Leia este artigo em português.
A pulmón. That’s how neuroscientists in Latin America say they get their work done: through sheer grit in the face of numerous obstacles, including an ongoing lack of infrastructure and funding. For this report, which you can explore here, we spoke to nearly 50 Latin American neuroscientists to learn how those constraints shape the way they work—and how they conduct high-quality research despite them.
A common theme we heard was that Latin American neuroscientists make use of what is available to them. Native animals can reveal the power of using nontraditional models. Because new technologies can be expensive, researchers build their own infrastructure from scratch. “We put it together with wire,” one Argentine saying goes.
“It’s not as if there’s a department that hands you the electrodes; you have to make the electrodes yourself. It’s not as if there’s a data scientist who runs the analyses for you; you have to perform the analyses yourself,” says Agustín Ibáñez, an Argentine neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin who founded LatBrain, which seeks to advance brain research in Latin America.
In these stories of how Latin American neuroscientists have adapted to limited resources lie lessons for all researchers on how make the most of what is available to them and how these constraints can inspire new ways to work and collaborate.
But the story of neuroscience in Latin America is not just one of scarcity: Across the region, researchers are constantly contributing important findings and innovative ways of thinking to the field at an international level.
Here we focus on neuroscientists and institutions from six countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay—chosen based on our reporting and a study that quantified neuroscience and psychology research output. It is not a comprehensive picture, so stay tuned for our ongoing coverage from these and other countries in Latin America, including dispatches from the Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies (FALAN) meeting in Santiago, Chile, this week.
“In some countries, where neuroscience is developed, I see it keeping pace with neuroscience across the globe,” says Luiz Mello, director of research and innovation at the Instituto D’Or de Pesquisa e Ensino in Brazil. But still, “there is a long, long way to go in many, many countries.”
Read additional coverage from The Transmitter in Spanish and Portuguese.
