The State of Neuroscience in
Latin America
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There is great diversity in neuroscience in México. For example, there’s great researchers studying membrane channels that regulate electrical activity. There are people who work on how the brain perceives and processes information. There’s people doing molecular biology and gene therapy for brain diseases. There’s researchers working on the study of emotions and fear. We have a spectrum, and it's a wide one.

I’m very proud to be in México because it has a very old tradition in neuroscience. For instance, I trained with Augusto Fernández Guardiola, who was a scientific great-grandson of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. We have a great tradition of important influences that come from the Spanish school by way of Cajal and from the American school by way of Walter Cannon, who collaborated with Mexican researcher Arturo Rosenblueth, who collaborated with Walter Cannon to consolidate paradigms of chemical transmission in the nervous system. These influences have enabled excellent research in neuroscience and other areas, such as neuropharmacology. We are going through a tough time economically, but I think our research is very good.

Policy is very focused, even today, on clinical research. There’s a major limitation because they'll always ask you to include knowledge transfer or innovation products. This has caused funding for basic sciences to be reduced enormously, and that’s where you have to look for international sources to be able to do it.

I see [neuroscience in Colombia] as a snapshot of history that is starting to take off in many areas all at once. It's a very interesting thing because these are groups that are colonizing different fields in such a way that I see a really, really promising future for behavioral neuroscience, social neuroscience and everything related to psychophysiology.

São Paulo is a haven in which neuroscience progresses. I would say all sciences. And maybe over time that model is spreading to the other states, but still it's not fully developed in other states.

There's been a lot of interest in psychedelics in the past 10 years. There’s a huge interest in our institutes, and in different institutes in São Paulo. And there’s lots of research at the interface in indigenous culture and pharmacology. There’s a law in Brazil that because ayahuasca is culturally important for Indigenous people, it can be used for research.

Neuroscience in Chile is in good health. My team and I at the neuroscience center of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile have contributed to that by creating a neuroscience doctorate and generating an entire generation of cognitive neuroscientists in the country. There are now long-standing traditions in molecular neuroscience—and particularly in biophysics—in Chile, dating back to the 1970s and the study of ion channels in nerves. We were very fortunate, and a very strong tradition was established.

Chile is, by far, one of the countries in Latin America that dedicates a very small percentage of its gross domestic product to science. That is not a good strategy if one wants to progress. The number of users of the financing system of science has increased—at the least, it has doubled. It was difficult to win a project before; now it has become an arena of gladiators.

Despite the dire situation that Argentine science is going through, the neuroscience field is making a huge effort of resistance, and the Argentine Society for Neuroscience Research plays a crucial role in this. The situation is adverse, but the society has been organizing activities and meetings of very high scientific caliber at low costs. This unites us to preserve the quality of our science and keep us motivated, despite the destruction that Javier Milei’s government is causing.

We had been doing very beautiful science; it makes no sense to lose what the country has invested in having strong science which has given us Nobel Prizes, such as Bernardo Alberto Houssay. It is an emptying that will be very hard to come back from because there are resources being lost, research lines are being abandoned due to lack of funding, and because there is no one to continue doing science.

Our political class does not fully understand the relevance of basic research. Despite this, we still do very good neuroscience here. At the Clemente Estable Institute, there are great researchers such as Federico Trigo and Raúl Russo. And in my institute, la Universidad de la República, there are also a lot of excellent researchers, such as Gonzalo Budelli and Michel Borde.

The neuroscience system in Uruguay has a relatively short life span of about 40 years, which is not a lot in comparison to other Latin American countries. For example, I’m in the first generation of graduates that studied biological sciences with a focus on neuroscience at the beginning of the 2000s in Uruguay. It's interesting to see how we are adding ourselves to the current scientific landscape.