted by an inflated view of the potential of bioenergy, or our ambivalence is caus-ing us to under-invest in bioenergy relative to its merits, or – in light of the diversity of bioenergy technolo-gies – both. At the most general level, I hope that the GSB project will bring clarity and consensus to these issues. A key focus of the project, and stage 2 in particular, is to actively look for future land use scenarios that are not continuous with current trends. Such scenarios are, by definition, improbable today. However, currently improbable futures are exactly what is needed, since we cannot expect to achieve a sustai-nable and secure world by continuing the practices that have resulted in the unsustainable and insecure present. Motivated and informed by analysis of the possibility of bioenergy-intensive futures carried out in stage 2, stage 3 of the GSB project will work back to

the present, addressing transition paths and policies, ethical and equity issues, and local-scale analysis. To achieve glo-bal viability, relevance and impact, it is essential that the GSB project involve analysts and reach decision makers from around the world.

n What contribution can the Brazilian researchers give to the project?— Brazilian participation in the Global Sustainable Bioenergy (GSB) project is important for several reasons. First, Brazil has a lot to teach the world in light of its trail-blazing role in the bio-fuels field, leading to a larger share of transport fuel coming from biomass in Brazil than in any other country. Second, in the course of informal dis-cussions associated with planning the GSB project, knowledgeable persons from Brazil have commented: “Con-cern over land availability is a distinc-tive concern to persons in the US and EU, but the world looks much different from the perspective of those of us in South America and Africa’ and ‘The issues of ultimate resource availability and domestic energy security are easily and often mistaken for one another. We need to develop better clarity on the relative importance of national and global concerns, and realities, with respect to biomass resource availabil-ity.’ Clearly, perspectives such as these are essential to include in order for the objectives of the GSB project to be realized. Finally, as a country that combines a large biofuels industry, a modern infrastructure and a sub-stantial poor population, Brazil is in a distinctive position to provide much-needed understanding and experience relative to the important matter of the impact of biofuels on the world’s poor and poverty alleviation efforts.

n Will the group analyze only second generation technologies or will it also evaluate the progress in first generation technologies? Which resources will be considered?— The project will take a feedstock-neutral, performance-based approach, considering first generation feedstocks and technologies, to the extent that they are responsive to project objectives. Decisions have not been made with respect to specific feedstocks.

Perhaps the

ambivalence

towards

bioenergy is

leading us to

invest less in its

potential than

its merits

recommend



n Will the group evaluate gas emissions and other problems related to the “land use changes”?— In contrast to many other studies, our primary emphasis will be on avoid-ing undesirable impacts associated with indirect land use change assuming mo-tivation to do so rather than quantify-ing such changes assuming the absence of such motivation.

n What are your expectations about investments and advances for green technologies, like cellulosic ethanol, in president Obama’s government? — As a result of both their insight and the times in which they find themselves, President Obama, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and others in the adminis-tration have given a higher priority to green technologies than prior admin-istrations. How this will be translated into action remains to be seen, but I am hopeful , based on the administration’s awareness of the importance of renew-able energy as well as on positive initial steps, such as US$ 2 billion in stimulus money devoted to supporting research on sustainable energy production and energy conservation. I believe that the US, and other developed countries have both a moral obligation and a pragmatic interest in modifying our resource use toward practices that would be viable if emulated by the developing world.

n What is your opinion about new approaches to obtain biofuels, like green gasoline?— In general, I believe that we need to consider all conversion technolo-

gies that are capable of producing ac-ceptable transportation fuels so long as they pass the ‘sniff test’ of potential for being cost-effective and scaleable. There clearly is interest from multiple parties, including multinational oil companies, in developing biofuels for both light duty and heavy duty vehi-cles. Indeed, I think a stronger long-term case can be made for the necessity of biofuels for the heavy duty sector as compared to personal vehicles. Com-patibility with the existing petroleum fuel infrastructure is an important consideration, although price and per-formance will be the deciding factors in the long run. Elaborating on this a bit, I think that a three-step approach makes sense with respect to new energy technologies. Step one is a ‘sniff test’ to determine whether the idea has poten-tial to be cost-effective and scaleable. We want technologies to pass the sniff test, because we need multiple paths to success. However, we should avoid pursuing ideas that do not have any realistic hope of making a significant impact. In my opinion, not all energy technologies that are currently being pursued by both governments and the private sector have passed this test. In step 2, innovation-focused activities should be supported pursuant to a very broad range of technologies that pass the sniff test. Like the successful ventu-re capitalist, we need a diversified por-tfolio such that, of ten investments, five might fail utterly, three might succeed marginally, and two would succeed su-ch that they pay for all the rest. Wrin-ging our hands over single options we

can afford to invest in is not the best way to ensure successful navigation of the sustainable resource transition. Following broad investment in inno-vation, the winners that are adopted on a large scale should be determined by consumers in response to perfor-mance and price dictated by both cost of production and also governmental policies to capture societal values that would not otherwise be represented by market forces.

n You once said that “It seems to me that when, in a few hundred years, people look back on our time, one of the very key things that they will judge us on is how well we did or did not deal with that transition. So I can’t think of anything more important to devote my professional life to.” Are we doing fine? Are you optimistic?— Well, I think our situation is still grim in absolute terms but the trend with respect to increased awareness and urgency is positive. Currently probable trajectories are not sustainable, and we must thus we must look beyond these trajectories to find viable futures. In this context, we need to realize that “busi-ness as usual,” although a term of art in scenario planning, is in fact a fan-tasy rather than a baseline. The first step toward realizing currently improbable futures is to show that they are possible. I am devoting my career to developing this understanding of possibility at the level of both technology as well as re-source and environmental issues. n

Miscanthus, the option chosen by the Americans for the production of cellulose ethanol

inr

a l

ill

e/S

. ca

do

ux

Fabrício Marques



Unraveling the webattacking undesirable veins and arteries could fight cancer and blindness

Maria Guimarães

Published in July 2010

[ phySiology ]

science

042-045_Cien_Para desenredar a trama_ingles2011.indd 42 11.04.11 19:11:50


Imagine veins and arteries that branch out, grow, split and spread. Normal during embryo development, in adulthood this formation and proliferation of blood vessels might be at the source of serious prob-lems, such as blindness and cancer. The biochemist Ricardo Giordano, from the Chemistry Institute at the University of São Paulo (USP), has been finding

ways of localizing and exterminating these blood vessels that sprout out of place and in an untimely fashion.

He has developed a peptide (protein fragment) that brings together highly desirable qualities in a potential pharmaceutical substance to fight these problems: the molecule is able to find blood vessels that should be cre-ated – and it does this circumventing the body’s defenses, which are unable to recognize the peptide as an intrusive substance to be fought. The molecule, known as D(LPR) because it is made out of leucine, proline and arginine, was the result of the work of a couple of Brazilian re-searchers that jointly coordinate a laboratory at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Institute in Texas, USA: the molecular biologist Renata Pasqualini and the oncologist physician and researcher Wadih Arap. During the course of 10 years of post-doctoral work in this lively environment full of equipment, minds and motivation to discover proteins that can have an impact on human diseases, Giordano used the ZIP cold concept developed by Renata and Arap: each type of cell, in each of the body’s tissues, has a unique molecular signature that can be recognized by



specific peptides, just like the number 05415-012 designates a two-block area in which postmen will find the offices of this journal.

And this worked, as shown in the article in the March issue of the jour-nal PNAS. To build trackers capable of overriding the radar of the immune system, Giordano used a conceptu-ally simple trick based on the two cat-egories of peptides, characterized for having certain chemical groups that go toward the right (D) or the left (L). “Nature chose to make proteins in the L form,” explains the biochemist. Therefore, he chose their mirror image, D. As this is not found in nature, the body’s immune system does not rec-ognize it. It is as if the peptides that go around the blood and the cells were all left-handed. The enzymes in charge of destroying impurities, which are akin to left-hand gloves, do not fit on right hands and therefore allow them to es-cape. Thus, D(LPR) goes undetected, yet it does not fail to fulfill the role of its mirror twin, RPL.

T he task, in this case, is to inhibit the production of the vascular en-dothelial growth factor (VEGF),

which is the substance mainly respon-sible for the proliferation of blood ves-sels. “However, one can’t totally inhibit the activity of this growth factor: the VEGF’s basal function is important in order to maintain the blood vessels,” Giordano states. He therefore looked for a right hand that might affect only the generation of new vessels, which was successfully achieved by D(LPR) on premature retinopathy, as the PNAS ar-ticle shows,

This is the cause of the musician Stevie Wonder’s visual handicap.Pre-mature retinopathy mainly affects those babies that had to spend some time in an incubator when they were born. As the oxygen pressure is very high (about 70%) inside this type of equipment, when the child is taken into the natural atmosphere, with about 20% of oxygen, the retina cells interpret this as a short-age of oxygen and produce more VEGF. The outcome is a vascular web in the retina density so that it obstructs vi-sion. Giordano showed that the peptide D(LPR) can find such a formation of undesirable blood vessels, recognizing

specific molecules in the membrane of the vascular cells. “Because it’s small, the peptide is cheaper to produce and the likelihood of causing side-effects is small, because the cell’s exterior is the most selective part; therefore, the action is localized.”

When it fits into the cell’s surface, D(LPR) interferes with the VEGF acti-vation chain, thus inhibiting exagger-ated vascular proliferation. In Gior-dano’s trials, the system worked on culture cells and on live mice. Because it is small, stable and water-soluble, the peptide developed by the biochemist has everything to be successful in the eyes of those who suffer from this type of eyesight problems, if it eventually does, indeed, result in a medical drug.

Besides retinopathy among premature babies, vascular proliferation in the ret-ina also causes wet macular degenera-tion, the main cause of partial loss of vision connected with aging. A D(LPR) drug might perhaps be applied in the form of eye drops, which would be a re-lief as compared to the current macular degeneration treatment, which consists of injections applied directly on the eye. Wadih Arap has already had to have an eye injection due to a detached retina and has warned that it is awful.

Tracking a bomb - In the laboratory that he created last year upon return-ing from Texas and being hired by USP, Giordano is looking for new VEGF re-gions in mice that could function as therapeutic targets. The benefits of this could extend way beyond eyesight illnesses. Vascular proliferation or an-giogenesis, stimulated by VEGG, is also what characterizes malignant tumors, which secrete angiogenesis factors to encourage the production of blood vessels that, in turn, feed the masses of cancerous cells. “If we manage to fight this process, which normally doesn’t occur in adults, we will have yet one more weapon to fight cancer,” predicts the researcher.

A ttacking VEGF is not a new idea. There are some drugs against these factors, based on antibodies, that

have been already approved and are in use, but, according to Giordano, they have proven to be less effective than scientists hoped and cause unpleasant side effects, a problem that he hopes to avoid with the targeted peptide that he has developed. “There are hundreds of labs worldwide trying to develop this type of medication; it’s a race.” For him, more important than getting there first is to develop a pharmaceutical prod-uct in Brazil. Not only to have more accessible drugs, but also to own the intellectual property for them, as this might aid further research.

One of Renata’s and Arap’s priorities now is to continue the tests to develop a drug based on the peptide developed by the collaborator from USP. “We want to establish in São Paulo a branch of the company to which the M.D. Anderson intellectual property is being licensed, in order to get partnerships and invest-

identification of new molecular markers in angiogenic retinas and rational design of new therapeutic agents for eye diseases with a vascular component -no. 2008/54806-8

TyPE

young Researcher

CoordInATor

Ricardo José giordano – iQ/uSp

InvESTmEnT

R$ 774,669.76

The ProjecT


ment to develop drugs,” the researcher tells us. One advantage of conducting the clinical trials here is testing the drug’s effectiveness on the Brazilian population, a validation that is indepen-dent from the effects of the drug on a larger number of patients. In the future, D(LPR) may also prove effective against tumor irrigating blood vessels, but the group has prioritized the study of eye diseases to avoid the huge competition around the war on cancer, whereas, in Renata’s words, “there’s a vacuum sur-rounding retina treatments.”

T he two researchers are in the right place. M. D. Anderson is a huge research center and hospital that

specializes in cancer. Here, one of the world’s benchmark reference centers where cancer treatment is concerned, and therefore a place that gets the toughest cases, the researchers have access to a large number of patients and huge scientifi c challenges. Besides doing research, Arap sees hospital pa-tients. In the Texan laboratory, the two scientists that graduated from USP have been using the ZIP code idea to fi ght cancer and obesity. They have de-veloped a prostate cancer drug that is in the initial stage of clinical trials on humans. “We have already treated six patients,” Renata told us. This initial stage, with only a few patients, after the drug has been tested on other spe-cies – generally mice, dogs or monkeys – is mandatory in order to assess the treatment’s possible toxic effects. By fi nding the drug in tumor biopsies,

the study validates the notion of us-ing ZIP codes against cancer and other diseases – a method that appears to be effective against fat cells, according to an article published by the group in 2004, in Nature Medicine.

The peptide fi nds the specifi c mo-lecular signature of the tumor or the fat and carries along with it a bomb – the klaklac molecule (see Pesquisa FAPESP nº 115). “It’s a corkscrew-shaped structure rich in negative charges, which attach to the membrane of mitochondria,” Giordano describes. Upon destroying the mitochondria, the cells’ power plant, klaklak specifi cally eliminates the undesirable cells, such as the blood vessels that irrigate tu-mors. In an earlier research stage, Ma-rina Cardó-Vila, a Catalan researcher, worked together with Giordano at the M. D. Anderson center, using similar techniques on different molecules. She showed, in an article also published in the March issue of PNAS, that an inverted peptide (D shaped) system, such as that produced by her colleague, effectively inhibits the growth of mam-mary tumors in female mice.

Breathing space – Besides pharma-ceutical potential, Giordano’s tracking peptide has also been shown to be an effective research tool. In collabora-tion with Rubin Tuder, a Lithuanian pathologist who graduated from USP and now teaches at the University of Colorado, he showed, in 2008, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, that the technique allows one to fi nd and

destroy blood vessels that maintain the structure of the lungs’ alveoli and cause lesions similar to those found in the lungs of smokers with emphysema. In this case, the peptides work as an anti-drug. The idea of this is to produce, in labs, mice with emphysema pulmonary characteristic, in order to study the dis-ease in greater depth.

Tuder is now looking into using the method to help to diagnose pulmonary hypertension, characterized by the pro-liferation of cells in the vessels of the lungs. This, in Brazil, is linked with schistosomiasis (see Pesquisa FAPESP nº 158). Today, in order to look inside blood vessels, one must insert a cath-eter through the groin. The researcher’s plan is to bind gold particles, for in-stance, with tracking peptides. Gold is recognized by CAT scanners, a far less invasive test than catheterization. “I’m trying to identify peptides that locate these lung lesions to aid diagnostic im-aging,” explains the pathologist. He has already found, in patients’ cell cultures, promising molecules for this role and in another two months, he hopes to have further details to relate.

Although the method seems promis-ing to treat major diseases, the research-ers do not expect it to be a panacea and they certainly are not planning to inject klaklac loaded peptides to attack undi-agnosed tumors preventively. “Cancer is a very diffi cult disease,” comments Renata. “Steps taken are small, the ben-efi ts, incremental; but if one doesn’t try, nothing will be achieved.” ■

» See infograph on our website:www.revistapesquisa.fapesp.br

Scientific articles

1. GIORDANO, R. J. et al. “From combina-torial peptide selection to drug prototype (I): Targeting the vascular endothelial gro-wth factor receptor pathway.” PNAS. v. 107, n. 11, p. 5.112-17. 16 Mar. 2010.2. CARDÓ-VILA, M. et al. “From combina-torial peptide selection to drug prototype (II): Targeting the epidermal growth factor receptor pathway.” PNAS. v. 107, n. 11, p. 5.118-23. 16 Mar. 2010.3. GIORDANO, R. J. et al. “Targeted induc-tion of lung endothelial cell apoptosis cau-ses emphysema-like changes in the mouse.” Journal of Biological Chemistry. v. 283, n. 43, p. 29.447-60. 24 Oct. 2008.

“If we could

fight

angiogenesis,

we’d have one

more weapon

against cancer,”

Giordano says



Out of control

Inflammation unleashed by sepsis damages the heart

Salvador Nogueiraillustrations Laura Daviña

Published in June 2010

[ ImmunOlOgy ]

046-049_Cien_Fora de controle_ingles2011.indd 46 11.04.11 19:14:24

Defending the organism from itself when it launches a desperate attack against its own cells is the main challenge facing doctors in cases of sepsis, a generalized infection caused by bacteria or a virus, accompanied by aggres-sive inflammation that attacks the organs it should protect. Assessing the health of patients

with sepsis, a problem that every year affects 18 million people worldwide, doctors in Brazil and from other countries have observed that the risk of dying increases a lot when the most damaged organ is the heart: the death rate reaches 80% if the heart muscle is affected and starts pumping oxygen-rich blood less efficiently to the rest of the body, compared to 20% when there is no heart damage.

Now researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Ribeirão Preto have gone a step further. Analyzing the hearts of people and animals that died from sepsis, the team, coordinated by pathologist Marcos Rossi and by pharmacologist Fernando Cunha, has characterized the type of damage that causes sepsis-related inflamma-tion in cardiac cells. More importantly, it also found a promising way to protect the heart and thus gain time for the body to regain control of the situation.

The main advance of the group from Ribeirão Preto was to see what happens with the heart cells on a mo-lecular scale. In studies with laboratory animals the researchers discovered that molecules of nitric oxide released in the inflammation damaged cell walls making them more permeable to calcium. The consequence of this alteration is an overdose of this particular chemical element that leads to cell death – if the number of cells affected is very large, it reduces the capacity of the heart to pump blood. Published in March 2010 in the scientific journal Shock, this finding is significant because it sug-gests ways of slowing down the process of wear and tear in the heart. There are drugs on the market that block the absorption of calcium and that are used to control blood pressure and to regulate the heartbeat.

Currently, Cunha and Rossi’s group, in partnership with researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, are evaluating if these drugs really help keep the heart functioning when admin-istered during sepsis. The study is still ongoing, but preliminary results are fairly expressive. In one of the experiments the researchers administered compounds that prevent the absorption of calcium – the so-called calcium channel blockers – to mice that had suffered a perforation of the intestines and had developed a generalized infection. Then, they compared what hap-pened with a group of animals with untreated sepsis and with a group of healthy rodents.


48 n SpecIal ISSue may 2009 / dec 2010 n PESQUISA FAPESP

The calcium channel blockers pro-vided some degree of survival to the sick mice. Without the medication most of the animals with sepsis died in less than 24 hours. When treated, however, all survived the first day. “The death rate of animals with sepsis that received the calcium blocker was similar to that of mice in the control group that had no infection,” explains Rossi. “We’re en-thusiastic about the results.”

M any more tests are still needed – and possibly years of work – to prove whether this strategy is ef-

ficient and can be adopted safely on a daily basis in hospitals. However, one fact makes the researchers optimistic: it will be simpler to carry out tests on humans, since calcium channel block-ers are already used to treat heart prob-lems. Rossi remembers, however, that it is premature to suppose that every-thing is going to work out all right, because the circumstances to which the animals were subjected are quite different from those involving patients in hospitals.

As a pathologist, Rossi performed many autopsies on patients who had died from sepsis and found that almost always their hearts had undergone radi-cal changes. “The heart of a patient with sepsis was different, somewhat flaccid, indicating that during its life it had had functioning problems,” he says. Analysis of material obtained from autopsies in fact indicated morphological changes in the cardiac muscle. Presented in Shock in 2007, these changes were like a picture of the final moment.

In order to know how sepsis-asso-ciated heart damage begins and evolves the researchers had to resort to an ex-perimental model of the problem – they chose to work with mice, because the organism of these rodents functions in a similar way to that of humans. By means of an incision in the animal’s in-testine bacteria from the digestive tract reach the thoracic cavity and cause a generalized infection.

Right from the start the research-ers noted an important change in the structure of the heart of the animals that developed sepsis: there was a sig-nificant reduction in the number of proteins responsible for keeping the heart cells strongly united. As a result, these cells, known as cardiomyocytes, separated from each other, Rossi ob-served when analyzing the tissue under an electronic microscope. It was as if, at the cell level, the heart muscle had been ‘dismantled’.

Even if this transformation, which was described in 2007 in Critical Care Medicine, were to occur at the micro-scopic level, the ‘dismantling’ produced easily observable consequences. For the heart to beat regularly, its cells need to be firmly attached to one another in such a way that they contract or relax in harmony. With the cells disconnected the heart rhythm became irregular and the heart quickly stopped.

More sophisticated chemical ana-lyses, using a technique (immune-fluo-rescence) that makes certain proteins shine when present in a sample, rein-forced the suspicion that cardiac re-

1. Mediators involved in the genesis of pain and the migration of leucocytes and in sepsis – nº 2007/51247-5 2. Sepsis and septic shock: functional and morphological alterations in the heart: experimental study in mice – nº 2004/14578-53. In vitro assessment of the expression of dystrophin in cardiomyocytes submitted to different stimuli – nº 2009/53544-2

tyPE

1 and 2. Thematic project3. Regular aid for Research project

CoordInAtorS

1 and 2. Sergio Henrique Ferreira – uSp/Rp3. marcos antonio Rossi – uSp/Rp

InvEStmEnt

R$ 2,303,227.35R$ 153,565.78R$ 310,920.30

The projecTs


PESQUISA FAPESP n SpecIal ISSue may 2009 / dec 2010 n 49

Inflammatory

molecules make

the membrane

of heart cells

more permeable

to calcium,

leading to an

overdose and

cell death

Scientific articles

1. ROSSI, M.A. et al. Myocardial structural changes in long-term human sepsis/septic shock may be responsible for cardiac dys-function. Shock. v. 27 (1), p. 1-18. Jan. 2007.2. CELES, M. R. et al. Disruption of sarco-lemmal dystrophin and beta-dystroglycan may be a potential mechanism for myocar-dial dysfunction in severe sepsis. Laboratory Investigation. v. 90, p. 531-42. Feb. 2010.

fections,” said Li. “In essence, we show that instead of attacking the pathogen, we can target the host to help it fight the infection.”

Adequate control of sepsis, how-ever, should demand more of an ac-tion strategy. In a recent study made in partnership with researchers from the University of Glasgow, in Scotland, pharmacologist José Carlos Alves Filho, from Cunha’s team, gave mice with sep-sis a protein, which is naturally pro-duced by cells in the defense system, which acts as a chemical communicator of anti-inflammatory action: interleu-kin 33 or IL-33. Besides reducing in-flammation in the organism without eliminating it in the original center of infection, this protein stimulated the migration of a specific type of defense cell – neutrophils – which eliminate bacteria efficiently.

The results of this experimental therapy were clear. Only 20% of the ro-dents treated with IL-33 died of sepsis, while the mortality rate in the group that received an innocuous compound

was 80%. In the article in which they presented these data in Nature Medi-cine on May 16, the researchers suggest that the effect the IL-33 produced in mice is likely to be also observed in hu-mans, since neutrophils are less active in people who develop more serious cases of sepsis.

L ess than a month before, another member of Cunha and de Rossi’s team, pharmacologist Fernando

Spiller, had shown that the use of hy-drogen sulfide, or hydrosulfuric acid (H2S), the gas responsible for the stench of rotten eggs, induces a migration of neutrophils and another defense cell group, the leucytes, to the initial infec-tion area (see Pesquisa FAPESP nº 146). This cellular reinforcement eliminated the bacteria and reduced the mortal-ity rate among the mice receiving the compound to 13%, compared to nearly 80% among those not treated, accord-ing to an article published in American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Despite being encouraging these advances only represent the initial step on a long journey towards improving the control of sepsis, a public health problem that is especially serious in developing countries, where resources are scarcer. A survey done years ago by the Latin American Institute for Sepsis Studies showed that of the R$ 41 billion spent in 2003 on intensive therapy by the Brazilian health system, more than R$ 17 billion was used to treat 400,000 patients with sepsis, of which 227,000 died. n

structuring occurred at the molecular level, but not inside cells. The problem was outside, in the so-called extracel-lular environment. The group noted that a protein structure, the dystrophin-glycoprotein complex (DGC), which serves as support and shapes the cells, seemed to dissolve in the hearts of animal victims of sepsis, the researchers from Ribeirão Preto revealed in an ar-ticle published in Laboratory Investiga-tion in April 2010.

If this heart damage is indeed caused by the inflammation associated with sepsis, the solution for increasing the survival rate of those who develop the most serious forms might be in control-ling the inflammation and the damage caused by it. According to the research-ers from Ribeirão Preto, this would be an important transformation in the way of dealing with the problem, since attempts are generally only made to fight the infectious agents with antibi-otics and antiviral drugs. “The changes identified are therapeutic targets, whose modulation may reduce morbidity and mortality in sepsis,” says Rossi.

T hey are not the only ones who think so. At the University of Utah, in the United States, the group led by car-

diologist Dean Li, of which Brazilian physician, Fernando Augusto Bozza, from the Evandro Chagas Institute of Clinical Research, in Rio de Janeiro forms part, tried to control inflamma-tory reactions resulting from sepsis or bird flu in an unusual way. Research-ers gave the mice a compound that prevented the chemical communica-tors that feed the inflammation from leaving the bloodstream and reaching the tissue. In this way they managed to reduce the level of damage to the organism of the rodents, according to an article published in Science Trans-lational Medicine on March 17. “By blocking the harmful effects of the in-flammation in the host and stabilizing the blood vessels, we identified a totally different strategy for treating these in-



Jaguar: risk of having to move to less suitable areas

050-055_Cien_natureza_ingles2011.indd 50 11.04.11 19:17:54


mathematical models help predict the effects of global warming in Brazil

research groups using environmental models. For the environmentalist from UFG, it is useless choosing a forest area to be protected if it has little chance of containing the biological diversity that the country wants to maintain in the future. Such is the case with the jaguar (Panthera onca), the theme of the PhD of Natália Torres, whose thesis advisor was Diniz-Filho.

From the 1,053 records of jaguars on the database of the Jaguar Institute, based on rainfall and temperature parameters, Nátalia has defined the ideal weather conditions for jaguars. Although they can live in very varied environments – ranging from the thick, damp and dark vegetation in the heart of the Amazon Region to the arid ex-panses of the Caatinga scrubland and thorn forests – studies involving pho-tographic traps and monitoring these big cats reveal that they prefer more enclosed areas near water, with tem-peratures between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius (°C) and rainfall most of the year. The model, which was produced based on the current distribution of jaguars and then applied to weather conditions from the past, passed its first test. The distribution found in this as-sessment of a past forecast coincides with the historical data – from when panthers covered almost all of Brazil, an e

du

ar

do

ce

Sa

r

A hundred years from now cli-mate change may cause ma-jor alterations in the natural landscape and in Brazilian agriculture. It’s possible that the jaguar, the largest feline in the Americas, will find no

suitable living areas in the Amazon. In turn, the Cerrado [savannah] may dis-appear once and for all from the west of the State of São Paulo and losses in the soybean crop in Brazil run the risk of reaching 40%, i.e., an annual loss of R$ 4.3 billion. These are just some of the estimates of researchers who are con-cerned with climate change, as forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-mate Change (IPCC). What is enabling environmentalists and agronomists to take their eyes off the present and look at the future are mathematical models that try to sum up, in a few parameters, the essential environmental conditions for each species and to simulate what might happen to the climate in differ-ent scenarios depending on the concen-tration of gas in the atmosphere.

“Current conservation units may not serve to preserve species,” warns Paulo De Marco Júnior, of the Federal University of Goiás (UFG). Along with José Alexandre Diniz-Filho he heads the Laboratory of Theoretical Ecology and Synthesis, one of the main Brazilian

The future of nature and agriculture

Maria Guimarães

Published in October 2009

[ environment ]



area twice as large as today, and loom-ing large in popular imagination.

Natalia’s data were published in late 2008 in Cat News and predict that during the course of the next 100 years there will be a large reduction of areas suitable for jaguars. In the Amazon Region, for example, these ideal zones may be restricted to the so-called arc of deforestation, which includes the north of the State of Mato Grosso and the south of the State of Pará, where there is greater pressure for planting soybeans and sugar cane. The challenge now is to find areas that can be preserved and that are capable of sustaining popula-tions of these large predators.

“It’s important to point out that the model indicates the occurrence potential of this species, not necessarily where it will be found,” Natália reminds us. She is going to add more detailed information to the climate model, such as the size of the patches of vegetation. With this she intends to indicate priority areas for preserving the jaguar. In the south of the Amazon, one promising area is along the Araguaia River, the source of which lies on the border between Mato Grosso and Goiás and which flows north into the Tocantins River, where the States of Ma-ranhão, Pará and Tocantins meet. “There are still very well preserved areas there,” says Natália, “and it’s an important cor-ridor for the jaguar because it connects the Amazon Region and the Cerrado.” It also coincides with part of the area that is expected to continue being ideal for it in the future, a forecast that may improve with more detailed analy-ses. Climatologist Carlos Nobre, from the National Space Research Institute (Inpe), is surprised that the model does not highlight the permanence of jaguars in the west of the Amazon. “All the mod-els forecast that there will be dense and humid forests there,” he says.

The researcher is not overlooking the fact that jaguars can live in very dif-ferent environments and that, therefore, a reduction in ideal areas does not nec-essarily mean the end of these big cats.

“Climate change is unlikely to affect the general distribution,” she reflects, “but, if the quality of the environment has an effect on the abundance of the animals, it may be worrying for the long-term persistence of populations.” She is now trying to gather information to suggest areas for preservation, which must take into account the size of remaining areas – large predators need a lot of space to get sufficient resources.

Amphibians, which are more sensi-tive to environmental conditions and less mobile, are good indi-

cators of what happens with forests. “They depend on the temperature and humidity of their surroundings and that’s why they are restricted to their particular environment,” says João Gio-vanelli, from Paulista State University (Unesp) in Rio Claro, who used envi-ronmental models to investigate future distributions of amphibians from the Atlantic Rainforest – toads restricted to the tops of mountains and a frog with more flexible preferences.

Considering a scenario for 2100 with double the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) than there was in the pre-industrial period (one of the pos-sibilities forecast by other research-ers), some species of small toads of the genus Brachycephalus, which are the size of a person’s thumbnail, may disappear. They only live in the humid areas of the Mata Atlantica rain for-est at a high altitude, where the rise in temperature may alter the cloud system and eliminate a large part of the for-ests, which would start growing dozens or hundreds of meters higher up the mountains – provided they find suit-able conditions. Even if this happens, this migration process of the forest will take a long time and the minute toads, which look like drops of gold on the leaves that form a carpet on the forest floor, may have nowhere to wait. So, Brachycephalus may lose more than half its distribution and various species may become extinct, accord-

ing to a chapter written by the Unesp group, which includes zoologist Célio Haddad, for the book A biologia e as mudanças climáticas no Brasil [Biology and climate change in Brazil], edited by Marcos Buckeridge, of the University of São Paulo, and published last year by the RiMa publishing house.

Giovanelli also shows that not all species will come out of this as losers. The tree frog, Hypsiboas bischoffi, for example, may benefit from fewer cold spells in some areas of Rio Grande do Sul, leading to a growth of 57% in its distribution.

Mobile environments – Environmen-tal modeling may help forecast the des-tiny of entire ecosystems. That is what Carlos Nobre’s group is doing. “We de-fine the biome by a set of climate pa-rameters, which include soil humidity, temperatures, the evapotranspiration of plants and resistance to fire, among other things,” explains the climatolo-gist. The group estimates, for example, that at the end of this century Uruguay, which today is very cold, will be able to support Atlantic rainforests. The re-sults, published in 2007 in Geophysical Research Letters, also indicate that in certain regions of the Amazon Region only plants adapted to savannah condi-tions will survive. “But the model does not allow us to talk about biome migra-tion, which is a very complex and slow process,” he advises.

In her PhD, tutored by Giselda Durigan, from the State of São Paulo Forest Institute, botanist Marinez Siqueira, from the Rio de Janeiro Bo-tanical Garden, concentrated on the ef-fect of climate change on trees from the Cerrado, which is the typical vegetation of Central Brazil. One outcome of this work was the article published in 2003 in Biota Neotropica, in which Marinez modeled the distribution of 162 spe-cies of trees and forecast that in 50 years time there will be a drastic reduction in the area occupied by most of them. The best conditions for the Cerrado are

It is useless to protect an area of forest if it has few chances in the future

of harboring the biological diversity that we would like to keep



likely to be displaced to the south of the region currently occupied by this ecosystem, coming close to the border between the states of São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul.

Marinez is now detailing what is likely to happen in São Paulo, a panel presentation she gave at the Interna-tional Conference on Biodiversity IT, held in London this year. In projections for 2020 and 2080, she shows that the ideal climate conditions for the Cer-rado are likely to move to the east of the state, close to the coastal range of hills – today the domain of the Mata Atlântica rainforest. “But this does not mean that the Cerrado is going to in-vade Mata Atlântica areas.”

The fact is that, at the regional and local level, the distribution of species is not only defined by the climate. “Temperature and rainfall alone do not determine the occurrence of Cer-rado species,” says the researcher from the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden. The species that manage to survive in a certain region are partly determined by the soil’s capacity to retain water – a

category of data not taken into account in the models she used. Changing this will be the next step.

M ore complete models will help imagine the destiny of birds from the Cerrado. Environmen-

talist Miguel Ângelo Marini, from the University of Brasília (UnB), led a study that estimated where the 26 species will be in 2030, 2065 and 2099. According to the results, published in June on the Conservation Biology website, most of these birds are likely to move to the southeast by an average of 200 km – precisely the country’s most urban region. In the State of São Paulo, for example, it is estimated that less than 1% of the original Cerrado remains. “It’s no use if the climate is good for birds if the Cerrado vegetation takes a long time to arrive,” says Marini, who estimates a reduction in areas occupied by all the species he studied, which may make the birds whose distribution is already restricted even rarer. By ana-lyzing the conserved areas, in an article accepted by Biological Conservation, he

ra

fae

l o

liv

eir

a

showed that birds from the Cerrado are already poorly protected today – and in the future they will be even less protect-ed. “We’re identifying possible locations for new conservation units in regions of Minas Gerais where there is an overlap between today’s climate and the climate 50 years ahead.”

Planning preservation with an eye to the future seems essential – perhaps the areas defined as priority in the State of São Paulo, during a workshop of specialists in 2007, may not have the climate necessary for accommodating the Cerrado in 2080, according to Mari-nez’s projections. “The Cerrado areas that already existed in the east of the state are beginning to take on a greater importance,” she says. Such is the case of the Cerrado enclaves in the Paraíba Val-ley in the northern part of the State of São Paulo, between the Mar and Man-tiqueira ranges of hills, a region that has already been heavily altered by hu-man activity and where few fragments of natural vegetation remain. Even so, Marinez believes that it is worth estab-lishing areas of preservation there.

Cerrado savanna: increasingly less suitable climate in the central region

050-055_Cien_natureza_ingles2011.indd 53 4/12/11 12:51:08 PM


Calculated risk – The same principles may help plan the planting of the main Brazilian crops. This is just what Em-brapa, the Brazilian Company of Agricultural and Livestock Farming Research, has done in a partnership with the State Uni-versity of Campinas (Unicamp) and Inpe, with support from the British Embassy. According to a publication released last year and coordinated by agronomist Hilton Silveira Pinto, from Uni-camp, and by agricultural engi-neer Eduardo Assad, from Em-brapa, if nothing is done global warming may be responsible by 2020 for losses of R$ 7.4 billion a year in grain harvests. By 2070, this figure could reach R$ 14 bil-lion a year. The report analyzed where the ideal conditions for Brazil’s nine most important crops will be located. These crops – cotton, rice, coffee, sugar cane, beans, sunflowers, cassava, corn and soybeans – account for 86% of the country’s planted area.

The group considered two scenarios. The pessimistic one estimates a temper-ature rise of 2°C to 5.4°C by 2100, which is plausible if nothing is done to reduce emissions. The more optimistic scenario foresees a temperature rise of 1.4°C to 3.8°C by 2100, if human population growth stabilizes, natural resources are preserved and greenhouse gas emission are reduced. “If Brazil’s inaction remains the same,” Hilton Pinto states provoca-tively, “this is what the losses will be.” Losses in soybean production, the crop that is likely to suffer the most, may ex-ceed R$ 7 billion a year by 2070, with the loss of areas that can be cultivated, mainly in the south and in the north-eastern Cerrado region. At less than 10°C, plants hardly grow at all and from 40°C they do not flower normally and tend to lose their beans. Furthermore, during germination and the period be-tween flowering and grain production, soybeans need a lot of water.

Changes are already happening. “Coffee in the west of São Paulo has moved to the northeast of the state, to the region of Mogi,” says Hilton Pinto. In conversations with coffee growers he discovered that from 1995 until today

flowering has been more and more com-promised by heat waves in normally not very hot months, like September. This causes the flowers to abort. But the dam-age is not generalized. “Sugar cane likes high temperatures and higher levels of CO2,” he recalls. According to his calcu-lations, even if nothing is done to adapt this crop to the new conditions, the area suitable for its production may increase by about 150% as early as 2020.

T he group is now estimating how much Brazil will need to invest in the production of plants adapta-

ble to the new conditions. According to the engineer from Unicamp, each new cultivar costs R$ 1 million a year. The data are in a new publication, to be launched this month, that focuses on mitigation and adaptation. As it takes at least ten years to develop a new variety, the cost will rise to R$ 10 million for each of them.

The projections may have a direct application in practice through Climate Risk Zoning, which estimates the risk of planting each crop for each municipa-lity in the country – a success probabi-lity of at least 80% qualifies the farmer for financing. It is a system that is worth R$ 19 billion in financing for family farming,” comments the researcher.

Though the production of sunflow-ers in Brazil is small, they are among the plants with the greatest planting po-tential, almost 4.4 million square kilo-meters – an area that is likely to shrink by up to 18% by 2070, mainly in the northeastern Agreste area of dry, stony soil and Cerrado regions. Over and above climate change, another threat to this crop is the caterpillar of the Chlo-syne lacinia butterfly that eats the leaves and reduces productivity by as much as 80%. This insect, known in Brazil as the sunflower pest, was the theme of work by biologist Juliana Fortes, from the Federal University of Viçosa, in a partnership with De Marco. In the work, a Master’s Degree dissertation, under the guidance of Evaldo Vilela, the researcher adopted a scenario that forecasts a temperature rise of 2.6°C over the next 100 years. Juliana realized that producing a model taking into ac-count the species as a whole might lead to errors in the forecast distribution, because in the case of these butterflies each subspecies has different environ-mental needs – and only C. lacinia saundersii, the commonest in Brazil, is known as the sunflower pest.

If climate change comes true, it might be good news for the sunflower: the overlap between the caterpillar and

Sunflower: sufficient area to escape from an inhospitable climate and from pests

ed

ua

rd

o c

eS

ar



Scientific articles

1. MARINI, M.A. et al. “Predicted climate-driven distribution changes and forecast conservation conflicts in a neotropical savanna.” Conservation Biology. 2009.2. SALAZAR, L. F. et al. “Climate change consequences on the biome distribution in tropical South America.” Geophysical Research Letters. v. 34. 2007. 3. SIQUEIRA, M. F. de; PETERSON, A. T. “Consequences of global climate change for geographic distributions of Cerrado tree spe-cies.” Biota Neotropica. v. 3, n. 2. 2003.4. TORRES, N. M. et al. “Jaguar distribution in Brazil: past, present and future.” Cat News. Autumn 2008.

areas suitable for planting the yellow flowers that are rich in oil is likely to shrink. But the dissertation, which was accepted this year, also warns: if the C. lacinia lacinia subspecies, which is typical of Central America, were to be introduced into Brazil, it could take advantage of the climate change and adapt to a large part of the center and northeast of the country. “If this were to happen, instead of a future area reduc-tion, the possible hybridization of the lacinia subspecies with might mean an increase in the species’ area in Brazil,” imagines Juliana, fearing greater dam-age for the sunflower.

Future under construction – The use of models is becoming increasingly dis-seminated and may be an essential tool for facing up to climate change, but as knowledge grows they are still being improved. There are dozens of differ-ent models and each one attributes a different weight to the various climate variables. What many researchers do is apply several of these models and use their points in common to produce future distribution maps. “Our work is to supply projections of the future climate,” says climatologist José Anto-nio Marengo, coordinator of the cli-mate change group at the Terrestrial System Science Center at Inpe. There, an interdisciplinary team is constantly improving the models, inserting more

data and improving the mathematical representation of the complex processes that happen in nature. “The models are mathematical tools and all models have their uncertainties.” For Marengo, one must take this uncertainty into account in order to find out where the safest pro-jections lie – including looking for ways to improve the model where it does not function. His team uses data and infor-mation – both Brazilian and interna-tional – to develop regional models that supply more details about the climate of Brazil and South America. However, it has not been possible, to date, to reach the desired level of detail for the country as a whole. “The reliability of the pro-jections tends to be relatively smaller in the Midwest and Southeast, because some continental zone processes have not been properly represented in the models yet,” he says. “And the Pantanal poses even greater difficulties, because the models do not handle emissions and the hydrological representation of a swamp that size very well.”

Marengo say that Inpe works with models that he knows in detail, but it is difficult to obtain top quality climate data for certain regions covering a long time span, as required for studying cli-mate extremes. “If we had finer data-bases, we could carry out more detailed analyses – on the scale of a basin in the State of São Paulo, for example,” says De Marco. Furthermore, one must be

conversant with the various models in depth. “It’s no good just pressing the button and looking at the output,” says Giovanelli. “One must understand how the model functions and the database available on the species to know if they’re going to be compatible with the question we asked.”

A nother difficulty that the models face is environmental: the places where a species exists are not nec-

essarily the only ones where they could exist. Just as Marinez Siqueira cannot be sure that the Cerrado will invade the areas of Atlantic rainforest, so the jaguars may manage to live well in less favorable areas and the mountain toads will perhaps not suffer from climate change as much as expected – according to Haddad, there are already records of amphibians typical of the Cerrado be-ing found in the Atlantic rainforest. For Paulo De Marco, this is not a problem as such. “We make projections for the future using species for which we have sufficient data to allow us to represent their distribution and their ecology,” he states. “Furthermore, the current work shows that the current environmental niche of a species offers a good esti-mate of its future niche,” under normal circumstances. The environmentalist from Goiás explains that these invading species, which suddenly change habitat, quickly adapt to their new conditions.

The knowledge derived from these projections makes the tools more reliable to deal with the environmental changes caused by man, which also include the heightened effects of deforestation, as the article that follows will show. n

Cigarra-do-campo cicada: migration to the southeast and less suitable habitat

ch

ar

le

S d

uc

a/v

ila

ve

lh

a u

niv

er

Sit

y c

en

te

r



An ant visits the inflorescence of the para-tudo-do-campo or perpétua (Gomphrena macrocephala)

056-059_Cien_Quimica no ar_ingles2011.indd 56 11.04.11 19:20:40


Chemistry in the air

Volatile compounds control the interaction between vegetables and insects

The abacaxizeiro-do-cerrado [the Cerrado savanna pineapple plant] is one of the few red spots in the midst of the dried-out grayness of the trees on a savanna reservation surrounded by sugar cane and eucalyptus plantations on an estate in Pratânia, in central São Paulo State. The pale-blue flow-ers and the leaves of this pineapple plant (Ananas ananassoides) release volatile compounds that attract hummingbirds, bees and butterflies in their quest for nectar or pollen. “The pineapple maintains a closer rela-

tionship with the hummingbirds, but this doesn’t mean that other animals don’t visit it,” says biologist Juliana Stahl, who is heading a study under the guidance of Sílvia Rodrigues Machado and Elza Guimarães, both of them professors from Paulista State University (Unesp) at Botucatu. The aromas that permeate the air in woods, plantations or gardens express ongoing battles for survival and show that plants are definitely not passive. After millions of years of natural selection, the only ones to grow are those that can interact with animals and other plants, releasing natural compounds that enable defense, or establish agreements that often involve mutual advantage.

“Plants ‘manipulate’ their visitors,” explains Sílvia. Her group’s research is detailing why certain plants attract specific groups of pollinators. They are also explaining the formation of chemical compounds that are of interest to humans. Tatiane Rodrigues, one of the biologists in Sílvia’s team, found that the elongated and rounded secreting structures of the stalk and the root of the copaíba tree produce an oil that people use to treat inflammation, wounds and mycoses, and to treat plants against insects. “Even plants that have just germinated have oil-secreting cells that protect them from predators,” she says. Her colleague Shel-ley Favorito has identified five types of glands on the surface of the leaves of

ed

uA

rd

o c

es

Ar

[ ecology ]

Carlos Fioravanti,from Pratânia

Published in December 2009



Lippia stachyoides; they produce a strong smelling oil that waterproofs the leaves and repels predators.

Learning more about this interaction helps to define the species of plants and animals that are more important for the continuity of natural environments. The Croton glandulosus, a one-meter bush that grows in abandoned pieces of land, is one of them. Lucia Maria Paleari, a researcher from Unesp in Botucatu does not cease to be amazed at the diversity of millimetric bees, aphids, flies, butterflies, beetles and ants that satiate themselves with the secretions of secreting struc-tures in roots, stalks, leaves and flow-ers. One of the visitors is the jataí bee (Teragonisca angustula), which feeds on the nectar of the croton flowers, produc-ing honey that can cost as much as R$ 120 a liter. For Lucia, this bush, which does not compete for light and nutrients with farmable plants, should be kept in agricultural areas rather than being eliminated as a negligible weed, its usual fate. “The croton feeds insects that could work as natural enemies of agricultural pests,” she says.

Opportunity – Brazil’s wealth of plants and animals is driving researchers from Brazil and the USA to interact. One of the centers to house international col-laborations is the National Institute of Science and Technology - Center of Energy, Environment and Biodi-versity, coordinated by José Rodrigues

and Tetsuo Yamane, headquartered at the University of the State of Amazo-nas (UEA), in Manaus. At the institute’s inauguration, in April, Jerrold Mein-wald, one of the pioneers in this area, stressed Brazil’s potential in this field in a talk. “The Amazon Region, with its broad diversity that has been studied very little, offers a unique research op-portunity,” he notes. “If Brazil were to consistently invest in this area it might be able to produce world-class research and an institute capable of attracting and training scientific leaders.”

One of the members in this group, which is beginning to take shape, is Brazilian biologist Consuelo de Moraes, a researcher from Pennsylvania State University, who showed that messages

from plants may have specific address-ees. “Many researchers did not believe in the specificity of the interactions of plants with other species,” she says. As explained in detail in her article pub-lished in 1998 in Nature, the Cardiochil-es nigriceps wasp distinguished between the composition of compounds released by tobacco, cotton and corn attacked by caterpillars of the species Heliothis virescens and Helicoverpa subflexa – and only looks for plants with caterpillars of the first species.

Now working on her doctorate, Clívia Possobom lent strength to the hypothesis of specific messages when she found that a creeper from the Cer-rado savanna, the Diplopterys pubipeta-la, maintains quite a close relationship with bees from the Centridini tribe. Glands at the base of the flower pro-duce an oil that only seems to be of use to the bees: they use it to line their nests and as food for their larvae. “I know of no other function of this oil, which only appears when the bee scrapes the gland,” says Clívia. According to her, this oil “may be a kind of reward for the pollinators that the Diplopterys depend on, because the plant is auto-incompatible” (the grains of pollen of a given plant, even if produced by a her-maphroditic flower, can only germinate if they reach the feminine structure of the flower of a different plant from the same species). “There is an exchange at play, a co-evolution,” comments Sílvia. “The Dyplopteris and the bees depend on each other.”

Substances released by the plants may guide other plants, though the latter may not always be welcome. In an issue of Science from 2006, Justin Runyon, Mark Mescher and Consuelo showed that the cipó-chumbo (five-angled dodder) or Cuscuta pentagona, through volatile compounds, selects hosts, growing in their direction. It is a parasite of tomato, alfalfa, potato, soy and onion plants, but not of wheat, which releases compounds that repel it. “After germinating, Cuscuta has 10 days in which to find a host plant,” says Consuelo. “Because it lacks roots and leaves, if it doesn’t find one, it dies.” Another type of parasitic plant, the Cuscuta racemosa, lives in the Mata Atlântica forest and should have simi-lar behavior. We are not dealing with an

cl

íVia

po

SS

ob

om

/el

za

gu

ima

rã

eS

/uN

eS

p

A bee reaches Diplopterys pubipetala in search of oil

The role of the glandular structure of the Croton glandulosus in tritrophic interactions

tyPE

regular research project aid

COOrdInAtOr

Sílvia machado – unesp

InvEStmEnt

r$ 183,752.02 (FapeSp)

The projeCT



isolated example here, because at least 4,500 species of plants with flowers, or 1% of the total, are parasites that live off the water and nutrients extracted from other plants.

“Chemical signaling is nature’s dominant means of communication,” says Meinwald. The number of types of interactions is practically unlimited. To com-plicate matters further, flowers and leaves may pro-duce different types of compounds as they grow. In 2006, Sílvia, Elza and Elisa Gregório, from Unesp in Botucatu, showed that the flowers of a Cerrado savan-na bush, the Zeyheria montana, produced alkaloids, which repel visitors, during their early development, and terpenes, which attracts them, when the grains of pollen are ready to fertilize other flowers.

message for other leaves – At least 1,000 species of plants resort to chemical language, according to a study by Christopher Frost, from Consuelo’s team, in Plant Physiology. The plants release at least three types of compounds that give woods their typical smell. Identified by the abbreviations z3HAL, z3HOL and z3HAC, they trigger a response to parasites, inducing the release of substances with a nasty taste. In 2008, in New Phytologist, Consuelo and her group described the biochemical reactions through which one of these substances, z3HAC, released by leaves that are being devoured by insects, activates the production of compounds that strengthen the defense of leaves that are still intact in a type of poplar, a cold-weather tree. “If a leaf is being attacked, the neighboring leaf prepares to defend itself when it perceives the vola-tile compounds,” says Consuelo. “The leaves that are not connected amongst themselves communicate through these compounds.”

Lucia Paleari decided to present these interactions in a more exciting manner and proposed an exhibition about the croton to a group of students from Unesp in Botucatu, last November. According to her, two thousand children, youths and teachers from an el-ementary school and high school in Botucatu became acquainted with the plant and were amazed at the immense models and expanded photos of insects and their heads on show at the school’s sports gym. “They asked how insects could have so many structures on their head and how could a plant that they referred to as a weed be so interesting and capable of attracting so many different little animals,” she recalls. “We are learning to look at such things more slowly.” n

ed

ua

rd

o c

eS

ar

Scientific articles

1. FROST, C. J. et al. “Plant defense priming against herbivo-res: getting ready for a different battle.” Plant Physiology. v. 146. p. 818-24. 2008.2. RODRIGUES, T. M.; Machado, S. R. “Developmental and structural features of secretory canals in root and shoot wood of Copaifera langsdorffii Desf. (Leguminosae Caesalpinioideae).” Trees. v. 23 (5). p. 1013-18. 2009.

Insects copulate under the fluff of the paineirinha-do-cerrado (Eriotheca gracilipes)



Living lights

In the cartoon movie A Bug’s Life all the inner lighting for the ants’ nest comes from luminous mushrooms. “There’s a large de-gree of poetic license in the work,” comments Cassius Stevani, from the Chemistry Institute of the

University of São Paulo (USP), “but in essence it’s true.” There really are mushrooms that emit light, or are bio-luminescent, and many ants grow fun-gi in their nests – but not of this type. Stevani is putting a lot of effort into understanding the chemical mecha-nism that generates this luminosity and what its function in the organism is. On the way, he has already discov-ered a practical use: detecting metal contamination in the soil.

It only took 5 years for Stevani and his colleagues to discover 12 species of luminescent fungi in Bra-zil. Among them are the Amazonian Mycena lacrimans, found by Ricardo Braga-Neto from the National Re-

[ biochemiStry ]

Published in February 2010

search Institute of the Amazon (In-pa), and a species that looks like an inverted umbrella that grows at the foot of palm trees, like the piaçava [piassaba], or the babaçu, in Piauí. Worldwide there are 71 species, ac-cording to a review article written by Stevani in collaboration with North American biologist, Dennis Desjar-din, from the São Francisco State University, in California, which in March will grace the front cover of the journal Mycology. “There must be many more species to discover,” the chemist imagines, “that have not yet been described because they’re difficult to find; few people walk around in the forest without a torch on a moonless night.”

Until 2002 there were no reports of bioluminescent fungi in Brazil; or rather, there was one species, de-scribed in the nineteenth century by Britain, George Gardner, the scientific name of which was Agaricus phos-

060-065_Cien_Luzes vivas_ingles2011.indd 60 11.04.11 19:23:04


mechanism that makes mushrooms glow leads to a method for detecting contamination | Maria Guimarães

“Pleurotus” gardneri: rediscovered in Piauí

phorescens (later renamed Pleurotus gardneri), but today fungi specialists question this classification, based on similar species in Europe, and it was difficult to correct the mistake be-cause the only preserved sample is in a herbarium in England.

A mushroom that seems to be of the same species was recently found glowing at the foot of a piassaba palm tree by North American primatolo-gist, Dorothy Fragazy, who was out later than usual at the end of a day she had spent looking for monkeys in Piauí. Fascinated, she showed her photos to a fellow countryman at the Botanical Gardens in New York, who got in touch with Dennis Desjardin, considered to be one of the greatest specialists when it comes to identify-ing these organisms. He, in turn, advised Stevani. The Brazilian only had to search the Internet to discover that Dorothy was in Brazil for

some work she was doing in collabo-ration with primatologist, Patrícia Izar, from the Psychology Institute at USP – whom he immediately contacted in his search for a the whereabouts of the mushroom. It is one of these stories of chance, in which information needs to go round the world before arriving back in almost the same place.

It turned out well: the owner of the property where Dorothy and Pa-trícia were working, Marino Gomes de Oliveira, dried 4 kg of the glowing mushroom in the sun and sent them to Stevani. Now the researchers are close to correcting the identifica-tion, with the detailed examination of the mushrooms by mycologists (fungi specialists) Marina Capelari, from the Botanical Institute of São

Paulo, and Desjardin. He has dedicated himself to ex-ploring little known forests all over the world, including in Brazil, and says that the

pioneering efforts of his group have been responsible for many discover-ies. “Recently I led an expedition to an island in Micronesia, in the Pacific, where mushrooms had never before been documented; of the 128 species we found 7 were luminescent,” he says, making it clear that glowing fungi are in the minority.

Brazil is promising because it has an immense forest area, the fungi of which have not yet been studied, says Desjardin. “We know very little about Brazil’s mushrooms, so we hope to find many new species, whether lu-minescent or not.” He explains also that in order to find luminous fungi you have to think about it. Most of the mycologists who study fungi di-versity describe mushrooms during the day (when they also emit light, but the researcher cannot see it) and dry them immediately to preserve them; they need to be examined first in the dark to determine if there is P

ho

to

s c

as

siu

s s

te

va

ni/

us

P



any luminescence and only then should they be dried. “Because of this I guess that several rare tropical fungi are luminescent, but we’ve not yet noticed it.”

Despite being little known, there have been reports of luminous mush-rooms for a long time. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, was the first to re-port the phenomenon more than two thousand years ago, when he described the living glow and decided that it was different from fire. However, scien-tific studies on this phenomenon only started in the 1950s and only now are they beginning to contribute to our un-derstanding of the bioluminescence in these organisms that are specialists in decomposing wood and other types of organic matter.

Signaling – Stevani’s interest in fungi grew out of his previous work with fire-flies and other insects. In 2002, dur-ing a trip for collecting material with Etelvino Bechara, a renowned specialist in the bioluminescence of fireflies, now at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), he took advantage to look for the mushrooms that Bechara had talked to him about. He found them: while he

was looking in the dark at an area of damp vegetation close to a waterfall in the middle of the Cerrado [scrubland, sa-vannah vegetation] in Mato

Grosso do Sul, he saw a different green light that was constant, unlike the flash-ing light of the fireflies.

They were mushrooms and gave rise to the project that the researcher from USP became involved with as from 2002 with the help of FAPESP and its Young Researcher program. Even before the work began, the luminous fungi proved not to be restricted to Mato Grosso do Sul. During fieldwork in the State Tourist Park of Alto Ribeira (Petar), in the south of São Paulo state, ecologist João Godoy, now a professor at the São Paulo School of Engineering, was led by his forest guide to a luminous fungus. Surprised, he told his chemist friend, who can now concentrate his field ac-tivities in the Petar, which is closer to his laboratory.

Some of these species are helping unveil the minute details of the biolu-minescence of fungi and for this Ste-vani relies on the help of three PhD students, funded by FAPESP. By means of exhaustive chemical trials PhD stu-dent, Anderson Oliveira, analyzed three

Mycena luxaeterna: light concentrated on the stalks, or stipes1. Study of the bioluminescence

of fungi and its applications in environmental chemistry2. Bioluminescence and the pharmacological activity of mushrooms

tyPE

1. regular research project aid2. young researcher

CoordInAtor

Cassius stevani – iQ/usP

InvEStmEnt

1. r$ 328,413.092. r$ 457,741.18

The projecTs



Mycena fera: mushrooms glow all the time, but are only seen in the dark

species from the Petar’s Atlantic rain-forest – Gerronema viridilucens, Mycena lucentipes and Mycena luxaeterna –, as well as the “Pleurotus” gardneri fun-gus, found in a region of the Cerrado in the Piauí municipality of Gilbués. In an article published in 2009 in Photo-chemical & Photobiological Sciences, the results show that the light production mechanism is similar to that seen in fireflies and in bioluminescent bacteria: enzymes called luciferases oxidam, a substance – or substrate, as chemists prefer to call it – known as luciferin that releases energy in the form of light.

Oliveira used the very latest equip-ment in chemistry labs, but the basis of the trial for characterizing the enzymat-ic reaction was discovered more than a century ago. In 1885, French physiolo-gist, Raphaël Dubois, crushed the lumi-nous organs of a Pyrophorus firefly and mixed them with cold water. The solu-tion gave off a green glow which little by little faded away. It was luciferin be-ing consumed by the chemical reaction, he concluded. Then Dubois heated a similar solution, disintegrating the en-zymes present that are sensitive to heat. On mixing the two solutions – the cold one, where the enzymes survived but no longer with luciferin, and the hot

one that only had luciferin –, he saw the mixture emit light. This story is in the book, Bioluminescence, published in 2006 by Japanese pharmacist, Osamu Shimomura, a researcher in the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, in the United States.

Shimomura won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008, precisely for his studies on bioluminescence: he isolated

the green, fluorescent protein (GFP) from jellyfish, which indicates the ac-tivity of specific genes when attached to the DNA of an organism studied in the laboratory. The luminous protein has become essential in many genetic laboratories, an aspiration that is not far from Stevani’s mind, given that bio-luminescence mechanisms are similar, even among very different organisms.



This does not mean, however, that the chemical composition of luciferin is similar in insects and fungi. “Luciferin is the name we give to any substrate that is luminescent, but the luciferins of different organisms may be com-pletely different molecules,” explains Stevani. All the fungi studied by his group, however, shine by means of the same substrates and the same enzymes, suggesting a common origin for all of them. However not all bioluminescent fungi are close relatives, warns Desjar-din. “Today, we know that there are four families of fungi with bioluminescent species, but they don’t always have the same close relationship between them,” he says. “Some shining species of My-cena are more like species that don’t shine than other shining species of the same genus.”

The group from USP is now hunt-ing down the structure of the molecule that makes these tiny mushrooms, sometimes only 0.5 cm in circumfer-ence, resemble glow-in-the-dark star stickers, stuck to the trunk of a tree, or as if they were sprinkled in the midst of the leaves that cover the forest floor. Unlike fungi, which produce their own light, glow-in-the-dark stars are phosphorescent stickers that store environ-mental light and consequently only shine at night, creating

constellations in the bedrooms of chil-dren of all ages. So far, Oliveira has managed to separate from the fungus extract a solution containing luciferin – it shines when mixed with an enzy-matic solution. However, the substance must be in very low concentrations, because chemist Antonio Gilberto Fer-reira, from the Federal University of São Carlos (Ufscar), has not managed to detect it by the nuclear magnetic resonance of protons. “We need to ex-

tract a larger amount, or use more sensitive equipment,” plans Stevani.

The chemist from USP started on this undertaking out of pure scientific curiosity,

but considers it essential to find practi-cal uses that bring benefits for other researchers and for society. He seems to be on the right track: the glow of the Gerronema viridilucens fungi may help detect high levels of soil contamination by various types of metal, as Luiz Fer-nando Mendes, another PhD student of Stevani’s, showed in an article going to press in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

Biological sensors - Mendes grows the fungus on 35 mm diameter glass plates, on a gelatin base of algae, known as agar, the most commonly used culture medium in biological laboratories. Af-ter growing for 10 days, the fungi still do

stems covered by hyphas that are invisible in daylight



not attain the shape of a mushroom. In this phase, they comprise microscopic filaments, hyphas, which represent the major part of the life cycle of any fungus and, in some species, they also produce the green glow. The researcher mea-sures the luminosity emitted by each of these plates and deposits on them a small soil extract sample to be ana-lyzed. After 24 hours in a cold chamber the fungus starts emitting less light if the sample is contaminated, which the chemists interpret as a form of damage that the organism has suffered.

Mendes got graphs that represent the intensity of light emitted in the presence of different concentrations of 11differ-ent metals – calcium, sodium, magne-sium, cadmium, cobalt, manganese, potassium, lithium, zinc, copper and nickel – and that indicate the toxicity of the sample analyzed. The work has al-ready provided a patent registered in Brazil on the use of fungi in environ-mental toxicity trials. It is enough just to measure the intensity of the light that emanates from the fungus to estimate how much of these metals is in a form that can be absorbed and used by living beings. “This is not a matter of measur-ing the total concentration of chemical substances; that would have no biologi-cal significance and be of no practical use,” points out Stevani. The problem is that Gerronema viridilucens is not very

sensitive, perhaps precisely because it lives in the soil and is adapted even to adverse conditions. “What matters is that the biotrial works; now we need to find more sensitive species that can be tested in the same way,” says the chemist.

Strategies – Because it consumes oxygen in its chemical reactions, bio-luminescence may be able to perform an antioxidant role that would protect fungi and other organisms, even fire-flies, from reactive species produced from the oxygen consumed in breath-ing. This protection of the organism possibly explains the benefits of glow-ing in the middle of the forest. However when it is necessary to take up arms against intense oxidative stress, Stevani’s group has shown that the organism of fungi favor more specialist reactions in accomplishing this function, and switches off its luminescence. This is what the as yet unpublished work of Olívia Domingues indicates; she is also a PhD student of Stevani’s. She saw that in the presence of metals in high con-centrations cells give preference to using the co-enzyme, NADPH, for producing reduced glutathione, which avoids the harmful action of the metals. As reduced glutathione competes for resources with the enzymes that produce the lumines-cence, little by little the fungus switches off. That is why the fungi in Mendes’

bio-trials lost their luminosity in soil contaminated by metals.

Olívia’s results help explain why bioluminescent fungi serve as a toxicity bio-trial, but do not explain the ben-efit to the fungus in emitting a greenish glow. Stevani is betting on ecological hypotheses, showing photographs of flies landing on mushrooms. Like a lamp around which various insects fly, the green glow perhaps helps attract insects. It may seem that there is no advantage in announcing your pres-ence to the hungry hoards that are on duty, but the function of mushrooms in the life cycle of fungi is ephemeral, like the fruit of trees: when an animal eats part of the mushroom it takes away its spores, microscopic structures that are going to generate new fungi if they are deposited in suitable locations. Or per-haps the light is a danger signal in the case of poisonous mushrooms, as hap-pens with brightly colored venomous animals. “What isn’t probable is that the bioluminescence of fungi has evolved to illuminate anthills or to serve as an indication of the flight path, as in A Bug’s Life,” he jokes.

The chemists’ discoveries make it clear that many mysteries will remain lost among the leaves until more bi-ologists and chemists resolve to put out their torches and gaze at the dark-ness of the forest, which is sometimes sprinkled with green. n

Mycena asterina: luminescence restricted to the cap of mushrooms

Scientific articles

1. DESJARDIN, D. et al. “Luminescent Mycena: new and noteworthy species.” Mycologia. In press2. MENDES, L. F. Stevani, C. V. “Evaluation of metal toxicity by a modified method based on the fungus Gerronema viridilu-cens bioluminescence in agar medium.” Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. v. 29, p. 320-26. 2010.3. OLIVEIRA, A.G. AND STEVANI, C.V. “The enzymatic nature of fungal bioluminescence.” Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences. v. 8, p. 1.416-21. Oct. 2009.


[ Physics ]

The entanglement formula

Group from Rio de Janeiro proposes equation that describes a reduction in the quantum phenomenon due to environmental influence

On April 20, 2006, a team from the Quantum Optics Group of the Physics Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) published an article in the UK journal Nature that reported the first

direct measuring of one of the weirdest and most fascinating phenomena in the quantum world, the so-called en-tanglement or interlacing of particles, such as atoms, electrons or photons, the elementary light particles. On April 27, 2007, Brazilian researchers published yet another important pa-per on this complex field of physics. On the pages of Science, an American periodical, they explained how en-tanglement, an essential property for the development of a quantum com-puter, can disappear abruptly, suffering a sort of sudden death. Now the same team, comprised of researchers Luiz Davidovich, Paulo Henrique Souto Ri-beiro and Steve Walborn, has added a further, major contribution to the question, in an article published on May 14, 2009, on the Science website. They formulated and experimentally

Marcos Pivetta

demonstrated a law that describes the dynamics of entanglement.

In more colloquial language, what the physicists from Rio de Janeiro did was to create a general equation that allows them to estimate, simply and precisely, the loss of entanglement of a two-particle system, when one of the particles is adversely affected by the en-vironment. Factors outside such a sys-tem, such as attrition or temperature, may cause entanglement to drop off or even disappear altogether. The new method can do without the reconstruc-tion of the final state of an entangled system, a difficult task that sometimes yields inaccurate results.

“Up until now, there has only been one equation, proposed in a theoretical study published last year in the jour-nal Nature Physics, for describing the dynamics of entanglement in a highly particular and idealized case: a system whose initial state was fully known,” ex-plains Davidovich, the study’s main au-thor, who had collaboration from two graduate students, Camille Latune and Osvaldo Jiménez Farías. “Our equation is a generalization of the previous one

Published in June 2009

066-067_Cien_Formula do emara_ingles_2011.indd 66 11.04.11 19:25:30

PESQUISA FAPESP n sPecial issue may 2009 / dec 2010 n 67

elementary particles, the reader can imagine a system comprised of two entangled dice, this disconcerting con-cept from the world of quantum phys-ics becomes easier to understand. Be-cause they have this strong correlation, when they are thrown, the dice always produce the same result: for instance, their sum is ten. The end result of the system is known and easy to measure, but one does not know what combina-tion of numbers (five plus five, seven plus three, eight plus two, etc.) yield this sum. However, as the dice are en-tangled, when the number of one is determined, the number of the other is automatically discovered.

In the experiment now described in Science, Davidovich’s team, by shining a laser beam onto a crystal, generated pairs of photons entangled with regard to one of their physical parameters: po-larization (the spatial direction – verti-cal or horizontal – in which its elec-tromagnetic field vibrates). Another parameter of the photons, momentum (connected with their propagation di-rection, i.e., their trajectory in space) acted as the system’s external environ-

ment in the experiment. The research-ers realized that, when they produced interaction between the photons’ mo-mentum and polarization, there was a reduction in the degree of entangle-ment in the system . They also found that their equation could account for this loss in the entaglement. “We took a small step towards understanding the dynamics of entanglement, which can help to build more stable and ro-bust quantum systems,” comments Davidovich, whose team is part of the National Science and Technology Institute for Quantum Information. Storing, transmitting and processing information by exploring the quantum world’s peculiar properties is one of the likely bets for IT in the 21st cen-tury. But there is still a lot of basic and applied research to be done before an atom- or photon-driven PC can ma-terialize in people’s homes. n

and also works in situations that are closer to reality, when there is uncer-tainty about the system’s initial state.” The environment’s influence on one of the entangled system’s particles was demonstrated by the Brazilian scientists in an experiment with photons, using a method known among physicists as the “quantum process tomography.”

D efined by Albert Einstein as some-thing wrapped up in “phantasma-goric action at a distance,” quan-

tum entanglement is a phenomenon that is alien to the world of classic, Newtonian physics in which we live. As if by magic, it causes a set of el-ementary particles to share certain characteristics even though there is no physical connection between them. The problem is that it is impossible to determine the properties of each one of the entangled particles, but only of the overall system. If, instead of two

Illustration of photons with entanglement (full circular lines) and without entanglement

Scientific article

FARíAS, O. J. et al.“Determining the dyna-mics of entanglement.” Science Express Reports, published online on May 14, 2009.

uf

RJ

066-067_Cien_Formula do emara_ingles_2011.indd 67 11.04.11 19:25:30


White and silver: the elegant SOAR building and its Gemini Sul neighbor, in the background r

ica

rd

o z

or

ze

tt

o

068-075_Tec_Rumo as Estrelas_ingles_2011.indd 68 4/11/11 7:24:29 PM


astronomical instruments made in Brazil equip the SOaR telescope in the chilean andes

Physicist Antônio César de Ol-iveira barely saw the light of day in the last week in January. He, astronomer Flávio Ribeiro and mechanical engineer Fernando Santoro spent five consecutive days at the top of a bare, rocky,

mountain in the Chilean Andes. They left their dormitory in the morning, traveled 3 km. on a narrow, dusty dirt road and only returned late at night, when an un-countable number of stars were already twinkling in the sky. There was little time and a lot to do. With the help of Chilean technicians they connected the biggest and most complex astronomical equipment ever made in Brazil to the telescope of the Southern Astrophysics Research Observa-tory (SOAR), constructed with Brazilian and North American funding, close to Vi-cuña, in northern Chile.

With around 3,000 parts and weigh-ing a little more than half a ton the equip-

ment the Brazilians installed at the end of January is a spectrograph, a device that decomposes light into the different col-ors (spectra) that constitute it – some of them are invisible to the human eye, like ultraviolet and infrared. Inside the spectro-graph the light from close or distant stars explodes in a succession of all the colors in the rainbow, but in proportions that vary according to the chemical composition of the object observed.

The instrument installed at SOAR, however, is not just any spectrograph. The device that reached the observatory building in Cerro Pachón on December 10, after travelling 3,500 km overland from the workshops of the National Astrophys-ics Laboratory (LNA) in Itajubá, Minas Gerais, is a spectrograph with technologi-cal innovations that make it unique. One of the characteristics that make the SOAR In-tegral Field Spectrograph (SIFS) a special instrument is its capacity to fraction the

[ aStROnOmy ]

Ricardo Zorzetto, from Cerro Pachón


technology



image of a heavenly body into 1,300 equal parts and in one go record the spectrum of them all. In some months, when it is working at full potential, the SIFS will allow, for example, an evalu-ation of the chemical composition of 1,300 points of a galaxy in one mea-surement that will take few minutes, a task that until now has required hun-dreds of different measurements.

“For astronomers that is a lot of information”, explained physicist Clemens Gneiding last October dur-ing the final stage of the assembly of the SIFS in the laboratories of LNA, before embarking for Chile. And that’s not all. This spectrograph was planned to have extremely high spatial resolu-tion power. “It can distinguish objects very close in the sky, separated by 1 arc-second [a unit of angle measure-ment]”, he added. In more concrete terms this corresponds to the size of a soccer ball seen from 50 km away – something absurdly small.

On the afternoon of January 28 the Brazilian team was running from one side to the other in the white shin-ing SOAR building that can be seen from afar by passengers on flights that

land in the region. They tried to finish the SIFS connection before the week ended. “A week is very little time to complete the installation and make the necessary adjustments”, said Santoro, who is responsible for the mechanical part of the project.

“The most complicated thing is in-stalling the cable with the optical fibers that join together the two parts of the spectrograph”, commented Oliveira, while he assessed the best way to fit the 8 centimeter in diameter and 14 me-ter long flexible tube to the base of the telescope; this tube contains the super-fine glass fibers – half the thickness of a hair – which has to conduct the light from the first to the second module of the instrument. “We have to be care-

ful because these fibers are going to move a few centimeters to accompany the movements of the telescope, but they can’t be stretched”, explained the physicist, who is a specialist in optics, and coordinator of the LNA’s Optical Fibers Laboratory. If the fibers are pulled taut they may break and leave the US$ 1.8 million spectrograph, fi-nanced by FAPESP, ‘blind’.

With the SIFS in activity the light collected by SOAR’s 4.1 meter mirror will be focused on the so-called pre-optical module of the spectrograph, a rectangular black box a little bigger that a desk-top computer, attached to the base of the telescope. Inside this module a set of lenses amplifies the intensity of the light by 10 to 20 times and reflects it onto 1,300 microlenses. Each microlens, in turn, guides the light it receives to one of the 1,300 optical fibers which, like the electricity wires in a house, conduct it to the second and bigger module of the equipment: the bench spectrograph, which installed two meters below, in the telescope’s supporting column. There, a further 18 lenses – some of them can turn up to 130 degrees with the precision of

Threads of light:1,300 fibers connect the

telescope to the SIFS spectrograph



Never resting: Soar’s instrumentation team makes adjustments to the equipment received in december

There were plenty of reasons to jus-tify the investment in the innovation – one of them economic. The smaller the diameter of the fibers the closer they can be aligned where they enter the equipment’s second module. As a con-sequence they also reduce the dimen-sions of the lenses and of other optical components, the price of which increas-es proportionally with their size. “The use of fibers with twice the diameter would make the spectrograph double in size”, says astronomer Jacques Lépine, from the Institute of Astronomy, Geo-physics and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of São Paulo (IAG-USP), the first coordinator of the project that developed the SIFS in partnership with Gneiding, from LNA. In the case of this spectrograph, doubling the size of the second module – an octagon 70 cm tall and 2.4 meters at its widest – would have meant making it almost as tall as a person and as wide as a good-sized bedroom in an apartment.

In the 15 meters that separate the focus of the telescope from the sensor of the spectrograph the already weak light from the stars, galaxies or planets undergoes a series of deviations and

thousandths of a millimeter – either disperse, align or make the luminous beams converge until they reach the sensor where they are recorded.

T he choice of such delicate and fine optical fibers was a risky bet by the Brazilian researchers. The nucleus

of the fibers, through which in fact the light passes, is only 50 micrometers (thousandths of a millimeter) thick and, at the time, different research groups stated that fibers less than 100 micrometers thick would cause a loss of most of the light that should reach the second module of the spectroscope. Basing it on good results from a piece of equipment constructed in Australia, the team that planned the SIFS decided to experiment with finer fibers. But it was a well calculated risk. Before exert-ing a great deal of effort and investing so much money in the equipment they built a smaller version of the spectro-graph in partnership with the Aus-tralians, which for two years has been functioning – and very well, as a matter of fact – in the telescope on the Pico dos Dias Observatory in Brasópolis, a town in Minas Gerais, close to Itajubá.p

hO

tO

S R

ica

Rd

O Z

OR

Ze

tt

O

1. construction of two optical spectrographs for the SoAR telescope – nº 1999/03744-12. Steles: high resolution spectrograph for SoAR – nº 2007/02933-33. evolution and activity of galaxies – nº 2000/06695-04. new physics in space – formation and evolution of structures in the Universe – nº 2006/56213-9

TyPE

1. Regular aid for Research project 2., 3. and 4. theme project

COORdInATORS

1. Beatriz leonor Silveira Barbuy – iaG/uSp2. augusto damineli neto – iaG/uSp3. Ronaldo eustáquio de Souza – iaG/uSp4. Reuven Opher – iaG/uSp

InvESTmEnT

1. R$ 3,254,030.59 (FapeSp)2. R$ 1,373,456.33 (FapeSp)3. R$ 1,520,687.31 (FapeSp)4. R$ 1,926,187.91 (FapeSp)

The projecTs



Made in Brazil: the SiFS spectrograph, already installed in the telescope; and alongside the BtFi imager, will soon be on its way to chile

reflections and loses intensity; and the less intense it is the worse the defini-tion of the spectrum produced by the equipment. The researchers reduced this loss using mirrors with a greater reflective capacity and anti-reflective coated lenses that avoid light loss. So they managed to guarantee that 80 − 85% of the light captured by the tele-scope would reach the SIFS sensor.

Planned a little over a decade ago the SIFS belongs to the first generation of equipment at SOAR, which will only be complete in 2011, with the installa-tion of the fourth and last instrument that Brazil has undertaken to supply. “In creating the consortium that adminis-ters the telescope the country became responsible for producing these pieces of equipment”, says Beatriz Barbuy, astro-physicist from IAG-USP and coordina-tor of the Thematic Project that financed the construction of the spectrograph.

It took almost 10 years of work from the conception of the equipment to its installation, which used the labor and knowledge of at least 20 researchers and highly specialist technicians. Execution

of the project also demanded the forma-tion of a not-so-frequent partnership in Brazil, between universities, research institutes and private companies.

“In Brazil there was no culture and expertise for producing such a large piece of astronomical equipment”, comments Keith Taylor, the English astrophysicist who coordinated the optical group of the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Australia and who for two years has been managing the devel-opment of SOAR’s instruments.

T he researchers say that it would have taken much less time to pro-duce the SIFS if they had had easier

access to the materials, which needed to be imported. Part of the delay was due to complications in the import-ing of parts, like calcium fluoride lenses supplied by North American compa-ny, Harold Johnson, which took nine months to reach Brazil, and the optical fibers bought from Polymicro Technol-ogies, also in the United States.

In mid-2009, a few months before the SIFS was sent to Chile, another piece

First generation

equipment will only

be ready in 2011,

with the installation

of the fourth and

last instrument that

the country

undertook

to supply for

the telescope

‘


over coordination of the project after Sueli moved to the United States.

The two detectors alone cost almost US$ 700,000, half paid with money from the Sueli Viegas project and half with funds from the Millennium In-stitute, coordinated by Beatriz Barbuy, from the IAG-USP, and Miriani Pas-toriza, from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Since September, 2009, the Spartan has been function-ing experimentally. In this phase, the astronomers are learning to deal with the equipment, which may still un-dergo adjustments and there is no guarantee that the observations will be very accurate. “SOAR was planned to present high performance, with equip-ment of the highest optical quality”, says Keith Taylor.

A little more than five months after the conclusion of the building and assembly of the telescope, SOAR is

coming to life and becoming indepen-dent. It is planned to deliver the Bra-zilian Tunable Filter Imager (BTFI), equipment that costs US$ 2.2 million and that will allow for identification of the chemical composition of these celestial objects and for measurement of their relative internal movements. “This instrument will be attached to a module that corrects the effects of turbulence in the atmosphere”, says Claudia Mendes de Oliveira, from USP. “Allied to the quality of the image from the BTFI, this correction will result in images of unprecedented sharpness, giving SOAR the capacity that other telescopes of the same size do not have”, says the astrophysicist who coordinated the teams from Brazil, France and Can-ada that constructed the BTFI.

“The production of these instru-ments inaugurated a new era in Brazil-

Side by side: arrangement of

optical fibers demanded

precision and a lot of patience

ph

Ot

OS

ed

ua

Rd

O c

eS

aR

of equipment, planned and constructed with the participation of Brazilians, had been connected to the SOAR: the Spartan camera, which specializes in producing images in infrared – a form of electromagnetic radiation perceived by human beings as heat and capable of crossing the gigantic interstellar dust clouds that hide the galaxies and the nurseries of the stars. As part of the first group of instruments manufac-tured specifically for this telescope, the Spartan substituted a camera on loan from the Blanco telescope of the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory, lo-cated 10 km to the northwest of SOAR on one of the countless reddish peaks on the mountain range.

Almost 8 years ago, astronomer Sueli Viegas, an USP retiree, started a project in cooperation with the University of Michigan, in the United States that led to development of the Spartan. “Brazil participated in preparing the optical and mechanical project for this camera and bought two of the four infrared detectors”, says Ronaldo de Souza, an astronomer from the IAG, who took



ian astronomy and boosted national as-tronomical instrumentation”, says Be-atriz Barbuy. These expensive devices, devised with the objective of expanding human comprehension of the Universe, consume a large number of very small parts that fit together and move with extremely high precision. “Just for the BTFI, we supplied some 1,500 parts”, says Paulo Silvano Cardoso, director of the optomechnical material company, Metal Card, from São José dos Campos, in São Paulo State.

“In 10 years, Brazil has managed to establish an international level instru-mentation program”, says João Steiner, the astrophysicist from the IAG-USP who was a member of the management board of SOAR for 12 years and took part in the telescope project right from its conception in 1993 (see Pesquisa FAPESP nº 98). He says that Brazilian researchers even tried to begin produc-ing astronomical instruments years ago

when the country was first part of the Gemini Observatory consortium, which has two telescopes with 8.2-meter diam-eter mirrors, one installed in Hawaii and the other, 350 meters from SOAR, on the Cerro Pachón, 2,701 meters above sea-level. But the project never got off the ground. “It was too big a step”, ex-plains Steiner, who even ended up in hospital because of the stress levels dur-ing construction of the telescope.

B y the start of 2011 a fourth in-strument should be ready: the échelle spectrograph of the SOAR

telescope (Steles), which the team of astronomer Bruno Vaz Castilho is cur-rently building in LNA’s laboratories. Similar to SIFS, the spectroscope that the Brazilians installed in January in the building at Cerro Pachón, the Ste-les, will also analyze the colors of light emitted by stars and galaxies. The dif-ference is that it will see a greater pro-

in 1998, two years after the project was approved, the building work started with an explosion on the summit of cerro Pachón, in Vicuña, in northern chile, and the extraction of 13,000 m3 of rock to create a flat area for the headquarters of Soar

a year later the building that will house the telescope and the control room began to take shape, built on a piece of land 2,701 meters above sea level and 80 km from the Pacific

in the 2002 the building received the 14-meter metal dome made by equatorial, from São José dos campos, in São Paulo State, which protects the telescope when night time humidity increases

the 4.1-meter mirror and light-capturing power, 350,000 times greater than that of the human eye, reached Soar in January 2004, after traveling almost 10,000 km from the place it was built in the United States

the birth of a telescope

In ten years

Brazil managed

to establish an

international level

astronomical

instrumentation

program, with

benefits also

for industry

‘



portion of the spectrum of visible light – and with better resolution. The use of two instruments from the same family may seem redundant, but it is not. Each one has specific applications. While the SIFS generates 1,300 spectra in a single exposure, Steles produces just one. “As the Steles will record the whole of the visible light spectrum in one go it’ll al-low us to analyze different character-istics of the object observed, such as its chemical composition, temperature, speed of rotation or the speed at which it is moving away”, says Castilho.

“When these pieces of equipment have been delivered the first and sec-ond generation of instruments defined in the initial project will be complete”, says Alberto Rodriguez Ardila, national manager of the SOAR. This does not mean, however, that the telescope will be fully equipped. “Scientific advance always generates the need to develop new instruments”, he says. In the opin-

ion of this astrophysicist from LNA, the result of so much work should be no-ticed in a few years time in the scientific projects that will be developed at the SOAR. “The use of these instruments is likely to increase the dispute for ob-servation time and improve the quality of research”, says Ardila.

Before its own set of equipment had even arrived the white telescope at Cer-ro Pachón was not idle. Since it received the first light from a star in 2004 until December last year, the SOAR has been responsible for generating 36 scientific articles that have been published in in-ternational periodicals. Nineteen of the articles (53%) were produced by Brazil-ian researchers, who have only 34% of the telescope’s observation time.

But recognition from the inter-national scientific community really came about in 2007, when the result of an observation made at SOAR by a Brazilian was published in the coveted pages of the journal, Nature. Almost two years before, in the early hours of the morning of September 25, 2004, the space observatory Swift, from the North American Space Agency (Nasa), issued a warning with the coordinates of what could be an explosion of gamma rays – the death of a star, the mass of which was dozens of times greater than the Sun, which is trans-formed into a black hole, one of the most energetic events known to man – that had occurred within the Pisces constellation (see Pesquisa FAPESP nº 116). Eduardo Cypriano, one of the first resident astronomers at SOAR, a type of telescope ‘tamer’, was working that night and detected the first signals from the explosion.

At the request of Daniel Reichart, a North American academic who studies these phenomena, Cypriano pointed his telescope at the same point in the sky for a few more days. A week later came the official announcement: the images taken by Cypriano and analyzed with the help of his wife, astronomer Elysandra Figueredo, had captured the explosion of a star 12.7 billion light years away from Earth. SOAR had been the only telescope on the planet to accompany this rare phenomenon, which was later confirmed by other observatories. “It was the most distant and oldest object so far observed at that

time”, says Cypriano, who believes that as soon as the adjustments have been finalized in the SOAR equipment Bra-zilian astronomers will be well served for at least a decade.

While they await the conclusion of the last pieces of equipment – SOAR has eight pieces in all –, the Brazilians are planning the next steps. A group coordinated by João Steiner and Beatriz Barbuy is assessing the possible par-ticipation of Brazil in the next genera-tion of telescopes. These are grandiose projects that are likely to cost between US$ 700 million to US$ 1.4 billion to erect telescopes with a mirror up to 40 meters in diameter, four times bigger than the biggest telescopes now in use. In comparison SOAR cost US$ 28 mil-lion, of which US$ 14 million was paid by Brazil, divided between the National Council for Scientific and Technologi-cal development (US$ 12 million) and FAPESP (US$ 2 million).

E ntering astronomy’s first division, however, is not cheap. Brazil is ne-gotiating to pay 10% of the total

amount to have access to the Thirty Meter Telescope, with a 30 meter mir-ror, or 5% to have the right to use the Giant Magellan Telescope or the Euro-pean Extremely Large Telescope, of 22 meters and 42 meters, respectively. But it is demanding a counterpart. “We’ll not go into any project unless at least 70% of these funds are earmarked for manufacturing of the equipment by Brazilian industry”, says Steiner.

The astronomers have at least two good reasons for justifying such a large investment. The first and more abstract: access to these mega telescopes will guarantee Brazilian researchers at least the chance to look increasingly further into the Universe in their search for convincing answers to one of the simplest and most fundamental of questions that any human being ever posed: how did it all begin? The second is more pragmatic: Brazilian astronomy, a young area that grew very quickly in the 1990s, cannot stagnate if it wants to remain internationally competitive. “If we stop”, says Steiner, “we’ll condemn the next generation of astronomers to remaining outside cutting edge re-search as from 2025. We’d be the only emerging country to do so”. n

on the night of april 17, 2004 the telescope made its first observation or, as astronomers say, saw its first light, still using equipment on loan from other observatories

ph

Ot

OS

SO

aR

/ln

a/m

ct



un

ica

mp

076-079_Tec_Feixes multiplicados_ingles_2011.indd 76 4/11/11 7:23:41 PM


Researcher publishes article in leading international journal on the new generation of optic fibers

In the mid 1990s, researchers from Eng-land’s University of Bath, created a new kind of optic fiber and revealed it to the world. This new optic fiber was named Photonic Crystal Fiber (PCF). Accord-ing to the inventors, this innovation had several advantages over existing fibers

and its properties were much more interest-ing than those of conventional optic fibers. Optic fibers are filaments made from silica or from polymer material; these filaments are as thin as a strand of hair. Optic fibers are capable of providing high-speed data trans-mission in the form of light. Nearly 15 years after their discovery, PCFs are already being used in a number of applications – ranging from signal amplifiers in data transmission networks to computerized optic tomogra-phy, laser devices, ultra-sensitive sensors and light sources. However, they have not totally substituted traditional fibers. This January, electrical engineer Arismar Cerqueira Sodré Júnior, a professor at the College of Technol-ogy (FT) at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Limeira campus, published an article called “Recent progress and novel applications of photonic crystal fibers”, in the Report on Progress in Physics, journal, in which he writes about the applications and this state-of-the-art technology.

At the beginning of the article, the 31-year old Cerqueira refers to a question asked by Irish physicist Philip Russell, from Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nurem-berg. Russell was the inventor of this new class of optic fibers. The question was: could photonic crystal fibers be the beginning of a new era in optic communications? In the

conclusion of his 21-page article, Cerqueira left another provocative question unan-swered: can PCF technology make conven-tional optic fibers obsolete? The paper was written at the invitation of the publishers of the journal, considered one of the world’s most prestigious publications in the field of photonics. The referred article’s impact factor corresponded to 12.9; this factor is related to the number of times the articles published in the journal are quoted in pa-pers written by other authors. According to the publishers of Report on Progress in Physics, the electronic version of the paper – technically a revised copy, because it does not contain any new discovery and merely revises everything that exists on the given topic – had more than 250 downloads in the first 11 days after the paper was published in January 2010. This goal had been achieved by only 10% of all the articles divulged in journals published by England’s Institute of Physics (IOP).

The PCFs have raised many questions, but have also provided many answers. To better understand the future perspectives of this new kind of fiber, it is essential to understand how they work, their potential, what kind of equipment they are used in and how they differ from traditional tech-nology. Conventional optic fibers, which are much more efficient than copper wires, have an outer layer and a core, usually made of silica. The functioning principle is very simple: a laser beam is launched from one end of the fiber and, according to the mate-rial’s optic characteristics, travels through the fiber by means of successive reflections.

Photonic crystal fibers are a new moment in the era of optical communication

[ OpticS ]

Yuri Vasconcelos


Multiplied beams



The ability to confine light and make it travel inside the fiber is because the core’s refractive index is higher than that of the outer layer. To achieve a higher refractive index, the inner silica is enriched – or doped – with atoms from another material, such as germa-nium. One of the differences between phonic crystal fibers and conventional fibers is that the former do not neces-sarily have to contain doping elements in their core. The refractive difference between the outer coating and the fi-ber’s core is due to the existence of a regular set of small apertures in the form of tunnels that run parallel to the fiber’s axis, along the entire length of the fiber. The diameter of these aper-tures corresponds to one micrometer, which is equivalent to one millimeter divided by one thousand.

Another specific characteristic of photonic crystal fibers – manufactured by such giant corporations as France’s Alcatel-Lucent, Japan’s Sumitomo, the US’s, Corning, and Holland’s Draka – is that they can have varied geometries and are made from several different materials, among which are pure or doped silica, polymers, liquids, metals, other kinds of glass and even air and gases. The possibility of varying geom-etries and raw materials is an advantage because manufacturers can design the

fiber’s microstructure in a way that pro-vides the fiber with properties defined according to the specific need. Thus, it is possible to guide the light by means of different propagation mechanisms in a variety of wave lengths. “The PCFs meet the requirements of the global market, which demands small, ener-gy-saving, lightweight devices. PCFs take better advantage of the light and this increases the performance of op-tic devices and the precision of such equipment as temperature and pressure sensors, biosensors, electric field detec-tors and gas sensors, among others,” says Cerqueira.

Thousands of fibers – In the researcher’s opinion, the invention of the PCF tech-nology and its entry into the market represent a new period in the era of optic communication. But he does not believe that this new technology will make traditional optic fibers obsolete. “There are currently hundreds of thousands of kilometers of optic fibers installed all around the world. These optic fibers go across continents, across the bottom of the sea, and have many applications in telecommunications. The substitution of all these optic fibers with PCFs would be unfeasible. The new fibers represent a complementary technology and can be used in applications in a variety

of fields, such as medicine, sensors, telecommunications, and metrology, among others,” he says.

In the article, Cerqueira describes new kinds of photonic crystal fibers, among them the hybrid PCFs that he helped invent during his doctor-ate studies at Italy’s Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. Cerqueira also spent some studying at the University of Bath, where he joined the team headed by professor Jonathan Knight, who had produced the world’s first PCF. The hybrid fibers combine the light guid-ance of two categories of existing PCFs. In the first category, the guidance is obtained in manner similar to that of traditional technology, by means of the internal reflection of the light in the core of the fiber. In the second category, the light is guided by a new effect, called photonic bandgaps, and travels through specific frequency windows specified in the design of the fiber. According to the professor from Unicamp, the hybrid PCF was the first optic wave guide to make it feasible to guide light simulta-neously by means of two propagation mechanisms. The professor says that one of the most promising fields for the use of PCFs is the development of the so-called nonlinear optical devices, used in telecommunications and pro-duced from dozens of meters of optic

un

ica

mp

an

d u

niv

eR

Sit

y O

f B

at

h

Various forms of photonic crystal fibers in images captured by electronic scanning microscope. The first fiber is a hybrid fiber, with two kinds of laser light guides



fibers. He adds that some of the related equipment, such as supercontinuum sources, is already being sold in the market. Supercontinuum is an effect characterized by the generation of very intense laser light and extensive wave-length. “Supercontinuum is used in computerized tomography, fiber char-acterization equipment, and optical de-vices, as well as in multiple wavelength systems for communication equipment called Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM), which exists in all telecommunication systems,” he says. Fianium, a British company, and RPMC Lasers, an American company, are two of the main manufacturers of supercontinuum sources with photonic crystal fibers.

This technology could also be used for the development of the so-called frequency combs, multiple length wave sources with a variety of applications, such as frequency measurements for the generation of ultra short pulses. They can also be used in metrology and high resolution optical spectroscopy equipment. None of these are com-mercially available yet. In addition, the PCFs can also be used as light guides in close and distant infrared regions and in sensors, to detect gas leaks in indus-trial processes and in terrorist attacks. “In this region, traditional fibers don’t work because of massive optical loss. Light does not travel along more than one meter with traditional technology, while the PCF can travel for dozens of meters,” says the researcher from Uni-camp. NKT Photonics, a Danish com-pany, sells products based on the PCF technology to the infrared area.

The PCFs can also guide light in the terahertz (THz) electromagnetic

Scientific articles

1. CERQUEIRA S. JR., A. “Recent progress and novel applications of photonic crystal fibers.” Reports on Progress in Physics. v. 73. 2010. On-line.2. CERQUEIRA S. JR., A.; CORDEIRO, C. M. B.; BIANCALANA, F.; ROBERTS, P. J.; HERNANDEZ-FIGUEROA, H. E.; BRITO CRUZ, C. H. “Nonlinear interaction between two different photonic bandgaps of a hybrid photonic crystal fiber.” Optics Letters. v. 33, p. 2.080-82. 2008.3. CERQUEIRA S. JR., A; LUAN, F.; CORDEIRO, C. M. B.; GEORGE, A. K.; KNIGHT, J. C. “Hybrid photonic crystal fiber.” Optics Express. v. 14, p. 926-31. 2006.

frequency region, a frequency which is prohibitive for traditional fibers. In Cerqueira’s opinion, the propagation of light in this band is the key technology to solve existing data transmission bot-tlenecks between microelectronics and optical communication. “Nowadays, the data transmission capacity of opti-cal systems is infinite, or at least, much higher than the current traffic demands of communication systems. However, due to the limitations of electronic components, the transmission band is underused. With light guiding in the THz frequency, the data transmission limit can increase several dozen tera-bytes per second, which would mul-tiply the performance of the world’s communication systems by up to one thousand times.”

Brazil’s contribution – Brazil is one of the world’s most advanced centers for research on PCFs. Important re-search projects on optical fibers have been conducted by professor Cerqueira and other colleagues at Gleb Wataghin Physics Institute, at Unicamp, for more than 30 years. The physics institute is part of the Centro de Pesquisa em Óptica e Fotônica (CePOF), optics and photonics research center in Campinas, which, in turn, is one of the Centros de Pesquisa, Inovação e Difusão (Cepid) research centers of FAPESP. In addi-tion to the CePOF, Unicamp is taking part in another major project which includes PCFs as one of the lines of research. More specifically, this is the Fotonicom project being developed at one of the Institutos Nacionais de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) national science and technology centers sup-ported by FAPESP and by the National

Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) research foun-dation. One of the innovations that came from Unicamp was a photonic crystal fiber with integrated electrodes (copper wires). This makes it possible to apply voltage to the fiber or make it go through a beam of light that can be shaped with the electric current, thus opening up new possibilities to use the fiber in gas detection sensors and optical modulators used in data transmission networks. It is also important to high-light the experiments conducted under the coordination of professor Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, scientific di-rector of FAPESP, at the Laboratório de Fenômenos Ultrarrápidos, laboratory on ultra rapid phenomena. An article published by Cerqueira and Brito in the Optics Letters, journal in 2008, explains the development of a frequency con-verter for the transfer of energy between photonic bandgaps. More articles on the experiments conducted with PCF fibers at Unicamp are available in issues 106 and 147 of Pesquisa FaPesP. n

un

ica

mp

Demonstration of hybrid photonic crystal fibers: a fiber without filter and, on the left, a fiber with blue and orange filter. Multiple electromagnetic wavelengths


O il exploration in the depths of the ocean includes a little-known obstacle and one that is capable of causing a lot of diffi culties for oil companies: the presence of microorgan-isms that break down oil. In

addition to the forces of nature, like sea currents and the pressure at the bottom of the sea that force the use of state of the art technology when it comes to installing oil rigs, they are yet another challenge to be overcome. Various spe-cies of bacteria live both in reservoirs as well as in the water found in oil wells and feed on oil breaking it down; they even secrete biofi lms, molecular struc-tures that they use to protect them-selves against toxic agents and attach themselves to rocks and sediment.

With the start of underwater pro-duction, biofi lms, which can also be formed by the agglutination of the bacteria themselves, are beginning to become attached to plastic and metal. These micrometric-sized structures ac-cumulate and reach a thickness of up to 4 millimeters (mm). “The problem is that these biofi lms hamper oil explo-ration because they stick to the inside of tubing and corrode pipelines, which are diffi cult to clean”, says Professor Anita Marsaioli, from the Institute of Chemistry (IQ) at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), who is taking

part in several projects with Petrobras to identify and study these bacteria and the enzymes that produce them.

When it breaks down some of the highly valuable oil is partially or totally destroyed, thus reducing its commer-cial value. “The bacteria transform the hydrocarbons into fatty acids, making the oil heavier and of poorer quality”, says Anita. Better knowledge of this population of bacteria and the con-ditions that are favorable to them is going to contribute to the preparation of strategies for the company to reduce the exploration risk and act to detect and anticipate the problems they will encounter in the production process. There is also an immense potential for the future use of some of these micro-organisms for cleaning up oil spills us-ing biotechnology. “We know of the existence of bacteria, for example, that produce biosurfactants that have a dual function, to inhibit the growth of other bacteria species, which is good, and at the same time dissolve the oil.” Bio-surfactants are molecules produced by bacteria that reduce the surface tension at the interface between the water and oil in the reservoirs, which facilitates the mixture of these liquids and the subsequent breaking down of the oil.

The studies being carried out at Unicamp in partnership with the Petrobras Research and Development

Challenge at the bottom of the sea

80 ■ SPECIAL ISSUE MAY 2009 / DEC 2010 ■ PESQUISA FAPESPPESQUISA FAPESP

[ OIL ]

080-081_Tec_Desafio no fundo do mar_ingles_2011.indd 80 4/11/11 7:22:51 PM

Petrobras and Unicamp are studying bacteria from oil wells that break down oil | Marcos de Oliveira

in Campinas we grow these bacteria in various environments”, says Anita.

One of the scientifi c reasons for studying these bacteria is to fi nd out if they are aerobic or anaerobic; the former need oxygen to live while the latter do not. This is fundamental for understanding the formation of these bacteria and the way of dealing with them in oil exploration. “Oil reservoirs are an anaerobic environment, but we believe that there may be micro-envi-ronments where oxygen is produced, mainly because of water that enters the wells or through chemical reaction”, says Anita. In the work being done by the group, which includes geologist Eu-gênio dos Santos Neto, from Petrobras, 29 bacteria of both types have already been identifi ed and assessed; most of these bacteria showed a tendency to biodegrade oil. So far, the studies show that the strains of bacteria that pro-duce a lot of biofi lm, from the aerobic group, do not break down oil.

The researchers are working on the hypothesis that the coexisting relation-ship between the aerobic and anaero-bic bacteria, such as, for example, the biofi lm that is produced by the former, may serve as an oxygen “sponge” and act to increase or reduce the degrada-tion activity of the others. All of the bacteria found in the wells and ana-lyzed, many of them unknown to sci-

ence, form part of a Petro-bras collection that is kept by Unicamp.

The research group’s ac-tivities include the participa-tion of Professors Luzia Koike and Francisco Machado Reis, from the Unicamp IQ, and Professor Valéria Maia de Oliveira, from the Chemical, Biological and Agricultural Research Center (CPBQA), at the same univer-sity. Since 2003, the group has received more than R$ 10 million for research from the Oil Sector Fund (CTPetro) and the Geochemical Theme Network, one of the Petrobras technology net-works, supported with company funds that are the equivalent of 0.5% of the oil it produces from its highly produc-tive fi elds, which by federal law, must be used for research purposes in part-nerships with universities. ■

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO

N

Center (Cenpes) are done with water and oil taken from the Campos Basin. The bacteria live both in the area be-tween the oil and water in the wells, as well as separately in either of these environments, at depths of 2,800 me-ters, according to studies carried out so far, in temperatures close to 80° Celsius, as in the Pampo Field, which is almost 100 km offshore from the coast of Rio de Janeiro. “To study these materials we receive samples of water and oil direct from the rigs in sealed glass vessels. Here in our laboratories

Scientific article

CRUZ, Georgiana F. da; SANTOS NETO, E.V.; MARSAIOLI, A.J. Petroleum degrada-tion by aerobic microbiota from the Pampo Sul Oil Field, Campos Basin, Brazil. Organic Geochemistry. v. 39 p. 1.204-209, 2008.

MO

Published in May 2009

1. Expansion of the analytical infrastructures in chemistry, metagenomics and biocatalytics by the organic geochemistry group of the Chemistry Institute and the Microbial Resources Division of the CPQBA at the State University of Campinas2. Multidisciplinary study into biodegradation

TYPE

1 and 2 Thematic Network

COORDINATOR

1 and 2 Francisco Machado Reis – Unicamp

INVESTMENT

1. R$ 3,504,189.57 (Petrobras)2. R$ 3,101,932.51 (Petrobras)

THE PROJECTS

080-081_Tec_Desafio no fundo do mar_ingles_2011.indd 81 4/11/11 7:22:51 PM

New monitoring camera made by Opto for Cbers-3 to be tested in China

Integrated into the Chinese-Brazilian land resources satellite, at an altitude of 800 km, a camera entirely developed and manufactured in Brazil by Opto Eletronica, from the city of São Carlos, inner-state São Paulo, is to record deforestation and urban expansion, as well as crop and livestock farming in Brazil and abroad, among other uses, starting in 2011, when the Cbers-3 satellite is scheduled for launch. On July 21, the

camera’s second version was delivered to Inpe, Brazil’s National Space Research Institute, to be sent to China, where it is to undergo tests, the so-called qualification trial. The first version, that was ready in December 2007 and was shipped to China in June 2008, had to be entirely redesigned after the United States and other countries restricted the importing of several of the components used in it. This final obstacle turned into an opportunity for the development of national technology to make the parts used. For this reason, the new version was dubbed MUX Free.

“The camera is the first of its kind and purpose to be en-tirely designed and made in Brazil,” says engineer Mário Stefani, Opto’s R&D director and coordinator of the multispectral camera project. The device records images in four colors – blue, green, red and infrared – in well defined narrow bands. The previous camera, made by China and attached to Cbers-2, which is cur-rently in orbit, worked with only three colors (the above minus blue). “The combination of the four spectral bands enables one to see the quality of river water, whether the soil is exposed or degraded, and whether vegetation is degraded, or areas occupied irregularly. The blue is useful mainly to assess water resources,” says Stefani. The Brazilian camera has 4 lines of 6 thousand pixels; each pixel covers a 20-meter area on the ground. The width of the strip pictured, the extension of the territory seen on one line of the image, is 120 km.

The process of making a camera capable of withstanding the rocket launcher, operating in outer space at zero gravity, in a vacuum and under a constant bombardment of radiation, comprises several stages. “We made two engineering models and one more qualification model is to be made, to be followed by the three flight models.” However, before beginning to develop

Dinorah Ereno

A brazilian perspective

[ AerOspACe eNgiNeeriNg ]

Published in August 2009

082-083_Tec_Olhar brasileiro_ingles_2011.indd 82 4/11/11 7:22:10 PM

PESQUISA FAPESP n speCiAl issue mAy 2009 / deC 2010 n 83

and imaging capacity covering a 780 km strip of land.

Ever since Opto was established back in 1985 by professors Milton Fer-reira de Souza and Jarbas Caiado de Castro, the firm and its affiliates have been granted aid by FAPESP’s Pipe Program (Innovative Research in Small Firms), which financed, in particular, studies in the fields of industrial ap-plications and ophthalmic equipment for medical use. The first aid grant, that dates back to 1988, was for the develop-ment of a laser measuring device for long distances, for industrial use, under Stefani’s coordination. The product was ready two years later but it never took off commercially. Only eight of these devices were ever sold: seven to Vale do Rio Doce (mining company) and one to Firestone. “Despite this commercial failure, the project helped the company to develop both its human and its in-strumental capabilities, giving rise to technological knowhow that resulted in the development of a highly com-petitive laser device for retina surgery,” says Stefani. The company still makes this laser device – a major commercial success that has assured the company a strong position in the international

market – with the same people and equipment used in the first FAPESP-fi-nanced project. At present, Opto, which is active in the fields of ophthalmologi-cal medical equipment, anti-reflection treatments for lenses, measurement, control and defense instruments, and aerospace products, has 450 employees, 58 of whom are researchers. Its R&D investment is, on average, equal to about 15% of its sales, which last year amounted to R$50 million.

Once the cameras are up in space, Opto will help Brazil to join the limited group of countries that make orbital imaging systems, currently comprising the United States, Russia, France, Israel, India and China. Its participation in the MUX project plus the Pipe projects has enabled the firm to acquire cutting-edge infrastructure, with a secure room and machines for space trials. As a re-sult, Opto was able to develop a second generation of retina scanners, devices that map the retina and that are on a par with those made by international giants. “The space program worked as a powerful indication of the country’s industrial capabilities, helping it to be-come competitive in important fields,” says Stefani. n

ph

Ot

Os

ed

uA

rd

O C

es

Ar

the project, the firm had to win an in-ternational tender bid held by Inpe in December 2004. The camera’s prelimi-nary project was presented in October 2005 and, in December 2007, the first engineering model was delivered. This had to be totally redone following the boycott. The new engineering model delivered to Inpe is to undergo several trials, for its functionality and its capac-ity to withstand the space environment to be confirmed. Only after this stage will the qualification model made, to be followed by the actual flight mod-els, expected to be ready in July 2010. These will form part of the payload of the Cbers-3 and Cbers-4 satellites, the latter scheduled for launch in 2014.

O pto is also a member of the consor-tium for the development of a sec-ond camera that is to be part of the

Chinese-Brazilian satellites numbers 3 and 4. This camera is a WFI (for wide field imager) and is being developed in partnership with the firm Equatorial Sistemas, from the city of São José dos Campos, in inner-state São Paulo. In this project, Opto is responsible for the optical and electronic part, while Equa-torial is in charge of the processing and video signal, as well as for thermal con-trol. The WFI camera has a wider cov-erage angle, but a lower resolution than the MUX. “The WFI is to be delivered in October for the qualification trials,” says Stefani. Besides the two cameras made by these Brazilian enterprises, the satellites will carry another two, made by the Chinese. “All in all, we will de-liver three sets of MUX plus WFI cam-eras for flying, totaling six cameras,” says Stefani. Of these sets, one is for Cbers-3, one is for Cbers -4, and the third is the replacement set, should any problems arise. Stefani heads a team of 56 professionals who are working simultaneously on the development of three cameras: two for the Chinese-Brazilian satellites and the third one for the Amazonia-1 satellite. The latter is an AWFI (advanced wide field imager), with a spatial resolution of 40 meters

MUX Free camera covers an area of 20 meters on the ground

082-083_Tec_Olhar brasileiro_ingles_2011.indd 83 4/11/11 7:22:14 PM


humanities

084-089_Hum-Mario de Andrade_ingles2011.indd 84 4/11/11 6:55:23 PM


project reviews mário de andrade’s creative path

This ran through the month of April. I took the blank pages at the end of a notebook and, in the manicured lettering of the calm begin-nings of a book, started to write. However soon the handwriting became hasty, speedy, illegible to others, magically spelt phrases that stopped in the middle, in which I in-

cluded both a y in the word ‘notebook’ and a hyphen in ‘garden’; I was writing with fire. Everything was gentle in coming, foretelling an impassioned ardor, in an adoration of myself, of my possible intelligence, such as I have only rarely enjoyed as easily in this life,” described Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) in relation to his creative process. How equally easy the life of the researchers involved in recreating this process would be, had there been more texts such as this one, so explicit about the labor of creating a book. Hence the importance of the theme project headquartered at the Brazilian Studies Institute of the University of São Paulo (IEB-USP), Estudo do processo de criação de Mário de Andrade nos manuscritos de seu arquivo, em sua correspondência, em sua marginália e em suas leituras [Study of Mário de Andrade’s creation pro-cess in the manuscripts of his files, in his correspon-dence, in his marginalia and in his readings], which has FAPESP support and is coordinated by professor Telê Ancona Lopez. “We plan to discover how the entire organization of an invention took place, in search of the creative process. IEB centralizes most of the dossiers of folios left by the writer. Based on all of this material, it will be possible to recover the path of such creation,” explains the researcher.

Carlos Haag

Re

pR

od

uc

tio

nS

fR

om

th

e b

oo

k a

ima

ge

m d

e m

ár

io; p

ho

to

bio

gR

ap

hy

of

má

Rio

de

an

dR

ad

e /

má

Rio

, 19

38

Within the entrailsof invention

‘

Published in February 2010

The subject matter of the research consists of 102 manuscripts at IEB-USP. The classification is to be divulged on a database, an analytical catalogue of the literary manuscripts and an index of the titles of all the areas, along with a chronology of their creation and publication. “The catalog’s novel aspect is that we will try to reassemble the creative path. Researchers will be able to examine a facsimile of the manuscript and to resort to the path reassembled in the dossier, as well as to the research notes that explain the or-ganization’s pathways and all the other information found,” warns Telê. “A research powerhouse will be formed.” The classification in the catalog and in the index extends to the production of scanned facsimiles and to the microfilming of all the folios, as an extra resource to safeguard the documents from being used by researchers. Everything will be offered in detail: the dimension of the paper used, the type of pen em-ployed to write the poem or to correct a text, the color, etc. “There is even the interesting case of a poem in which the paper folds indicate that Mário carried it in his pocket, which points to his having shown it to other people, to his being concerned about his writ-ing and so on and so forth, a mystery that may be solved by a researcher interested in genetic critique and in the life of the document. This type of analysis also allows one to date documents by comparing the paper’s texture, etc.” states Telê. Another result of this project is the partnering agreement with the Agir publishing house, which is publishing the complete works of Mário de Andrade based on the editing pro-vided by the theme project team, which has already

[ liteRatuRe ]



resulted in new versions of the works Amar, verbo intransitivo, Macunaíma, Obra imatura, and Os contos de Belazarte, among others. The collection will also include, in a new edition of Poesies completas to be released in May, a series of hitherto unpublished poems by the author, which he had thought about publishing but discarded in the final version of his collected poems.

M ário de Andrade was a constant reviewer of himself in his works, forever busy with adding the final

touches to his writings while leaving room for yet one more future touch-up. Hence his huge personal archive of folios left for posterity, which reveal a creation always in action and never completed, and carefully kept. “The writer, an archivist of his own work, identified and separated sets of back-ground documents that he composed in the course of his lifetime, storing them on a shelf and a large chest of drawers in his home in Lopes Chaves Street in São Paulo. In the series Manuscritos Mário de Andrade, the documents of the creative process include path-ways to be decoded in the dossiers of the unpublished materials, the largest and richest stored by the writer in green envelopes and cardboard folders, the latter, in turn, reused, as one can tell from the sequence of crossed out head-lines,” says Telê. “Itineraries are decoded or established via an analysis and in-terpretation that is subject to setbacks and mistakes. Actually, such work must always keep in mind that the dossiers do not materially integrate the creative process, both that of the craftsman of literature and the arts and the humani-ties essayist. The creation overcomes the dossier, the file and, above all, ma-terialness itself, by toying, concerning the last point, with the writer’s psyche.” Hence the team’s work of crossing any given manuscript with other archive sources, such as letters (IEB-USP has the largest collection of correspondence sent and received by Macunaíma’s au-thor), interviews, other manuscripts and books’ marginalia; in sum, every-thing that might cast some light upon the reading of a given work and clarify Mário de Andrade’s creative pathways,

thus transforming the writer’s library into a site of creation, a creative space par excellence, the cauldron into which he cast all the ingredients that might generate the “ideal” mixture, no matter how ephemeral.

One important concept in An-drade’s creation process was the “work-ing copy,” as he called the printed text of books or periodicals in which he crys-tallized new versions of his works by adding creative corrections in black ink, or in regular, red or blue pencil. The working copies are added to his notes, versions, plans, etc. in the dossiers in which these were kept. After sending to the publishing house his written text and getting the proofs back, the writer would write on his working copies the changes he wanted to make. “A severe critic of his own work, Mário, in these working copies, embraced to his dy-ing day a fate akin to that of Sisyphus. In 1944, on the cover of an edition of Macunaíma published that year by the Martins publishing house, over whose segments he had not even run a spatula, he writes hurriedly, closing the paren-theses that he had failed to open: ‘Copy corrected to use for future editions/M.’,” says the researcher. At the same time, the efforts involved in the working cop-ies did not always go any further. “It is odd to see that by sparing the working copies, while making clean copies of the corrections in another copy of the book, this one addressed to the printers, An-drade the copyist, perhaps acting thus through an interest in the comparison with the new edition, is careless about the task. The comparison of the cor-rections in the working copies of Amar, verbo intransitivo and Macunaíma with the respective texts of the second edi-tions highlights the absence of certain reformulations,” notes Telê.

Here one witnesses Andrade’s idea of his creation of adjustments not as actual corrections (other than when grammar or coherence are faulty), but rather as a new possibility discovered during the creative process, above and beyond the pragmatic notion of right or wrong, especially in literary projects such as his, in which movement and the inability to reach an end form essential traits. In such cases, the working copy

Mário de Andrade’s office

in Rua Lopes Chaves,

São Paulo, October 1945

Mário de

Andrade, in his

working copies,

assumes

the fate of

Sisyphus to the

end of his life



becomes a manuscript of the work, en-compassing the typology and dynamics in all fields of action of a multi-faceted writer such as the author of Macunaíma. An outstanding example of this is, once again, Amar, verbo intransitivo, created and recreated between 1927 and 1944 by Andrade and the fruit of his correspondence and friendship with Pio Lourenço Correa, uncle Pio, who was actually a cousin and a friend with whom he maintained intense cor-respondence from 1917 to 1945. The corrections of the working copy of the book, which had been released during the heroic stage of the modernistic movement, reflect an author less con-cerned about advocating Freudianism and scientism and more flexible in re-gard to uncle Pio’s suggestions about elements such as using “pra” [an abbreviated, phonetically correct but grammatically incorrect form of ‘for’ in Portu

Sp

ha

n a

Rc

hiv

eS

, Sã

o p

au

lo

, ph

ot

o b

y g

eR

ma

no

gR

ae

Se

R

guese], which the friend preferred in its standard form, “para.” On the first page of the corrected copy, he writes: “The edition is to comply with the official Brazilian orthography… of the time,” in the same ink he used to correct the word “intransitivo” [intransitive], now spelt with an “s” rather than a “z.” Thus, the second stage of the whole creation takes place in this corrected copy, be-tween 1942 and 1943, when Mário de Andrade was already a highly regarded figure in Brazilian literature. “A friend stops by for us to go over the proofs of Amar, verbo intransitivo again and it comes out quite remodeled. Let’s see if it has turned out rather better,” he writes to the critic Álvaro Lins in 1944, showing yet again the importance of correspondence in the consolidation of the understanding of the pathways of his creation, as had been the case of uncle Pio.

“The letters are the area where he finds the understanding of pro-cesses, pathways and choices; they are something like a production diary for Andrade. At the same time, upon dis-closing something about the work, he elicits a reaction from the other party: it is work in progress. His work is not a sealed system; to the contrary, there is room for the other party in the dia-logue to provide suggestions and to in-tervene in Andrade’s creative process,” explains Marcos Antonio de Moraes, from IEB-USP, the associate coordi-nator of the theme project, who is in charge of the correspondence of the author of Macunaíma. “It is clear that certain expressions, certain vocative words come from I don’t know where, no matter how much I psychoanalyze myself. However they vibrate as words, they are word-expressions that are sug-gestive to me and that is why I left them



as they are,” wrote Andrade in a letter to Carlos Lacerda. “He acknowledges that he doesn’t know why he did this or that, but the wish to understand the creation mechanism imposes itself upon the writer, the idea of a domes-ticated creative process being refused. Andrade seems to impose the moral of the true artist: the fatal being, aware of his expressive technique and insatiable for knowledge about the inner works of his own person and of his art or, as Drummond wrote, ‘It’s been about two years or a little more since I fell in love with the phenomenon of esthetic creation’,” explains the researcher. The most intense dialogue started with Bandeira and was then transferred to Drummond, when the conversation with the former about the mysteries of creation seemed to be reaching its end. “I started by paying more atten-tion to my creative processes. Not to modify anything at all, not because I recognize the tiniest insincerity in my creative processes, but to verify them,” he wrote to Lacerda.

I n Mário de Andrade’s correspon-dence one finds a constellation of statements that allow the student of

genetic criticism to monitor the sev-eral stages of the tortuous process of producing a text,” notes Marcos. At the same time, the researcher adds, Andrade had direct impact upon the creative process of artists such as Di Cavalcanti, Brecheret, Mignone, Guarnieri, Anita Malfatti and Cícero Dias, among oth-ers. “He and the artists planted in the field of correspondence the essential expression of their work, with draw-ings as a playful expression and drafts of works in progress or completed, wishing to share the work of invention while also aspiring to eventual sugges-tions from the friend that was often ac-tive as an art critic in the press. Letters thus become a creative territory and the process of authorship falls apart in the collaborative creation, in the exchange of experiences, verses, ideas, etc. This is totally modern and the tools are the letters,” says Marcos.

However, as Andrade was an exem-plary polygraph, his archives also har-bor his passion for music, with anno-

tated scores, letters to composers, and texts on musical critique, among other manuscripts that reveal his dialogues with composers and, more importantly, his co-authorship, his veritable partner-ing of musical works, such as the op-era Malazarte and the unfinished Café, where his involvement was not limited to the libretto, but was also reflected on the musical construction. “Just as there is a space that was taken up by literary writing, there is a Mário that is occupied with musical writing, Mário the musicologist who, besides creating verse, also creates music and aims to get a national esthetic developed,” com-ments Flávia Toni, from IEB-USP, joint coordinator of the thematic project in charge of the musical manuscripts. Besides co-authoring major musical projects by composers such as Camargo Guarnieri or Mignone, Andrade also expressed his creativity through music. “There is a score in which one can see the drawing of what would come to be the Pequena história da música [Small history of music]; in another one, there is an unpublished poem, composed af-ter he read the music. There are three popular tunes written by Mário, all of them timid attempts, but there might be others,” says Flávia.

It is in his letters, however, that the writer inspires friends to create. In one of them, the researcher tells us, he de-vised a unique way of “extracting” the Cirandas out of Villa-Lobos, “on pur-pose, knowing it would work out,” by resorting to the argument that a Chil-ean composer, Humberto Allende, had written Doze Tonadas, popular music arranged for the piano and to be played by students. “I know that this is quite elementary for you and I wouldn’t dare to ask a composer of your stature for something like this, but I cannot imag-ine who in Brazil, other than our great Villa, would be capable of composing in the style of Allende.” The musical fish took the bait and soon the Cirandas appeared along the lines sought by Andrade. His nationalism, running in the opposite direction taken by Villa, was inclined to folklore-based melodies, such as the Cirandas, and this was diffi-cult to extract from the composer from Rio de Janeiro. The dialogue was much

more fluid with Camargo Guarnieri, a native of São Paulo and Andrade’s fa-vorite musician, with whom he enjoyed listening to records at home and with whom he also maintained a privileged dialogue. Pedro Malazarte, as mentioned above, included in its conception, and not only in its libretto, the co-author-ship of Andrade and, now, thanks to the theme project research conducted by Flávia, it has come to light that this partnership became even stronger in two unpublished melodies collected by the writer in 1927, on his first trip through Brazil, which were offered to the musician (who kept them in his ar-chive in Andrade’s originals) and used them in the opera.

“There are also many analyses of almost all the operas by Carlos Gomes, which shows Mário’s desire not only to have an impact on the present, but also to try to understand the past, to track the creation of opera in Brazil,” says Flávia. According to the researcher, Andrade seemed to repeat in music the same quest he had conducted in the 1920s, at the time when he wrote Gramatiquinha da fala brasileira. “He had planned to cover the Brazilian musical past and future, to build, one day, a ‘grammar’ of Brazilian musical construction; in other words, to use certain sound constructions to create music, just like one uses words to create verse.” The theme project also plans to recover a dialogue lost in the letters. Whenever Andrade received letters with information for his Dicionário de música, in the 1930s, he would place the correspondence in the manuscripts section, rather than the letters section, as they would later be used in the pro-cess of creation. Now this flow is being reestablished.

Finally, we have the books’ margi-nalia as a manuscript. “What one sees is a dialogue, given that Andrade’s an-notated readings, a movement in the artist’s research that unfolds in line with his obsessions, implied in criti-cism, selection or assimilation. His marginalia is the tilled land and the granary that coexist in parallel or that are merged in the archives of creation,” analyzed Telê. “The handwritten mar-ginal notes are part of the pathway of


the creative universe of other texts and, in so far as they fit the writing process’ pathway, they duplicate the documen-tal nature of the book. Thus, to the printed library text, one can add the manuscript. By transforming or select-ing, in the margins, the subject matter of the author, weaving comments in critical lateral reading, the writer es-tablished a coexistence of discourses. This dialogue shows the nascent text that faces a creation in its final stage, i.e., an alien book offered to the public.” The marginalia can function in the case of a writer as implicit matrix, in the fa ce of a book of handwritten annota-tions, but that, even so, one knows in-fluenced the work of Andrade, such as Les villes tentaculaires precedées de Les campagnes hallucinées, by Emile Ver-haeren, the confessed matrix, according to the letters, not only of the title, but of the contents of Paulicéia desvairada.

A ll of this would be no more than cold and impersonal investigation if it were not of use to the author

and his readers. To this end, there is the fine story behind Os contos de Belazarte, which reveals Andrade’s need to track creation that is always moving, that is never completed, in the several and endless samples of his work. In 1968, during the military dictatorship, Valentim Faccioli, a law student and editor for a publishing company, saw a little wine-colored book propped up on his desk at work. Upon picking it up, he realized it was a mock-up for Belazarte (which, among other short stories, had O besouro e a rosa), full of notes penciled in what he thought had been written by the author. Hav-ing later been jailed, he lost his job and abandoned the university. Years later, by which time he had become a professor at USP, he decided to deliver the little book to IEB-USP. We now know that it is very important document, a working copy with Mário de Andrade’s notes. To the writer’s happiness, the corrections arrived in time. n

Andrade in 1932 photo: always

correcting his works

an

dR

ad

e, 1

93

2 /

ph

ot

o b

y g

ild

a d

e m

oR

ae

S R

oc

ha



Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald had no qualms about stating that the rich are different from us poor mortals, sim-ply because they have much more money than we do. But is money enough to explain everything? Income inequality indicators have shown that the gap between the rich and the poor has been narrowing, but are these indicators enough to provide us with a more accurate

image of national social segregation? “Income is a very important indicator to analyze poverty and it is no surprise that international comparisons focus on this issue. However, our efforts at the Centro de Estudos da Metrópole (CEM), Metropolis Study Center, have focused on analyzing poverty and inequality from many aspects, because an individual’s poverty is the result of a combination of factors besides income. These factors include: access to the formal job market, to public services, and to social and associative bonds. An unprotected individual is the result of all these factors,” explains political scientist Marta Arretche, director of CEM.

Thus, she adds, although it is important to base ourselves on recent studies that show that income distribution has improved recently as a way of understanding what is going on in the country, one must also take into account other aspects of poverty and in-equality which have an equally strong impact on people’s well-being. The studies conducted by CEM attempt to expand this vision.

This is the reason for holding the international seminar on Metrópole e Desigualdades (The Metropolis and Inequality Seminar) was held in March 2010. This is another step in the internationaliza-tion process of FAPESP’s Centros de Pesquisa, Inovação e Difusão (Cepid), Research Center, which is also an Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia, National Institute of Science and Technology. The seminar will focus on discussing these three pillars of research and the peculiarities of Brazil’s recent development process.

“Our research studies are based on the theoretical presupposi-tion that work, social services and sociability are decisive mecha-nisms for the overcoming or mitigation of situations of poverty. You can have two individuals with the same nominal income, but if one of them has access to state-subsidized housing, health care, etc., and the other does not, then the latter is poorer and more segregated than the former. It is always necessary to analyze factors other than income, and this is what this seminar proposes to do. In fact, this is in line with recent international studies in this respect,”

Seminar discusses the dilemmas of social segregation in Brazil

A portrait of inequality: building in the high-income neighborhood of Morumbi and the favela (shanty town) in Paraisópolis

Unequalled inequality


[ Sociology ]

Carlos Haag

090-093_Hum-Desigualdade_ingles2011.indd 90 4/11/11 6:53:18 PM


says Marta. “Poverty might have been reduced, but, on the other hand, inequality might be being reproduced.”

The first pillar of the seminar will focus on access to the job mar-ket and will begin with an unusually “optimistic” interpretation of the current status of the city of São Paulo. “Migration flows changed direction in the 1990s and began to show signs that they were slowing down, after decades of accelerated growth; this tendency is explained by local factors, such as the loss of dynamism in the unskilled labor market and the high cost of housing, as well as by external signs, such as the creation of new development centers in other regions of Brazil,” explains sociologist Álvaro Comin, from CEM.

In other words, São Paulo, contrary to general opinion, has stopped growing and migration from other regions has slowed down; more people are leaving the city than coming in, especially the unskilled labor force. “The lower-income and uneducated, or poorly educated, segment of the population now corresponds to a smaller part of the city’s overall population.” Moreover, says the researcher, in the period from 2003 to 2007, the growth of the formal labor market corresponded to 4.15% a year, and for the first time in twenty years, the number of workers holding a Work Card corresponded to more than 50%.

“The city has gained more sophisticated services and the de-mand is for a more elite workforce, which suggests that the city is becoming a ‘ middle-class’ metropolis,” Comin explains. At the

same time, the educational level is also improving, in line with this evolution. “Formally employed individuals have many more opportunities to remain up-dated on recent developments in their professional fields, thus reducing their risk of unemployment and increasing their chances of professional growth.” All of this seems to indicate a perfect world. But this is when inequality arises, through a new pattern of segregation: the poorer segments of the population do not fit into this new structure, but they still depend on the city to survive, (domestic servants and other kinds of employees); they’re obliged to live fur-ther and farther away, because they no longer fit into the city, either because of the lack of affordable housing or be-cause of the new profile in demand.

“This is a complex cycle: the city has closed its doors to a specific kind of worker, who has been expelled from the

Tu

ca

Vie

ira

/Fo

lh

a im

ag

em


of making the city more ‘elite.’ An offi ce worker has to have a college diploma, no matter in what fi eld, but he has to have one. The question is: what is the reward for having fi nished high school or college and working as a telemarket-ing employee earning a pitiful salary? This confi rms a common axiom in our culture: a good education does not get you anywhere.” “Everything nice about the image of São Paulo seems to have a negative element,” Comin points out.

Another pillar of inequality focused on by CEM lies in the so-called social networks. “Poverty has a territorial di-mension: poor people tend to be spatially segregated, but they might be united spa-tially to fi ght the effect of segregation. The issue of unequal access to social poli-cies leads individuals to have different conditions and futures,” explains soci-ologist Eduardo Marques, from CEM.

Based on maps that show individu-als’ social networks, Marques showed

that these relationships with neighbors, family members, friends, colleagues, etc., are very important, and are more important than educational level and other factors, such as whether the indi-vidual is employed or not, the quality of the job and the income. Based on this data, the researcher prepared proposals for the State that could take advantage of the inevitable relationship between individuals and their interpersonal relationships, an effi cient manner of providing help when the time comes to try and get a job.

A survey conducted by Nadya Gui-marães on unemployed respondents looking for jobs at public or private employment agencies revealed that 80% of the respondents had found jobs through their network of friends in other periods, to the detriment of the employment agencies (which, of course, does not stop them from try-ing to get a job at such agencies, as a

‘metropolis and is thus obliged to live in surrounding regions. This leads to such major problems as transportation, fl oods, etc. What initially seemed to be a reason for celebration has become a reason for enormous concern, when the issue is considered more profoundly,” the researcher points out. These issues are gaining a metropolitan scope, as the problems encompass poorer, dis-tant regions and with less ability to re-solve them than a metropolis like São Paulo, adds Comin. “In addition, you only work on two government levels: the State of São Paulo and the local governments, that do not collaborate with each other; this is exemplifi ed by the tax issues and by issues related to the political parties.”

Even São Paulo’s industrial profi le has changed, although the state still concentrates 50% of the industrial output in the city of São Paulo. “Tra-ditional industries that employed or-dinary workers have relocated to the hinterland, and the city now has the technology-intensive industries. The city’s economy is more capital-intensive and less labor-intensive.”

Expulsion - “In general terms, poverty is being invited to leave the city, and we are exporting problems such as the favelas (shanty towns), extreme poverty, lack of health care, and the like. Concurrently, the ‘expelled’ population is being banned from using the public services in other places, because this population needs to show proof of work and residence. Twenty years from now, when we look at São Paulo, we might even think that everything is all right, but problems will be ahead of us – beyond the river, in the surrounding cities, with the differ-ence that these cities will have very little chances, like we do, to implement poli-cies and make changes,” says Comin.

The research work conducted by Nadya Guimarães, from CEM, shows another cruel reality. “Any job nowa-days requires a high school or college diploma. A street sweeper employed by the local government, for example, has to have a high school diploma to get this job. This is how distorted the situa-tion has become. It is the perverse effect



manner of reinforcing their search for employment). “This reveals that people with friends have a better chance of get-ting a job and increasing their income, thus narrowing the inequality gap, by means of their personal relationships, which proves that these networks are more effective than public policies in this respect,” Marta analyzes.

“The fight against poverty cannot do without traditional social policies, or without macroeconomic policies that promote more good quality jobs. But given that some networks have important penetration patterns in the relationship fabric of communities, its integration with the policies of the State may help solve problems more easily, by allowing policies to reach out to the users more efficiently, and customizing them, including the language, which would thus culturally mediate the re-lationship between the State and the communities,” Marques points out.

“In the specific case of employment, the development of employment agen-cies that provide integrated informa-tion on jobs and are located in radically decentralized forms in the communi-ties, might help reduce the effect of the migrant’s initial location and the entry of young people into the job market, distributing access to information and local relationship structures in a more equitable manner.”

Favor – Although a job might still de-pend on that friendly information from a friend, the good news is found in the third pillar of the seminar’s research study on public services. “Imagine an individual in a very difficult situation: this person is jobless in a metropolis. What is this person’s life like? In spite of all his difficulties, this person’s children can still stay in school and he can still depend on health care services. He has access to this without having to depend on favors or the blessing of any politi-cian,” says Marta Arretche. “His situation in a metropolis is certainly much better than if he were living elsewhere.”

According to the researcher, the metropolitan regions are not the worse places in Brazil. “I classified all the cities in Brazil according to this expanded poverty indicator criterion that charac-terizes the studies conducted by CEM: income, health, education, and hous-ing. All of the cities were classified ac-cording to an index ranging from 1 to 6, where 1 indicates the best cities in terms of income and social levels and 6 indicates the worst cities in this respect. Most of the cities in the metropolitan regions scored between 1 and 2, that is, they were among the cities with the best indicators,” she explains.

In her opinion, the main problems seem to be urban mobility conditions, that is, the urban and transportation infra structure. Another positive data that was revealed by Nadya Guimarães’ survey was that 98% of the people from the big metropolises (Rio, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo) have direct access to public services, which indi-cates the near-extinction of political cronyism in this respect. Comparative studies indicate that inequality in access

to public services has been falling around the world, while income in-equality has been increasing.

“In this respect, Brazil seems to be following a specific path, because Brazilian democracy has been able to reduce income inequality, together with inequality regarding access to public services,” says the director of CEM. In-equality demands political reflection and not only an economic one.

“The expectation of the majority of social scientists at the beginning of the 1990s was that the Brazilian state would be unable to deal with the so-cial inequalities inherited from the military regime. More extensive po-litical participation combined with the State’s inability to meet demands for social integration were seen as be-ing a serious threat to democracy,” says Marta. “These expectations proved to be groundless, because Brazilian de-mocracy has gradually revealed its social incorporation capacity; that is, Brazil is following the classic path of modern democracies in which political participation creates opportunities and institutional incentives for the progres-sive social integration of the masses.”

Brazilian political institutions al-lowed voters to become incorporated and demands to be met, “ including the lower segments of the population. Gov-ernments that followed the dictatorship regimes moved forward in terms of their re-democratization agenda through the redemption of the social debt inherited from the dictatorship. There is no doubt that income concentration and the limited access of the poorer segments of the population stemmed from the configuration of the political forces and the political priorities prioritized by those gover nments,” states politi-cal scientist Argelina Figueiredo. “Ever since the advent of re-democratization in the 1980s, this social panorama has started to chan ge and has been chang-ing with increasing intensity. The di-mension of this change shows that it is highly significant if we compare it to the timing of the processes of social change equivalent to that in countries whose democracies are today considered as being “consolidated.” n

ma

rc

oS

d’p

au

la

/ag

ÊN

cia

eS

Tad

o

Reflections: work, social networks and public services to explain segregation



database maps out the migratory flow of qualified labor that furthered São paulo’s post-1945 industrial development

São Paulo’s fast industrialization following World War II (1939-1945) was one of the most important chapters in the history of the state and can now be better told. What few people know is that the presence of large contingents of qualified immigrants coming from Europe and Japan, two of the regions

most affected during the conflict, was fundamental to this process. What happened was not merely an increase in the number of workers entering industry in the Greater São Paulo. They also embraced agriculture, which became modernized and was characteristic of the “new immigrants” in that these formed a more specialized work force, not in formal terms, but con-cerning their technical and practical qualifications.

São Paulo, Inc.

[ HiStory ]

Published in November 2009

Gonçalo Junior

094-097_Hum-Historia_ingles2011.indd 94 4/11/11 6:51:18 PM


refugees, the stateless, etc.,” believes Maria do Rosário. Ac-cording to her, what stands out in the work is the special profile of people from the European countries that had traditionally supplied immigrants to Brazil, in addition to other nationali-ties from Central and Eastern Europe. This was in marked contrast to the less qualified immigrant profile that characterized the large immigration wave of the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. “The origins of the immigrants are also interesting,” she points out. For example, concerning the Italians, they came from western Italy, contrary to what one might expect, since these areas were less developed and their workforce was more technically specialized than formally.

To understand the process better, the professor recommends going back to the nineteenth century. As from the 1870s, one can identify very significant periods during which immigrants entered the country; there were longer periods that had a stronger impact on the growth of the Brazilian population, such as the expansion of coffee farming in western São Paulo, the start of the subsidy policy and the en masse arrival of immigrants, mainly Italians. “This period ended in 1902, with the prohibition of subsidized emigration by Italy - the well-known Prinetti decree – and the redi-rection of Italian emigration to the USA,” she says. The second cycle was characterized by the Agreement of Taubaté (1906), by the arrival of more Portuguese and Spaniards and the beginning of the influx of Japanese (1908); this period lasted until World War I.

The second period is characterized by a smaller inflow of immigrants due to factors such as the re-

pH

ot

oS

div

ul

ge

me

nt

From European immigrants’ train to arrival with their families at the national centers

This new view is just beginning to be outlined thanks to the project “The new immigrants – Migra-tory flows and industrialization in São Paulo (1947-1980)”, from the Center for Population Studies at the State University of Campinas (Nepo/Unicamp); from 2003 to 2008 the project recorded more than 60,000 documents that now form a database with some 200,000 records of people who arrived in Brazil and became part of the workforce. This vast collec-tion, which promises to make researchers both in Brazil and abroad happy, was assembled in such a way that the information can be explored in vari-ous ways: by name, nationality, profession, region of origin, employer, etc.

And this is not all. Data that are more detailed can be crosschecked, such as all German automo-bile mechanics who were unmarried or people with higher education – in the latter case, regardless of nationality. It is also possible to prepare graphs, tables and other types of data consolidation, which can be of great help in demographic studies, to name just one possibility. The database is already available at Nepo/Unicamp and the Memorial do Imigrante (the Memorial to Immigrants Museum) in São Paulo.

W ith the data readily available, the project team felt that their work had ended, having made a collective contribution to other researchers.

However, the group is still together for what is called a continuation of its commitment to information and dialogue with other interested parties. It is headed by the researchers Maria do Carmo Carvalho Campello de Souza (USP and Idesp, coordinator from 2003 to 2006), Teresa Sales de Mello Suarez (Nepo/Unicamp), Célia Sakurai (Museum of Japanese Immigration and Nepo/Unicamp), Odair Paiva (Unesp and the Memorial to Immigrants Museum), José Renato de Campos Araújo (USP and Idesp) and Maria do Rosário Rolfsen Salles (Unesp and Idesp, coordinator from 2006 to 2008).

Sociologist Maria do Rosário Rolfsen Salles, who devised the project along with Célia Sakurai, explains that in the first stage they tried to identify, organize, catalogue, computerize and archive the documents deposited in the Memorial to Immigrants Museum in São Paulo that concerned the arrival of about 500,000 foreigners, many of whom were lodged in the then Immigrant Hostel in São Paulo. The second stage of the project consisted in conducting the thematic studies that led to work that discussed aspects that had been ill explored by the historiography of im-migration in the period.

“Our project’s chief merit, if we can say that, is providing new research with the possibility of ac-cessing the documentation that is now computerized and that can guide countless pieces of research on the period, such as nationalities, international organisms,



strictions that were already in place in the 1920s, like the end of the sub-sidy policy, or the coffee crisis, which peaked in 1930. The phase was typi-fied by the entry of the Portuguese and those classified as having “other nationalities” (Polish, Russian, Roma-nians, Jews, etc.). The final migratory cycle began when Brazil reopened its immigration policy at the end of World War II, thanks to the political opening that materialized with the ending of the New State period. The inflow during this cycle was much smaller than the previous one and consisted mainly of Italians, Spaniards and “other nation-alities,” as we have seen, from Central and Eastern Europe, in addition to the Japanese as from the 1950s. One of the characteristics of this contingent, says Maria do Rosário, was the presence of refugees between 1947 and 1951 and of stateless individuals who had lost their nationality for various reasons during the war and who were unable or unwill-ing to return to their home countries.

During the work, the researchers had countless surprises, such as the large number of Italians, Spaniards and Japa-

nese who went to the inner-state to work in agricultural concerns and in the city of São Paulo. They also found that these immigrants tended to be concentrated in industrial neighborhoods in the east and south of the city, besides other ar-eas, such as the Center, the north, Vila Leopoldina, Lapa and the west. “In fact, each of these nationalities needs to be researched in order to determine the direction they took in São Paulo.”

F or Célia Sakurai, who has a PhD in social sciences from Unicamp, the database that resulted from

the research makes it possible to re-flect more clearly on the influence of immigrants in São Paulo. She notes that she was unaware of the extent of post-war immigration, especially where the profile of the immigrants is concerned, as it was markedly differ-ent from those who came before World War II. “The variety of occupations also drew her attention, as did the profile of the companies, from the Japanese multinationals which came in the late 1950s, to the small, sometimes family concerns, which welcomed these im-

migrants.” Regarding the Japanese, what drew her attention was the large number of farmers who came to work in agricultural projects.

The researcher believes that the pro-file of Japanese immigrants changed after World War II; they were young, unmarried men who were profession-ally qualified, in contrast to their fellow countrymen who immigrated before the War. These new immigrants, she continues, fitted into the São Paulo industrialization process in positions that required qualifications. They came as technicians in new sectors, such as electronics, metallurgy and project de-sign for air conditioning circuits. “The contribution that this type of informa-tion will add to the study of immigra-tion in Brazil will present a different and little known facet of these people in our country.”

The total cost of the project was about R$ 130,000, expended on creat-ing a program for building the database, setting-up the data input teams, treating and laminating the documents, the pur-chase of permanent material, and a do-mestic and international bibliography on the post-war migration processes and the constitution of international organisms, such as the International Refugees Organization (IRO), the In-ternational Committee for European Migration (Cime) and Japan Migration and Colonization (Jamic). According to Maria do Rosário, what helped to consolidate the project was having two teams of researchers involved, one from the Institute of Economic, Political and Social Research of São Paulo (Idesp) and the other from the Memorial to Immigrants Museum itself, which sub-sequently also incorporated a researcher from Nepo/Unicamp.

Professor Odair da Cruz Paiva, who has a PhD in social history from USP, came into the project while working at the Memorial to Immigrants Mu-seum. One of his jobs was to organize the document collection. At the time,

The last migratory cycle began when Brazil reopened

its immigration policy at the end of WWII

div

ul

ge

me

nt



everything on post-World War II immi-gration was dispersed throughout the collection and disorganized, render-ing research into the subject unfeasible. He recalls that the idea of “The New Immigrants” Project was born out of conversations with professors Célia and Maria do Rosário. “Little by little, we determined its chief objective: to orga-nize and computerize the data in that documentation.” When preparing the project, the team was already formed and had held some discussions about what direction to take.

The functions were divided into two core functions. The first involved orga-nizing the collection and inputting the data in the computerized database. “A team of trainees hired by the Memorial to Immigrants Museum was charged with this task.” The group of research-ers – in which Paiva included himself – supervised and guided the work of the trainees, while also correcting the data-base and collecting information. Each researcher prepared and developed his or her own project, which was fed with data that was being entered. “In my case, I researched the incorporation of these immigrants into the São Paulo industrial market from the 1940s to the 1970s.” Célia embraced Japanese im-migration and Maria do Rosário took the war refugees who came to São Paulo from 1947 to 1951.

P aiva was also responsible for the database, a task he shared with IT technician Paulo Eduardo de Vi-

cente. “We initially wanted to insert the information from the documentation about immigration at this time. Most of it comprises individual records with the personal, professional and family data of the European, Japanese and the Middle Eastern immigrants.” They continued in this vein throughout the project, as this was its main objective. “What happened during the course of the four years it lasted was the need to adapt and change the working system we used for inserting the information and even the database structure; this was largely due to the multiplicity of available supporting documents.”

Paiva believes that the system that was assembled means that the data now reveal much more accurate informa-tion about this period in the Brazilian

immigration process. “In my case, for ex-ample, one can now fully map out the en-terprises that received this labor force, the professional profile of the workers and

their past experience in Europe.” He adds that this is very rich and varied information. “I believe that the project still has the potential for helping many researchers and producing knowledge about immigration in this period that is fundamental.”

At present, the coordinators of “The New Immigrants” want to publicize the initiative as much as possible, so as to encourage other researchers to work with the information gathered. The

team, Paiva points out, is fully aware that many other points of view are fundamental to drawing the most out of the large amount of available data. The idea is to continue the informa-tion analysis work and gradually make it public. This year, the book Migrações pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial [Post-World War II Migration] was com-piled and edited with FAPESP aid. “In this text, some of the issues that arose when carrying out the research were noted, particularly the contributions of experts working with the topic of migration in that period.”

In a way, the researcher concludes, this is essentially unprecedented doc-umentation that has the potential to unveil the many dimensions of immi-gration in São Paulo. n

Application to Brazilian authorities for a visa: flow of refugees

div

ul

ge

me

nt


In October 2009, Nasa sent a rocket onto the Moon. It was part of the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, and proved that water is more abundant and more widespread on Earth’s natural satellite. The sediments collected are also a glimpse into the evolution of the solar system. Upsetting news, though, for artist Sheila Goloborotko: “We are bombing the Moon!”

Anti-romantic attack

art

© sheil

Agoloborotko

| T

he

Da

y W

e B

om

B T

he

mo

on

. OIL

, aS

ph

aLT

, Ma

Rb

LE

dU

ST,

Ga

Uz

E O

N C

aN

va

S, 1

.23

x 1

.53

M, 2

00

9

98 n SpECIaL ISSUE May 2009 / dEC 2010 n PesQUisAFAPesP

098_ArteBR_ingles_2011.indd 98 4/12/11 12:37:53 PM

We are pleased to announce a schedule of VISITS following the 1st Brazilian Bioenergy Science and Technology Conference

The 1st Brazilian Bioenergy Science and Technology Conference will be an outstanding, state-of-the-art event in the field of bioenergy. A privileged forum will be available for experts to present their

latest scientific as well as technological achievements and to discuss business and policy for the development of the sector.

We offer three visits to complement a strong scientific program.Visits will be in two sugarcane production areas in São Paulo state: Ribeirão Preto and Araras.

We will visit São Martinho and São João Mills, and also importantResearch Centers as CTBE, Ridesa, IAC, Canavialis and Amyris.t.

First Brazilian BioenergyScience and Technology Conference

Campos do Jordão, São Paulo, Brazil August, 14th-18th, 2011

Visit schedule: August 18th and 19th, 2011

Breeding

Biotechnology

Molecular biology

Mills, sugar production, ethanol and electric energy processes

Agronomical management of sugarcane production

Harvest and plant mechanization

Wastes uses in sugarcane productionSustainability II - Socio-Economics of Biofuels

Deadline for submissions:

May 15th, 2011 – Submissions for poster presentations

Submit your abstract online

Submissions are invited for poster presentations on the following areas:• Biomass• Biofuel Technologies• Alcoholchemistry and Biorefineries• Engines and other conversion devices• Process Integration• Sustainability

Please submit abstracts using the Online Form.

For the complete meeting details including sponsorship opportunities, visit: http://www.bbest.org.br

A selection of papers will be published as full papers in a special issue of the Global Change Biology Bioenergy Journal.

Special hotel options available

Submit abstract for Oral or Poster presentation

http://bbest.org.brInfotmation: [email protected]

Campos do Jordão - August 14 to 18, 2011

1 BrazilianBioEnergyScience andTechnologyConference

st

BBEST

099_3aCAPA_ingles_2011.indd 99 4/11/11 7:25:14 PM

POST DOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS in São Paulo, Brazil

Gus

tavo

Tíli

o /

LNLS

Edu

ardo

Ces

ar

The São Paulo Research Foundation, FAPESP, one of the main research funding agencies in Brazil, invites talented researchers with a recent PhD degree and a successful research track record to apply for postdoctoral fellowships. In 2010, 66 positions were opened, in virtually all fi elds of knowledge (see http://www.oportunidades.fapesp.br/en/)

Fellowships may also be requested through specifi c proposals presented by a candidate and a supervisor from any research group

affi liated to higher education and research institutions in the state of São Paulo.

FAPESP’s PD Fellowships are granted for 24 months and can be renewed for 12 months. It includes a monthly stipend, travel to and from Brazil expenses for the selected candidate and his family, and an overhead for small research expenses.

For additional information, see http://www.fapesp.br/en/materia/5427/scholarships/post-doctorate-fellowship.htm

For guidance write to [email protected]

100_4acapa_anuncio_ingles_2011.indd 100 4/11/11 6:52:57 PM

Special Issue April 2011

Documents

Transcript of Special Issue April 2011