Technologies to drive Spain forward Science and innovation at last?

Summary:

On 17 November, the Rafael del Pino Foundation organised the meeting "Technologies to boost Spain: Science and innovation at last?", with the participation of Javier García Martínez, President of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; Sonia A. Contera, Professor of Biological Physics at the University of Oxford, and Iñaki Berenguer, co-founder and CEO of CoverWallet.

The event began with the presentation, by Javier García, of the results of the work of the Chair of Science and Society of the Rafael del Pino Foundation, materialised in the publication of the book "España a ciencia cierta. A look at the future we can build", published by Gestión2000. According to Javier García, the fourth industrial revolution is the train that is passing in front of us and that we are once again letting pass us by.

The report begins with an in-depth analysis of the Spanish economic reality, defined by SMEs, their temporary nature, structural unemployment of 12%, huge youth unemployment and low productivity compared to our European partners.

Since 1996, our country's exports have remained virtually unchanged. We continue to produce and export the same. Most of the leading countries in the economy have completely changed their production system. They have incorporated new technologies, while Spain continues to have a production system with a low level of economic complexity, which is what this Harvard University index analyses. This analysis highlights the low complexity of our production system. Therefore, it can be copied and relocated outside our country.

From this perspective, the ten technologies selected in this year's report are as follows:

-We have all suffered from telemedicine over the last year and a half, because it does not live up to the possibilities offered by technology. The <strong>second generation telemedicine</strong> It will not only enable more efficient interaction with the healthcare system, but also reduce costs and improve diagnosis for the next generation of patients.

-The <strong>change from electron to photon</strong> will also have a huge advantage, not only in environmental impact, but also in the speed and efficiency of countless systems, such as LIDAR and LIFI, which are alternative technologies to radar and wifi based on light instead of passing electrons.

-The <strong>green hydrogen generation</strong> is the great opportunity for Spain. Spain is Europe's green electron factory, but if we sell green electrons, we sell raw materials. The idea is to use these electrons to generate green molecules, such as hydrogen or green ammonia, and thus move up the value chain and sell high value-added products instead of raw materials.

-For more than a hundred years, Spain has been a leader in neuroscience. Today, it is a leader in many technologies that demonstrate the <strong>brain-machine connection</strong> which will allow us to interact with robots and computers in a much more natural way.

-The following figures are surprising, but they show the enormous value of the <strong>mathematics.</strong> In the UK, the contribution of mathematics to GDP is 43%. Behind this are insurance, logistics, the financial system. All these big industries are basically data. In Spain we still have a long way to go to ensure that the gold of the 21st century, data, is used as efficiently as possible. Mathematics has a fundamental role to play here. Hence the importance of education in mathematics, so that Spain can lead this data economy.

We have suffered the non-augmented reality of videoconferencing, of screens. In the new technologies that we are proposing, we are talking about a <strong>mixed reality (between virtual and augmented reality),</strong> where it is impossible to distinguish the virtual from the physical world. There are technologies that already allow this and yet we are still far behind in terms of what the technology allows in streaming communication. In practice, virtual reality is something that is still in the first generation when we have far superior technologies.

-One of the great contributions to the fight against Covid has been the <strong>nanosensors</strong> which have allowed us to identify the presence of antibodies in a very sensitive way. But it is in the Third World where the potential of this type of sensor is really being realised, to identify diseases that are difficult to diagnose at a reasonable price, in countries that do not have a health system as advanced as ours.

-Spain is a world power in <strong>supercomputing.</strong> We have great infrastructures and, without a doubt, this capacity can help us take off. Mathematics, together with supercomputing, will allow us to lead in the use of data. We are leaders in supercomputing capacity. This is a tool we cannot afford to miss out on.

-If there is one technology that should be singled out, it would undoubtedly be the <strong>precision agriculture.</strong> Precision agriculture is a necessity for a country that overuses fertilisers, which causes very serious environmental problems; in a country that makes very poor use of resources, that has a shortage of water. Precision agriculture, that is, the use of nanosensors, the internet of things, satellite information, drones, would allow us not only to make better use of the countryside but also to contribute to repopulating depopulated Spain, giving greater benefit to the people who work in the countryside. Other countries are leaders in this sector -Israel is an example of precision agriculture- and there is no reason why our country should not be committed to the same type of technology.

-The <strong>nanomedicine</strong> has played a very important role in the Covid vaccines. These vaccines contain genetic material that would not have been able to enter cells without decades of research into intelligent drug delivery, in this case genetic material that enters our cells by endocytosis and enables our immune system to respond so effectively.

These technologies can improve the quality of life of our citizens and the competitiveness of our industries. Citizens who do not know about them are going to be technologically illiterate. When we have to make decisions on issues that are going to affect our quality of life, our employment and our industry, if we do not know what we are choosing, there is no freedom without knowledge.

Technology is important, but in the end it is about people. Technologies are not going to solve our problems; it is people who ultimately have to put them into practice and make them a reality. We are living in a very special moment. We are coming out of a pandemic. We have a tight economy. Public debt is huge. Structural unemployment is growing. The speed of transformation is increasing. It is important that we think about the country we want to build together. We have the funds, we have the technology, we have the human capacity, we have the infrastructure to make a more competitive country a reality. This undoubtedly involves science, technology, knowledge and people.

This was followed by the intervention of professor and researcher Sonia A. Contreras, who stressed that Spanish scientists are very good and are used to competing internationally. They are very competitive. We think much more than in other countries about why science arises and materialises in our country. There are historical reasons. Despite the fact that scientists and technologists in Spain have a lot of talent, a lot of knowledge, Spain still does not have a scientific identity that allows us to face the challenges of the 21st century in the position we should have and do not have.

One of the things that made him go to Japan was trying to understand how a country went from being feudal in the 19th century to being the world's second largest economy through technology. You have to understand the cultural and historical context in which technology starts and becomes part of a country and how those countries, through technology, become powerful players in the world and in global geopolitics.

There is a common thread running through most of the technologies in the report and those that are beginning to be developed now that are going to have a major impact and change the way we live. Since the 19th century, which is the century of the great European empires, and throughout the 20th century, a science has developed that tries to reduce nature to simple laws. It is a science that divides the world and reality into different disciplines: physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry. It is a science that tries to control reality by reducing it to simple systems, systems that follow mathematics, that follow logic, reason. Human reason imposes itself on nature, and humans, using technology, impose themselves on other countries. It is a science that simplifies, that creates fertilisers and quickly improves production but does not think about what will happen afterwards, about the environmental consequences.

What is happening to us in the 21st century, climate change, for example, is making us confront where the scientific paradigm of reduction and simplification has taken us. Reality is complex, very complex, and science arises from that tension between the complexity of reality and the human need for simple systems that we can understand. Out of that tension comes the technology that allows us to survive and create ourselves.

Creativity creates us and gives us freedom. But simplification has led us to ignore climate change, the effect on nature. But neither has it allowed us to see the effect of science on people, on the lack of diversity, on gender issues, on the lack of equity.

In the 21st century we reach a point where technologies, by themselves, are stuck with the reductionist way of thinking of the 20th century. Mathematics meets artificial intelligence in neural networks and machine learning, which is not a normal way of doing mathematics and computation. It is a way that we don't understand, but it is capable of handling lots and lots of data, of starting to deal with complexity. Medicine has moved towards nanomedicine, to look for frontiers with other fields, such as physics, to take into account other ways of understanding how to deal with technical problems that are not solved, such as cancer. This has led to immunotherapies, such as vaccines, which use the complexity of the body's immunity to solve health problems that could not be solved with 20th century thinking.

All the technologies presented in the report have this common thread. Photonics, which allows us to make better computations of more data. Hydrogen, which allows us to tackle climate change. We have entered the age of complexity and all the sciences are starting to converge in multidisciplinary ways to deal with that complexity, which is what we need to do to survive in the 21st century.

This is called multidisciplinarity. Throughout the 20th century we have divided the sciences and now we realise that to solve complex problems we have to go back to using them all at once.

The Soviet suprematists thought a lot about what happens to a society when everything tries to rationalise too much, when everything tries to rationalise in order to survive, which is what the Soviet Union was trying to do. The suprematists realised that rationality has holes, that there are gaps, that not everything is rational in existence.

This idea was also being taken up by mathematicians such as Goedel, who in 1931 showed that rationality and logic cannot be a true representation of reality. There are things that cannot be solved by simple, rational models alone. The Turing machine, on which our computers are based, was designed by Turing to show that reality is not logical.

From a cultural point of view, it is also very interesting that intellectuals and scientists in the non-Western colonised countries were already thinking at the beginning of the 20th century where we were going to end up now. The limits of the Western system of science are very well explained by one of the best Indian scientists, the founder of physics in India, Jagadish Chandra Bose, in a work of science fiction, "Runaway cyclone". And also Junichiro Tazinaki, in a very famous work, "In Praise of the Shadow", when Japan begins to modernise.

The report is the scientists' vision of how science affects society. On the one hand, science is creativity and gives us freedom and identity, the identity of a country if we want it to be a global player. Science itself, creativity, business, what they are looking for is equality, equity and social justice. When a scientist sets out to create something, he does it to make it cheaper, fairer, to make a better society.

New technologies present problems for democracy. Algorithms that do not allow us to be free or that will further promote inequality. But science, because it is born of creativity, actually has a vocation for democracy.

In this complex system, the powers that be also try to use science to maintain their power and that is where geopolitics comes in, what is Spain's role, what is the hole through which we can get out. That is identity. So creativity, identity and science are related to geopolitics. In order to be a global player in power games, a country needs to have a scientific identity.

One of the questions is why we do not have a scientific identity in Spain, why Spain feels more comfortable buying technology than generating it, why we need a language of our own that we do not have. One of the reasons is the fragmentation of the ecosystem, which does not allow us to create an identity. Japan, in the 19th century, was a country isolated from the world that began to see China fragment and start to be dominated by Western powers. Then a squadron of ships arrived from America, the famous black ships of Commodore Perry, and the Japanese began to see that either they would seek a reason, a technological identity of their own, or they would lose their role in the world, they would be colonised. Because of this risk of now or never, either we learn science or we will end up like China, Japan digested three hundred years of Western science and culture in thirty years. They learned everything and created a technological society that in 1905 became the first non-European country to defeat a European country in the Russo-Japanese war. That was the beginning of the European fear of Asians.

The same thing happens in China when they decide that they too will have an atomic bomb. That's where Huawei comes from. China decides it is not going to be a vassal of the West. All these countries have an existential risk if they don't have science.

Spain has a very different historical context. At the beginning of the 20th century it had very good scientists, such as Ramón y Cajal, or great physicists, and we have not been able to recover that scientific identity. This scientific identity is necessary to create a vision for the future. We have to know why we do science, what our history is and what we want to contribute to the world. When we see that Korea makes our phones, we also realise that they win Oscars in the cinema and we buy books by their philosophers. These are countries that are very actively thinking about what they are, what they want to be and what role technology is going to play.

In Spain we have an opportunity because, lacking this scientific identity, it allows us to create a new one. In the 21st century we are facing a new world, the world of complexity, and we are going to need new scientific identities because the ones we have now are of no use to us.

Communication is important not only for people to understand science, but also to avoid an even more dangerous risk. There are many movements in the world that are anti-science, that try to control the power of science by creating anti-science. Science creates democracy, it creates new powers that sometimes confront the established powers. There is a lot of interest in curbing science. Ever since man landed on the moon there has been a lot of interest in curbing science. We see it now in the anti-vaccine movements, or in those who deny climate change. This goes back a long way. If we have had a model of society that sought to control nature, which for a century was the goal of power, now many men resist protecting the environment because they don't see it as masculine, they see it as a feminine action. This means that personal stereotypes, the way we behave, also reflect the power games that exist in society and that creates a new challenge for scientists, which is to be good communicators in science, because we see that it can create fairer societies, but if we don't communicate, anti-science can win.

The movement of science towards complexity will also create problems in technology transfer models. Spain is failing in this. The patent production model, the idea that from the university you could make a patent and with it create a company and go out into the world to see if it worked, is becoming less and less likely because of the complexity of science itself. A good example is Moderna. Moderna is looking for technology. It's a group of people who know a lot of science, who work with very experienced investors, who a long time ago thought there was a big opportunity in RNA for cancer treatment and for vaccines. They put together a group, looked for patents where they were and, with a vision of several years and many experts, they have created a new model of creating companies in the new era of complexity.

The stereotype of the entrepreneur is a man in a T-shirt, in Silicon Valley, who sets up a wonderful thing because he is very smart, also affects us a lot in the way we invest. Companies are not necessarily a man in a T-shirt, very smart and young, but they are quite complex groups of people, which even include women, who are the companies that are really making an impact. There are very few women-led businesses. Only 1.7% of funding goes to women-led startups.

Pandemic companies are proving that these stereotypes are not real. Pfizer, created by two sons of Turkish immigrants, led by a man and a woman who are married. The Oxford vaccine, which is the decades-long work of Professor Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green. And, of course, the work of Catalin Kaliko, a Hungarian immigrant biologist in the United States, who was the one who thought of using RNA to make vaccines and who no one supported. So there are new stereotypes in science and this is another opportunity for Spain.

Finally, a dialogue took place between Javier García, Sonia A. Contera and Iñaki Berenguer.

Iñaki Berenguer: The big problems are related to climate change and the health of the seas. Where value is going to be created in the next ten years is in extending the life of the planet and extending the life of humans, living those extra years better. To achieve both of these things requires the use of technology and the convergence of many of these technologies. Just on the issue of climate change, if you think about the commitments of individual companies and governments, you have to leverage technology. The same goes for human lifespan extension, which is going to be achieved through advances in computing, artificial intelligence and genomics.

Sonia Contera: The problem is how to define progress and what it is. Homo sapiens emerged two hundred thousand years ago, but people didn't start producing mathematics until two thousand years ago. We have produced a technology that has caused us to become more and more separated from the nature from which we emerged. It has given us a mirage of power over nature that we are paying for with climate change. It has given us power, but it is bringing us to the brink of extinction. The great challenge is to be able to reconnect with technology, to be able to create a technology that allows us to live in another way, as cultures that understand sustainability, with another relationship with nature. That is the kind of knowledge that we are desperately trying to seek with technologies, that give us a more meaningful life, that allow us to have a much stronger relationship with nature. That is why technology has not given us a successful development process.

Javier García: When you try to help sustainable development goals, for example, ending hunger, you end up increasing CO2 emissions. When you try to reduce poverty by creating more jobs, it has more impact on water, on the environment. Reality is very complex and when you intervene in it there are always negative consequences. Societies perceive science and technology with mistrust, which makes their world more difficult and complex because reality is not intuitive. Another thing, also, is that technology is a generator of inequality because, in reality, not all countries, not all communities can develop these technologies and implement them. Many countries are not growing because they do not have access to this technology, nor will they. That's why we have to be especially sensitive to the fact that technology is a problem solver, which it is not always. This rejection of technology can be seen very clearly with the anti-vaccine, anti-denialists, when the evidence is clear. We have to think about why science loses the battle.

With regard to the perception of Spain in science, the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the Second Republic had in science the country's commitment to science and technology so that Spain could emerge from the crisis of 1998. In April 1934, Spain held the first major science congress in Spain when, after centuries, it opened up to international science. And this was because part of what Spain wanted to build during the regenerationist period, and above all during the Second Republic, was a country for and by science. This was not part of the construction of the Spain of 1978. There were some efforts that tried to put it there, but in today's democratic Spain they have not been part of that project. Spain is not there. A few years ago Spain decided to stop paying dues to international scientific organisations and we were expelled from the international scientific unions because it was of no interest. Spain is not in these forums because we do not consider science and technology a priority. One of the lessons of the pandemic is that science and technology are a matter of state because they are part of national security. In problems such as climate change or the pandemic, Spain is not there leading the solutions. Countries that have been able to develop their vaccines have set the price and deadlines for others to buy vaccines. Spain has depended on others, the European Union, for the great threat we have had in recent years. If we do not invest in science and technology as a defence and national security strategy, then we have learned nothing in the last year and a half.

Iñaki Berenguer: According to the data on scientific publications, it seems that we are relevant in science. But the most important thing is the marketing of that science. What people talk about is a company called Moderna, which is the commercialisation of that science. This is the case of Oxford with AstraZeneca. Because it's one thing to do science and another to commercialise that science. You can be very good at doing science, but then making the leap to commercialisation requires other skills to be successful, and I don't think we are seen in the world as relevant when it comes to commercialising the science that is done here. When it comes to commercialising discoveries, you have to create teams, organisations, know how to scale the company, how to set prices, how to position yourself in the value chain, how to commercialise a technological innovation. All of this is lacking here, including the first step, which is that there should be no obstacles when it comes to technology transfer, or making it easy for scientists to set up a company. The second is investment. In Spain, this is changing a lot. The third thing is that there is an ecosystem, which means that the company is closer to the university, that there are venture capital funds, that there are lawyers to help with the patent system. That is why the big science commercialisation hubs around the world are around universities, such as Stanford in Silicon Valley, MIT and Harvard in Boston, Cambridge and Oxford in England. The university has no conflict of interest when it comes to commercialisation because that is not its purpose. That is why it is the centre of ecosystems, but in Spain you don't see the university playing that role.

Sonia Contera: How others see you is the main problem in creating your identity. Countries with scientific powers, such as Korea, Japan or Germany, are not interested in having competitors and will not help you to have a good identity. You have to create your own identity. Japan, Korea and China created their scientific identity through existential risk, because they didn't want to end up colonised like India did. For this they used a lot of neo-Confucianism, which is very similar to the complexity science we have now. The key reason why Asia is going to dominate the science of the future is not only because they want to dominate it, but because their cultural context of Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucianism is, fundamentally, a model of complexity that adapts to their culture. That's why they are so good at robotics and computing. Spain did have a scientific identity. Science was fundamental to the Spain that wanted to build itself in the 20th century. That was lost in the Transition. The problem is that you can't create an identity when Spain doesn't have an identity as a country. One of the good things about leaving a place that has no identity is that you can create a new one fit for the 21st century. We need more equality between countries, between genders, between society. Science creates inequality, but not science itself, but because of the system of power that controls science.

The camps are created very homogeneous. People elect people like themselves to create the power structures within their own fields. Then when you go to talk to another camp you have a cultural shift because you have homogenised your camp in a way that separates it from what you have next to you. That's why diversity is important. Everything you do has to take into account the society you come from. Reactions come from a lack of communication, humility and diversity.

Javier García: The problem is not a common language, because we are going to realise that there is a multiplicity of languages. What we need to do is to align objectives and incentives. When we have faced the pandemic, we have aligned objectives and we have understood each other very well, even though the agents spoke different languages. The administration had to get out of the way in the sense that we have simplified the procedures, we have speeded up the protocols so that things could arrive as soon as possible. We can agree on objectives and incentives and this is where our future lies. The European Union has invested more in supercomputing in Spain than in any other EU country. We already have that infrastructure, that incentive is already clear. The question is how we are going to align scientists to take advantage of this great opportunity, how we are going to get American funds to come to Spain to finance these supercomputing projects because the infrastructure has already been paid for by others. That is the challenge, not to dream that in the end we are all going to speak the same language.

Iñaki Berenguer: In the Anglo-Saxon world there are actors who have moved in all three areas, as scientists, entrepreneurs and investors. When they move from one place to another, they begin to understand each other much better. When you define a strategy of where we are from and where we are going, you have to answer three questions: where do I want to compete, how do I want to compete and when do I want to compete. When you answer those three questions, you have to look at whether the conditions are in place for all the things you want to achieve to exist. The conditions are talent, density and critical mass. With any of these big science commercialisation initiatives, you can't be a leader in everything, so you have to focus on specific technologies and see if those conditions are in place.

Javier García: To attract and retain talent you have to create a community. People who go to MIT go because things happen there, there is a community that encourages you to do great things. With initiatives like Celera we try to make extraordinary things happen in our country. It is those communities that change the country. Those are the incentives and the goals that we can align. First, identify what we want to build together as a country. To scientists, who need long-term funding and simplification, ending bureaucracy, which is what is killing us on a day-to-day basis in science. To investors, simplification, red carpet, so that they can have an immediate return. The Administration has the great role of being the great convener, the moderator of this meeting that allows us to create these common objectives and that the incentives are clear and do not change.

Sonia Contera: I would add that when we go somewhere, because things are happening, scientists and investors don't go because they want to make money, but because you have a good time. Creation makes you have a meaningful life. You have to create these communities, which create people who, when they have a good time, create things. In Oxford we have started a programme we call Creative Destruction. It's a very simple entrepreneurship programme where students, or whoever, come up with a business model. A group of scientists, CEOs and investors from all over the world help these companies as a group to localise globally, to look for money, to look for strategies. We mentors do it for free. There are the biggest CEOs in the world and they do it because they have fun and because they like to be in contact with the next generation. The common language comes out very quickly because what we want is for the student's company to succeed.

Iñaki Berenguer: The pandemic has also helped people rethink where they want to live. There are places that are very intellectually stimulating, like living in Boston, which has Harvard and MIT, but the winters, from the end of November to the end of April, are horrible. If people can combine spending two weeks there, two weeks here, another week in the Canary Islands or wherever they want, that's something that Spain can benefit from in order to attract more talent. It is important that people interact in the real world and not in the virtual world. We have to make it easy for all these people who want to come, but at the bureaucratic level it is very complicated, for example, with residency, medical care, paying taxes.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for the comments, opinions or statements made by the people who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their sole responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference are the result of the debates held at the meeting held for this purpose at the Foundation and are the responsibility of their authors.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for any comments, opinions or statements made by third parties. In this respect, the FRP is not obliged to monitor the views expressed by such third parties who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their own responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference are the result of the discussions that took place during the conference organised for this purpose at the Foundation and are the sole responsibility of its authors.

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