Sir

I am appalled by your editorial of 16 April, asserting that Argentina's national research council (CONICET) spends nearly all its money on 3,000 staff scientists but has now set up a new agency, in collaboration with industry, to produce sound science (Nature 392, 635; 1998).

I would like to mention a few facts and events that influenced the careers of those 3,000 researchers. In 1961, a secretary of state who did not tolerate Jews fired the director of the Malbran Institute of Immunology, Ignacio Pirosky, provoking the resignation and exile of most of the research personnel. In 1966, the military destroyed the School of Exact and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (“Exactas”), beating and incarcerating researchers, and had the laboratories exorcised by a priest. Luis Botet was appointed president of the university by the military: he fired all scientists who expressed solidarity with their Exactas colleagues. Hence, 1,315 scientists left the country.

In 1976, Raul Matera, undersecretary of science and technology, bought 40 crucifixes for CONICET's offices, despite the small amount of money available for research. The Argentinian government passed a law of amnesty to pardon all the military involved in torturing and murdering tens of thousands of people, as well as a law of punto final (no more questions asked), but refused to compensate researchers who had been fired and deprived of their labs. In 1990, finance minister Domingo Cavallo said that he would prefer scientists “to wash dishes”. Accordingly, those 3,000 researchers referred to in your editorial are paid meagre salaries, and have almost no money to run their labs. Argentina has a far larger and more productive community of researchers in exile abroad than it has at home.

To appreciate the quality of Argentinian researchers, one has only to note that they publish in the best international journals, they frequently work in first-rate universities in Britain, France and the United States, and are awarded all types of distinctions, including the Nobel prize. Argentina has some poorly financed research, but no science, because while the first depends on the ability of a few thousand, science is a way of interpreting reality that Argentina has never developed. Thus, not a single workers' union or society of entrepreneurs complained when the universities were destroyed. Consequently, today masses of unemployed people beg San Cayetano (the patron saint of workers) for work.

Argentina is not willing to accept that, in order to develop science, an ethical transformation is required, not just of its scientific infrastructure but of its society in general. Its ideal seems to be to combine technology with theology. For local governments, science is something that comes only after countries become rich. So they appoint managers to decide scientific matters.