Award-winning scientist Sandra Díaz slams Milei’s defunding of science

Award-winning ecologist and biologist Sandra Díaz has voiced criticism of President Javier Milei's government and its defunding of scientific research in Argentina.

Díaz, 67, was on Thursday named as one of the "100 most influential people in the world" by Time magazine. Along with Milei, she was the only other Argentine to appear on the international ranking.

However, on Thursday, the researcher at the state-run scientific institute CONICET warned in a radio interview of the “extreme asphyxiation of the scientific and technological system” in Argentina under Milei. 

“Since August of last year, we literally haven’t received a single peso,” Díaz told the Urbana Play radio station. “It’s not a metaphor — we haven’t received a single peso to replace a broken glass beaker in the lab.”

Díaz, a specialist in biodiversity and plant ecology, won the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement earlier this year, the Princess of Asturias Award in 2019, and was part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, among dozens of other accolades.

In 2024, Milei’s first full year in office, the science sector’s budget was reduced by 30.5 percent, according to data from the Ibero-American Centre for Research in Science, Technology & Innovation, which predicts an even greater cut in 2025.

Milei’s stringent austerity plan, which succeeded in balancing the books at the cost of a 4.7 percent GDP cut in state spending, lowered runaway inflation from 211 percent in 2023 to 118 percent in 2024.

Díaz noted that, beyond the budgetary restrictions, “there is also symbolic asphyxiation. There is an attack on the role of scientists in society that has never before happened in Argentine history.”

In a speech last September, Milei described scientists in the public system as a “caste” and said they should “go out into the market” instead of “cowardly hiding behind the coercive force of the State.”

Díaz, who is also a lecturer at the National University of Córdoba (UNC), argued Thursday that most developed countries "invest heavily in fundamental science.” 

“I never would have reached where I am now if nursery school, primary school and university hadn’t been public,” she emphasised.

Argentina has produced five Nobel Prize winners — three of them scientists — all trained in public universities.

– TIMES/AFP