newsletter no. 31 iii/2012 international spotlight on ... · newsletter no. 31 iii/2012...

BOLETÍN FUNDACIÓN BBVA N.º 13 FEBRERO 2008 MEDIOAMBIENTE 1

NEWSLETTER No. 31 III/2012

International Spotlight on

Scientific Culture

Presentation ceremony of the fourth BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards

ContentsThe BBVA Foundation trains a spotlight on

scientific culture in Europe and the United States 3

An international celebration of science and culture as

motors of development 8

Sixty-four experts provide a comprehensive guide to

allergies in a new BBVA Foundation publication 18

Daron Acemoglu (MIT) discusses what makes nations prosper 20

Accolades in the Spanish Physics Awards go to particle

research and industrial applications 22

Andrei Linde (Stanford University): “The multiverse is

the most natural concept, the theory that best fits the data” 24

Erica Villa (University of Modena): “Menopause alters the

response to hepatitis C treatment” 25

The complete version of Ginastera’s ballet Panambí in the

charge of the Gran Canaria Philharmonic under Pedro Halffter 26

MISCELLANY 27

NEW PUBLICATIONS 30

FORUM. Prof. Lorenzo Serrano

The complex employment situation of Spanish graduates 32

Fundación BBVA

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Fax: +34 91 374 85 22

[email protected]

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BBVA Foundation Newsletter

No. 31, III/2012

Distributed free of charge

Project and editorial management:

Carlos Gil

Translations:

Karen Welch

Editorial coordination:

Editorial Nerea, S. A.

Graphic design and production:

Eurosíntesis

Legal deposit: SS-1318/06

The opinions and conclusions

expressed in this newsletter are solely

the responsibility of the authors and

do not necessarily reflect the views of

the BBVA Foundation.

An electronic version of this newsletter

is available at www.fbbva.es

BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012 PUBLIC OPINION 3

he BBVA Foundation has unveiled the results of its International Study on Scientific

Culture, based on a wide-ranging survey as regards both the size of the sample (1,500 interviewees in each of the 11 coun-tries analyzed) and the variety of issues broached. This latest study not only repro-duces the standard indicators in the field, it also adds some new measures into the mix along with conceptual and metrical innovations.

A society attuned to and familiar with sci-ence and technology is better equipped to take individual decisions (as patients, consumers, in work and daily life) as well as being more open to innovation and the opportunities yielded by today’s global changes.

The study was conducted in 10 European Union countries: Spain, Italy, Austria,

the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom and Denmark, as well as in the United States. Information was gathered through 1,500 face-to-face interviews in each coun-try (an approximate total of 16,500 inter-viewees) with the population aged 18 and over, conducted by TNS Opinion over October and November 2011. The design and analysis of the study are the work of the BBVA Foundation’s Department of Social Studies and Public Opinion.

More interested than informed

A useful starting point to explore citizens’ connection with science is the interest they show in news items on scientific issues.

Stated interest in news about scientific issues stands in the medium-to-high range (average of 6.0 in the United States

and 5.6 in Europe on a scale from 0 to 10). But this interest fails to translate as a sim-ilar level of information, which averages just 5.0 in Europe and 5.4 in the United States. This gap appears in all the coun-tries surveyed and is particularly wide in Spain: although Spaniards’ interest is in line with the European average (5.7 on a scale from 0 to 10), their subjective level of information (average 4.7) trails some way behind.

TV is respondents’ main source of infor-mation on science topics, with the news-papers in second place (figure 1). Citizens in the United States are likelier to follow scientific information then their European counterparts. Within Europe, attentive-ness is highest in Denmark, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and lower by a significant margin in Spain, the Czech Republic and Italy. Spain stands out as one of the European countries where peo-

T

The BBVA Foundation trains a spotlight on scientific culture in Europe and the United States

Source: BBVA Foundation International Study on Scientific Culture.

FIGURE 1: Could you tell me how often you do each of the following things? Percentage answering “very or quite often”

47.2

22.8

27.4

30.6

31.8

36.7

43.7

46.7

47.9

54

58.1

41

0 20 40 60 80 100

United States

Spain

Czech Republic

Italy

Austria

Poland

France

Netherlands

Germany

Denmark

United Kingdom

Total Europe

0 20 40 60 80 100

31.8

13.7

15.2

19.8

21

23.5

28.3

30.8

23

37.8

32.9

24

0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100

33.7

17.4

21

22.6

28.3

24.7

33.9

51.9

37.4

48.1

42.5

31.7

15.5

10

12.7

13.7

13.6

16

19.6

13.3

17.6

25.4

21.8

16.6

… watch TV programs covering science and technology topics?

… read news items or sections in the newspapers about science and technology topics?

… search for or follow information on science and technology topics on the Internet?

… listen to radio programs covering science and technology topics?

4 PUBLIC OPINION BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012

ple pay least heed to this kind of news: 23% of Spaniards say they often watch TV programs on science and technology topics against a European average of 41%, while 18% read news items or sections in the newspapers about science and tech-nology topics compared to Europe’s 32%.

Citizens have little custom of visiting sci-ence museums or exhibitions, though they are likelier to do so in the United States than Europe (32% and 25% respec-tively). Within Europe, the 30% mark is only surpassed in Germany and the Netherlands (in Spain, meantime, 21% had visited this kind of center in the last 12 months). Participation in conferences or talks on science subjects is lower still (12% in Europe and the United States and 6% in Spain).

Respondents’ personal connection with the scientific career is very weak indeed. Only a minority have a friend who is a sci-entist (an average of 22% in Europe and 20% in the United States) and fewer still have thought at some point of taking up a science-related career (17% and 32% respectively), though note here the signifi-cant lead of the United States. Similarly, science topics were found to receive scant and uneven attention in day-to-day con-versation. Within Europe, the Danes are

those conversing most frequently on this kind of subject (50% saying they do so often or quite often, followed at a distance by the British and Dutch with almost 38%). The Spanish stand at the opposite extreme, with only 15% saying they con-verse often or quite often about scientific topics.

Through a combined analysis of these factors, the BBVA Foundation study was

able to determine citizens’ “closeness” to the science object. This, it found, was universally low, with only 29% in the United States and 22% in Europe respectively evidencing a high degree of closeness against the 14% and 27% registering no connection whatsoever. Within Europe, the highest level of close-ness corresponded to Denmark and the Netherlands (around 40%), ahead of the United Kingdom, United States, France

High Medium Low None

28 28.3 14.3

9.3 18 28.6 44

11.5 15.7 29 43.8

11.9 18.3 31.3 38.5

15.7 19.7 39.5 25.1

23.4 18.1 29.3 29.2

25.8 26.9 28.3 19

27.6 27 25.5 19.9

31.3 24.6 27.8 16.3

37.4 29.1 23.2 10.3

39.2 28.8 22.3 9.8

21.8 22.7 28.9 26.6

0 20 40 60 80 100

United States

Italy

Spain

Czech Republic

Poland

Austria

Germany

France

United Kingdom

Netherlands

Denmark

Total Europe


FIGURE 2: Distribution of level of closeness to science (0-20) (Base: all cases)

28.8

36.4

38.1

40.7

44.2

48.1

51.6

54.3

55.8

57.7

59.7

61

62.5

63.2

65.5

78.5

82

83

86

91

Human stem cells are extracted from human embryos without destroying the embryos (F)

Antibiotics destroy viruses (F)

Atoms are smaller than electrons (F)

Today it is not possible to transfer genes from humans to animals (F)

The light that reaches the Earth from the Sun is made up of a single color: white (F)

Lasers work by sound waves (F)

It is the father’s gene that determines a newborn baby’s sex; whether it is a boy or a girl (T)

Ordinary tomatoes, the ones we normally eat, do not have genes, whereas genetically engineered tomatoes do (F)

All radioactivity is a product of human activity (F)

The greenhouse effect is caused by the use of nuclear power (F)

Plants have no DNA (F)

The earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs (F)

Generally speaking, human cells do not divide (F)

Almost all microorganisms are harmful to human beings (F)

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed from one form to another (T)

Earth’s gravity pulls objects towards it without them being touched (T)

The gene is the basic unit of heredity of living beings (T)

The oxygen we breathe comes from plants (T)

The continents have been moving for millions of years and will continue to move in the future (T)

Hot air rises (T)

0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100

17.4

24.3

30.4

27.6

28.8

32.9

47.1

35.4

41.3

34.4

45.1

51.6

43.2

44.9

73.6

74.4

71.4

76.8

77.3

82


FIGURE 3: I’d like you to tell me to what extent you think each of the sentences I read out is true or false"Percentage answering correctly" (totally true or probably true – totally false or probably false). (Base: all cases)


and Germany (around 30%), with the Czech Republic, Spain and Italy trailing somewhere below 15% (see figure 2).

Testing knowledge: from biology to physics, from classical to recent science

The BBVA Foundation study scored respondents for their level of knowledge of selected scientific concepts and theo-ries according to their number of correct answers to statements drawn from disci-plines like biology, physics, etc. Citizens, it transpires, are more familiar with basic or classical scientific concepts, while those linked to more recent areas such as genetic engineering tend to attract lower knowledge scores (see figure 3).

The figures are eloquent. Over 80% of citizens in the majority of counties sur-veyed know that “Hot air rises”, that “The continents on which we live have been moving for millions of years and will con-tinue to move in the future”, “The oxy-gen we breathe comes from plants” and “The gene is the basic unit of heredity of living beings”. Over 70% in a major-ity of countries know that “Earth’s grav-ity pulls objects towards it without them being touched”, and over 60% are able to answer correctly that “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed from one form to another (True)”; “Almost all microorganisms are harmful to human beings (F: false)”; “Generally speaking, human cells do not divide (F)”; and “The earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs (F)”.

However, levels of knowledge tail off consid-erably, and also differ more between coun-tries, regarding statements like: “Human stem cells are extracted from human embryos without destroying the embryos (F)”; “Antibiotics destroy viruses (F)”; “Atoms are smaller than electrons (F)”; and “Today it is not possible to transfer genes from humans to animals (F)”.

Summing correct answers to the test, we find that overall knowledge lies in the medium to medium-high interval (see figure 4). Denmark and the Netherlands appear at the top of the knowledge map (over 15 correct answers to the 22 ques-tions posed), followed by Germany and the Czech Republic; in the middle ground stand Austria, the United Kingdom, France and the United States (averages of 13 to 14 correct answers); with Poland, Italy and Spain occupying the lower reaches. Spaniards in fact score lowest of all by the measure of objective knowledge (average of 11.2 correct answers against a European average of 13.4). In Spain’s case, furthermore, around 44% of the population with fewer years of study fall within the low knowledge segment com-pared to 6% of those completing their studies aged 20 or older. Likewise, 13% of young people aged 18 to 24 have a low level of scientific knowledge compared to 57% of the over 65s.

The distance between Spaniards’ scien-tific knowledge and the European average shortens considerably among the young adult population: 13% of 18 to 24-year-old Spaniards fall within the low knowledge

segment compared to 10% on average in the same age group in Europe. In con-trast, 57% of elderly Spanish adults are in the low knowledge group compared to the 22% average of elderly adults Europe-wide.

Understanding of key scientific concepts

The study examined respondents’ grasp of probability through a practical example, as a proxy for their understanding of the scientific method.

Interviewees were presented with the fol-lowing situation: “A doctor tells a couple that according to their genetic tests, they have a one in four chance of having a child with a hereditary disease”. They then have to choose one of the following alternatives to express what the doctor meant by this: If their first three children are healthy, the fourth will inherit the disease; If the first child has the disease, the next three will not; Each child the couple has will have an equal chance of suffering the disease; If they only have three children, none of them will suffer the disease.

A majority in almost all countries said what the doctor meant was that “Each child the couple has will have an equal chance of suffering the disease”. This response was a little more popular in the United States vs. the European average. Within Europe, it found the widest sup-port in the Netherlands and Denmark, and the least support in Austria. In Spain, it was the choice of 60%, a little below the European average (see figure 5 overleaf).

Another aspect touched upon was how knowledge is obtained and validated. The majority of respondents in the sur-vey affirm that for a scientific theory to be considered true, it is vital that the results should be tested, both by the researcher concerned and other scien-tists. Importance is accordingly attached to whether it has been tested through experiments and, also, whether other sci-entists have repeated the experiment with similar results (over 40% describe these two criteria as “very important”). Adding on those who define it as “fairly impor-tant”, we find that over 85% of citizens in all societies believe that experimental testing or the possibility of repeating the

14.3

11.2

12

12.4

13.8

14.1

14.2

14.6

14.8

15.3

15.6

13.4

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22

United States

Spain

Italy

Poland

France

United Kingdom

Austria

Czech Republic

Germany

Netherlands

Denmark

Total Europe


FIGURE 4: Average objective scientific knowledge (0-22)(Base: all cases)

6 PUBLIC OPINION BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012

experiment with similar results are key ways to validate scientific theories.

The publication of results – in a scientific journal or mass communication medium – is seen as another factor of weight in vali-dating theories, albeit less so than testing.

Collective knowledge of eminent scientists

Another measure of familiarity with sci-ence is knowing the names of those who have contributed significantly to its progress. Respondents were accordingly asked to mention three major scientists from any country or historical period.

What emerges is a striking difference between countries in the percentage unable to name a single scientist; a fact presumably indicative of a weak scientific culture (see figure 6). Difficulties iden-tifying even one scientist affect a similar percentage in Europe and the United States (27%), but rise significantly in Spain (46%), followed by Italy (31%), the United Kingdom (27%), Poland (26%) and France (25%). In remaining coun-tries, around 20% were unable to name

any scientists, with the smallest percent-age in Denmark (15%).

An icon called Albert Einstein

Among those able to identify at least one scientist, Albert Einstein is the name men-tioned most frequently by citizens in the

11 survey countries. His 42% of mentions in Europe and 50% in the United States place him far ahead of his nearest rivals. Within Europe, the percentages mention-ing Einstein run from 54% in Germany and 51% in Denmark to 30% in Poland and 32% in Spain.

27.4

14.7

18.8

19.4

20.2

23.4

24.5

26

26.8

30.5

45.9

0 20 40 60 80 100

United States

Denmark

Netherlands

Germany

Austria

Czech Republic

France

Poland

United Kingdom

Italy

Spain


FIGURE 6: Could you give me the names of the three scientists who you think have been the most important in all of history? Percentage unable or unwilling to give the name of any scientist. (Base: all cases)

74

48.2

57.4

58.8

60

65.1

65.6

66.1

74.2

88.7

91

65.3

0 20 40 60 80 100

United States

Austria

Italy

Poland

Spain

Germany

Czech Republic

France

United Kingdom

Denmark

Netherlands

Total Europe

0 20 40 60 80 100

13.7

26.5

14.1

23.9

14.5

19.5

25

16.1

13.8

6.7

8.7

16.7

0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100

7.7

21.7

12.7

20.1

10.1

13.5

19.5

12.8

9.2

3.7

5.4

12.7

4.2

12.6

8.5

11.7

5

10.8

10.2

10.7

4.6

3.5

2.9

8.4


FIGURE 5: A doctor tells a couple that according to their genetic tests, they have a one in four chance of having a child with a hereditary disease. Do you think what the doctor means by this is...? "Percentage answering yes." (Base: all cases)

Each child the couple has will have an equal chance of suffering the disease

If their first three children are healthy, the fourth will inherit the disease

If the first child has the disease, the next three will not

If they only have three children, none of them will have the disease


A long way behind, a consensus forms around the figures of Isaac Newton (13% in Europe as a whole with his high-est share of mentions in the United Kingdom, 24%), Marie Curie (11% on average in Europe, 45% in Poland), Louis Pasteur (9% in Europe, 37% in France), and Galileo Galilei (8% in Europe, 18% in Italy).

Scientists known as physicists, like Galileo Galilei and Newton, tend to be well rep-resented, while those whose names are associated with DNA or more recent dis-coveries in fields such as nuclear physics receive far less recognition (see detailed list by countries in figure 7).

Aside from these names, we observe a wide dispersion and heterogeneity among the other scientists mentioned. Citizens in each country tend to include more national figures in their lists or mention them in a higher position. For instance, 44% of Danes mention Niels Bohr, 32% of Poles mention Nicolaus Copernicus, 15% of Americans mention Thomas Edison and 11% Ben Franklin, 13% of

Italians mention Rita Levi Montalcini and 10% Leonardo Da Vinci, 11% of Germans mention Robert Koch and 10% Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, and 11% of the British mention Stephen Hawking. Spaniards however accord far less recognition to great national figures, and mention them less frequently than scientists from other countries. Hence Santiago Ramón y Cajal is mentioned by around 5% of Spaniards and Severo Ochoa, mentioned by 2.5%, does not even make into the top five.

A final map was then drawn up combin-ing the summated scale of closeness to science with that of objective scientific knowledge, in order to position countries by reference to both attitudinal and cogni-tive dimensions.

The results show that countries evidencing a higher degree of closeness tend also to be those registering the highest levels of scientific knowledge, primarily Denmark and the Neth-erlands. In the middle of the map stand coun-tries with closeness and knowledge in the medium range: Germany, the United States, Austria, France and the United Kingdom.

Lastly, the lower end of the map is occu-pied by countries with a lower level of closeness and scientific knowledge: Poland, Italy and Spain. The Czech Republic shares a low level of closeness with this group but deviates in its higher level of objective scientific knowledge.

An extensive summary, graphs and a video of the report’s presentation are available on the BBVA Foundation website (www.fbbva.es).

Germany

Albert Einstein 53.9

Robert Koch 11.2

Galileo Galilei 9.8

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

9.7

Isaac Newton 9.7

Marie Curie 9.9

Thomas Edison 6.1

Wernher von Braun 5.8

Alfred Nobel 5

Albert Schweitzer 4.8

Italy


Galileo Galilei 18.4

Rita Levi Montalcini 12.7

Isaac Newton 12.4

Leonardo da Vinci 10.3

Alessandro Volta 6.8

Enrico Fermi 6.1

Margherita Hack 6

Guglielmo Marconi 5.9

Antonino Zichichi 5.2

Poland

Marie Curie 45.3

Nicolaus Copernicus 32

Albert Einstein 30

Isaac Newton 11.3

Thomas Edison 8.3

Alfred Nobel 7.3

Louis Pasteur 2.6

Pythagoras 2.6

Charles Darwin 2.3

Alexander Graham Bell 2

Netherlands


Isaac Newton 15.8

Alexander Graham Bell 12.6

Charles Darwin 8.8

Thomas Edison 8.3

James Watt 6.9

Marie Curie 6.2

Louis Pasteur 5.8


Sigmund Freud 4

United Kingdom


Isaac Newton 23.9

Stephen Hawking 10.5

Marie Curie 9.3

Charles Darwin 8.7

Louis Pasteur 8.3


Alexander Fleming 7

Thomas Edison 5.3

Galileo Galilei 4

Czech Republic


Thomas Edison 24.9

Isaac Newton 11.5

Alfred Nobel 10.1

Marie Curie 8.6

Alexander Fleming 7

Jan Jánský 4.5


Charles Darwin 4.1

Jaroslav Heyrovský 3.9

Austria


Isaac Newton 14.1

Thomas Edison 11.2

Galileo Galilei 10.4

Marie Curie 9.4

Sigmund Freud 9.1

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

6.1

Charles Darwin 5.1


Alfred Nobel 4.4

Denmark

Albert Einstein 51

Niels Bohr 43.5

Isaac Newton 14.5

Thomas Edison 12.6

Tycho Brahe 8.9

Charles Darwin 8.9


Hans Christian Ørsted

5.8

Sigmund Freud 4.6

Marie Curie 4.2

Spain


Isaac Newton 15.2

Alexander Fleming 6.4

Thomas Edison 5.8

Marie Curie 5.5

Santiago Ramón y Cajal 4.8

Stephen Hawking 4.4

Galileo Galilei 4

Louis Pasteur 4

Charles Darwin 3.9

France


Louis Pasteur 37.1

Marie Curie 26.2

Pierre and Marie Curie

9.4

Isaac Newton 7.9

Galileo Galilei 6.5


Alexander Fleming 2.6

Christiaan Barnard 2.6

Thomas Edison 2.5

FIGURE 7: Citizens’ familiarity with eminent scientists


8 NEWS BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012

rom a fundamental discovery like that of the first extrasolar planet, urging us to reflect more deeply

on the presence of life in the universe, to such landmark achievements in human progress as the eradication of smallpox: the presentation ceremony of the fourth BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, held on June 21 in the Marqués de Salamanca Palace, Madrid headquar-ters of the BBVA Foundation, offered a journey round some of the universal mile-stones of science and culture in company of their authors. The diversity of the areas addressed and the huge impact of the contributions being recognized reflect the guiding spirit of these awards, which is to enthrone knowledge in all its scope as a motor of development.

The awards in this edition went to Alexander Varshavsky, for identifying the mechanisms involved in protein degra-dation; Isaac Held, for his discoveries on atmospheric circulation and the role of water vapor in climate change; Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, for discover-ing the first extrasolar planet; Ciro de Quadros, for his work in eradicating smallpox; Angus Deaton, for his contri-butions to the theory of consumption and savings and the measurement of economic wellbeing; Daniel Janzen, for his insights into the functioning of tropi-cal ecosystems and his efforts on behalf of their conservation; Carver Mead, for enabling the development of the billion-component microchips ubiquitous in our daily lives; and Salvatore Sciarrino, for renewing the possibilities of vocal and instrumental music.

The ceremony, under the presidency of Spain’s Minister of Education, Culture and Sport, José Ignacio Wert, the Presi-dent of the BBVA Foundation, Francisco González, and CSIC President Emilio Lora-Tamayo, welcomed eminent repre-sentatives of the international scientific community as well as leading figures from the worlds of business and the arts.

These awards, affirmed Francisco González, spring from BBVA’s conviction that “our collective possibilities, and those of fami-lies, individuals and corporations, depend

more than ever on the advance of scientific knowledge and innovation.” For this rea-son, added the BBVA Foundation President, “We are fully committed to supporting sci-entific research and cultural creation. And one expression of this support is, precisely, to recognize the individuals who have con-tributed outstandingly to our scientific and cultural advance.”

Challenge received truths, distrust the experts

The Minister of Education, Culture and Sport, José Ignacio Wert, praised the BBVA Foundation for its work on the Frontiers Awards: “It is vitally important that civil society gets behind this kind of initiative. In a country where we ask and expect the public sector to solve all our problems, it is particularly gratifying to count on the collaboration of civil society not only in funding scientific and artis-tic endeavor but also in giving it much deserved recognition.”

Wert expressed his conviction that fron-tier knowledge can only emanate from “people who are not afraid to question, who do not need to rely on a false sense of certainty, who dare to challenge received truths and question the omniscience of the experts, and who have the ability to explore old problems from new angles or pose problems that no one had ever thought of before. Science is an exercise in ongoing exploration driven by a bound-less curiosity.”

The Minister added that “there can be no university of quality without world-class research, particularly in the science and technology fields,” and, to guarantee this quality, “the university sector must transform itself, improve, modernize its structures of governance, reformulate its incentive systems, exploit internation-alization opportunities and, above all, believe in its possibilities; its ability to compete in an open field and attract the best teaching and research talent.”

He also commended laureates for the values which they not only practice but also convey to their colleagues and soci-ety at large: “It takes considerable vision

to imagine humanity’s future needs. And tonight’s award winners have succeeded in doing just that. In their work they have taken values like hard work, ambition and teamwork and applied them to the challenges that are shaping our future. They have learned to collaborate and compare results. They have successfully wed experience with experimentation, confronted and overcome all kinds of dif-ficulties and today stand as an example to the rest of the scientific and academic communities.”

In his speech, Emilio Lora-Tamayo, Presi-dent of the Spanish National Research

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An international celebration of science and culture as motors of development

understand and create, and the courage to explore hitherto uncharted terrains of knowledge.”

The awards are fully congruent with the knowledge map of the 21st century, with eight categories stretching from clas-sical disciplines like Basic Sciences; Economics, Finance and Management or Biomedicine to others like Development Cooperation, Climate Change, Ecology and Conservation Biology, Information and Communication Technologies and Contemporary Music, which address the challenges of our time or extend the

ment of knowledge and innovation. In the persons of the Frontiers laureates, the BBVA Foundation adds to its aim of disseminating science and culture that of recognizing and upholding the val-ues which they represent: namely, hard work, enthusiasm and the determina-tion to look beyond the legacy of past generations.

The BBVA Foundation President held up the thirty-seven awardees in this and previous editions of the awards as solid proof that “success and excellence are the sum product of a genuine passion to

BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012 NEWS 9

Council (CSIC), chose to stress the pres-tige that the awards have won, “due, in my opinion, to three factors as simple in their formulation as they are hard to apply in a systematic and honest fashion: the continuity of the promoter’s support, the excellence of the awardees, and the exact-ing standards of the juries, in which CSIC participates.”

Support to science and culture

Established in 2008, these awards aspire to be both showcase and tribute to those who dedicate their efforts to the advance-

Francisco González, BBVA Foundation President; José Ignacio Wert, Minister of Education, Culture and Sport; and Emilio Lora-Tamayo, CSIC President, flanked by the Frontiers laureates.

An international celebration of science and culture as motors of development

boundaries of our aesthetic and cultural universe.

From the time of their conception, the architecture of the awards has been founded on the quality, rigor and inde-pendence of the eight international juries, one for each category, who are tasked with evaluating the nominations put forward

by many of the world’s most prestigious teaching and research institutions.

These international awards have been devised and developed as part of the BBVA Foundation’s broad-ranging sup-port program for scientific knowledge and cultural creation. Support that stands undiminished despite the current eco-

nomic climate, evidencing the strength of the BBVA Group’s commitment. Its chair-man, Francisco González, has a positive message in this respect: “Although the gravity of the problems facing Spain may lead some to think that our economy, our research strength and our capacity to innovate and create wealth are in a place of stasis or, worse, decline, this is a coun-try which has carried through far-reaching structural changes in the past decades and where knowledge-based assets and activities account for a growing share of the national economy.” And it is fair to say, González concludes, that “the most dynamic, forward-looking part of our pro-ductive and financial structure is respond-ing positively to the challenges.”

Researching for a better world

In their acceptance speeches during the ceremony, the laureates talked about the researcher’s duties of social responsibil-ity, the purity of the knowledge quest and the necessity of innovation.

In the words of Ciro de Quadros, Executive Vice-President of the Sabin Vaccine Insti-tute (United States) and distinguished in the Development Cooperation category: “This is the most memorable honor I

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Angus Deaton, Economics, Finance and Management laureate, in the course of giving his thank-you speech.

José Ignacio Wert, Minister of Education, Culture and Sport, delivers the closing speech at the award ceremony.


have ever received. With the Frontiers of Knowledge Award connection between public health and economic develop-ment, the BBVA Foundation sends out a very strong message, indicating that vac-cines improve not only the health, but the wealth, of the world. And this message is particularly timely, as we initiate the Dec-ade of Vaccines, the first decade of what I like to call the Century of Vaccines.

It can almost be considered a public health miracle that today we register immuniza-tion coverage of 80% or even 90% in some of the poorest countries in the world. (…) Despite these magnificent advances, we must also overcome the massive challenge posed by the inequity faced by the poorest countries who do not have access to the miracle of vaccines. It must not be the case that the benefits of science and technology are available only to the most privileged.”

In order to deliver “affordable, sustain-able immunization programs to all peo-ple,” de Quadros calls for an action pro-gram spanning various fronts. As part of this effort, the industrialized world must not only “increase its support” but also “change the present paradigm, one in which international agencies still act in

the United States, and laureate in the Information and Communication Technologies category, has been both witness and protagonist – through his theoretical and applied discoveries – of the birth and consolidation of the infor-mation society. “When I was a young boy, electronic information was embodied primarily in the telephone network and

a very paternalistic way, with little if any involvement of governments of many of the poorer countries in the world.”

Innovation means risk, but the risk of not innovating is incomparably greater

Carver Mead, professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in

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Carver Mead, awardee in Information and Communication Technologies, receiving his award.

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Daniel Janzen, the founder of Tropical Ecology, during his award acceptance speech.


in broadcast radio. Today it has become the world’s most diverse and prosperous industry, its products and services touch-ing every human on the planet. I have been privileged to contribute to the evolution of this great human endeavor, and am grate-ful that those contributions have been deemed worthy of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award.”

Mead has regularly encountered resis-tance within his own areas of expertise and indeed sees this as a universal experience: “New ideas are universally greeted with ‘That is totally wrong – it

can’t possibly work.’ Then, after much time and effort ‘Well, maybe in some spe-cial circumstance…’ and finally, after suc-cess is clearly evident, ‘Yes, of course – everyone knows that.’ There is, of course, a good reason for this behavior pattern – most new ideas simply don’t work out. The burden of proof lies on the innovator.”

Hence the lessons he offers to any researcher with a new idea: “Expect criti-cism and opposition. Learn from your mistakes and press forward, in spite of hardship and resistance. Value your

friends and supporters, and treat them well. If you fail at one enterprise, there will be a next opportunity for success. After success comes, help the next innovator.”

Mead would also extend similar lessons to those entrusted with public policy: “Innovation, by its very nature, involves risk. But that risk pales compared with the risk of not innovating.” It is therefore vital to ensure that “this tiny minority of innovators is allowed to continue building a future for all of us, and for generations to come. And we are all indebted to the BBVA Foundation for their support in this endeavor.”

Celebrating knowledge creation in times of peril

Angus Deaton, a professor at Princeton University (United States), and 2011 laureate in the Economics, Finance and Management category, talked about the huge strides that society has made in the last two and a half centuries. “The use of reason to create knowledge that could improve society and the lives of individu-als, an enterprise that began with the European Enlightenment, has been the basis for the unprecedented progress in living standards, health, and governance over the last 250 years. Yet we live in a time not only when economic success is threatened, but where the very ideas of the Enlightenment are under attack. It is therefore an especially appropriate time for the BBVA Foundation, through its Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, to take a stand, to celebrate the creation of basic knowledge and to affirm its central impor-tance in our common future.”

Deaton evoked the fog-filled air of his hometown of Edinburgh in describing the work methods that underlie his many con-tributions in the economics field: “I have always played with ideas to try to under-stand them better, to try to clear away some of the fog that surrounds the first encounter with a new way of seeing. It was only later in life that I realized that clearing my own fog was sometimes more broadly useful and sometimes even extended what was known, though it has always been a surprise to discover that it was so. I have often worked by shaping my initial confusion into a paradox, a confrontation of two ideas, both of which appear to be true, but only one of which can be. From

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Biomedicine laureate Alexander Varshavsky delivers his acceptance speech.

Francisco González, President of the BBVA Foundation, with Isaac Held and Salvatore Sciarrino, awardees in Climate

Change and Contemporary Music respectively.


there, clarification and advance is only a matter of work.”

Exciting prospects in the search for other worlds

Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, pro-fessors at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and joint winners in Basic Sciences, are, literally, pioneers exploring new territories. Mayor addressed the pub-lic on behalf of both: “The discovery and study of planets orbiting stars other than our own Sun is a new frontier that astro-physics has now crossed. This award rec-ognizes the results of more than twenty years’ work by Didier Queloz and myself: from the discovery of the first extrasolar planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi to our current projects. Today, we know of more than 700 extrasolar planets. These discov-eries have revealed an astonishing diver-sity among planetary systems. A diversity that is now helping us to understand the complex mechanics of how planetary sys-tems are formed, particularly our own solar system.”

For Mayor and Queloz, the future of their field could not be more exciting: “As our research instruments have improved, we have been able to detect

own globe in its entirety, we are turning toward the cosmos, seeking answers to questions such as: Are we alone in the universe? Is life a cosmic imperative? In other words, will life develop whenever the right physical and chemical condi-tions are in place?”

Researching under pressure

lighter and lighter planets in ever greater numbers with each passing year. The latest measurements suggest that nearly all Sun-like stars are surrounded by planets. Finding rocky planets similar to our own homely Earth is a real pos-sibility.” The next questions follow natu-rally: “Nearly 500 years after humanity first set out to explore and conquer our

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Emilio Lora-Tamayo, President of the CSIC; Pedro Alonso, Chair of the Development Cooperation jury; Clara Menéndez,

CRESIB researcher; and BBVA Foundation Director Rafael Pardo.

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The 2011 laureates in a moment of the ceremony.


Isaac Held, a physicist working in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-istration (United States), and winner in the Climate Change category, reflected aloud on the disparity between research calen-dars and society’s expectations of results. “In climate science there are strong pres-sures to find answers to the big questions as soon as possible – first and foremost to describe how carbon dioxide emissions will affect the weather and climate of the world, of individual countries and regions. But there are areas of great uncertainty that constrain our ability to answer this ques-tion in detail, ranging from how the cloud distribution over our planet will change, to how the oceans will take up heat and carbon, to how the terrestrial biosphere will react by taking up some of the emit-ted carbon or by contracting and emitting more. These problems will only be solved by combining the efforts of a variety of dis-ciplines, observational and theoretical, and this will take time.”

“This tension between the needs of funda-mental research and the desire to answer the questions that the world needs us to answer quickly is not unique to climate science,” affirmed Held in closing, “but we feel this tension very strongly.”

Conserving biodiversity is compatible with development

Daniel Janzen, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania (United States), awardee in the Ecology and Conservation Biology category and founder of the discipline of Tropical Ecology, devoted much of his acceptance speech to those taking part in his project to restore the tropical ecology of Costa Rica.

“This award is truly in honor of the many hundreds of Costa Rican biodiversity managers, administrators and conserva-tion biologists who have invested many decades in their many different ways of conducting conservation of their complex tropical ecosystems, and doing it trans-parently, as an example for the world. For me, all of this is ‘conservation by means of non-damaging biodiversity develop-ment’, or more simply, biodevelopment.”

“A pillar of this conservation has been the restoration of damaged ecosystems, mostly by allowing them to restore them-

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Francisco González, BBVA Foundation President, in conversation with Basic Sciences laureates Michel Mayor and

Didier Queloz.

Alexander Varshavsky with Biomedicine jury members Francisco Sánchez Madrid, Robin Lovell-Badge and Angelika

Schnieke.

Sigfried Mauser and Dieter Torkewitz, members of the Contemporary Music jury, with violinist Emma Alexeeva, con-

ductor Fabián Panisello and Paolo Cairoli of the RAI.


selves and by resident biodiversity care-takers helping the process along.”

“A second pillar,” he continued, “has been simultaneous empowerment of those same resident caretakers – para-taxonomists, the conservation area staff, and visiting biologists – to conduct the detailed inventories, natural history stud-ies, and ecological experiments that yield the site-specific knowledge required to non-damagingly biodevelop a conserved wildland to where it can be tolerant of the human presence and footprints that yield benefits for society. A conserved wild-land must at the least pay for its own bed and breakfast.”

And, finally, “a third pillar has been DNA barcoding of the hundreds of thousands of species conserved, which in turn ena-bles true bioliteracy for all concerned; this bioliteracy aims to allow anyone to iden-tify any species at any place at any time for any purpose – in short, to be able to read wild biodiversity.”

Janzen also specified that “the BBVA Foundation award funds will be used to partly finance an endowment fund for the permanent leadership of the para-taxonomists of Área de Conservación Guanacaste in northwestern Costa Rica.”

A small protein essential for life

Alexander Varshavsky, professor at the California Institute of Technology (United States) and Biomedicine laureate, sum-marized the content and scope of his research for the benefit of the Frontiers audience. “The work of our laboratory over the last three decades, at first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and later at the California Institute of Technology, focused on the understand-ing of how and why cells destroy their own proteins in order to divide, to pro-tect themselves from stress, and to form new kinds of cells, a phenomenon called cell differentiation. We were fortunate to understand the fundamental biology of these processes, which center on a small protein called ubiquitin and underlie a staggering number of things that cells do in their daily lives. The field of these studies, initially very small, later grew to become both vast and diverse. After three decades of ever-expanding research in this biomedical realm, new directions of

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Isaac Held, distinguished in the Climate Change category, poses with his family and Bjorn Stevens (right), Chair of the

jury in this category.

Angus Deaton, awardee in Economics, Finance and Management, and his wife converse with José García Montalvo,

from the Development Cooperation jury, and Rafael Repullo, Director of CEMFI.

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Ciro de Quadros (second right), winner in the Development Cooperation category, had the company of family mem-

bers at the award ceremony.


inquiry, new problems, and new applica-tions of fundamental discoveries continue unabated. Advances in the understanding of the ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like systems are being published at a clip that exceeds anyone’s ability to follow these studies in their entirety, a state of affairs that is frustrating and exhilarating at the same time. I feel privileged having been able to contribute to the birth of this field, and to partake in its later development.”

Varshavsky also talked about the fascina-tion of knowledge. “Viewed as a dynamic body of self-improving knowledge and insight, science is remarkably and refresh-ingly even-handed. To biology, a deer, a microbe, and a human being are equally worthy of noting and understanding. International prizes in science, especially major ones, such as the BBVA Frontiers in Knowledge Awards, continue to contrib-ute, in both tangible and intangible ways, to sustaining and improving links among people and countries all over the world.”

Sounds in movement

Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, dis-tinguished in the Contemporary Music category, explained that “my music con-sciously tries to be suitable for human beings, to be communicative. It starts from the body. It doesn’t reside in subjec-tivity (the emotions of the composer) or in objectivity (the relationships that are internal to the writing); it is therefore nei-ther subjective nor objective. If anything is at the core, it is the individual listener.”

“In accordance with this aesthetic shift, the work becomes an experience of per-ception. I conceive sounds in movement, environmental events at the limit of what is perceptible: I represent a sort of theater of listening. There are no longer pieces of music, but rather pieces of reality in which object and subject, instrument and performer become fused in an elliptical space, a permanent and mysterious non-place that keeps us in suspense, on alert, where the spectator is the protagonist. Silence is not simply a background, far from it - it coincides with the re-setting of the mind. This is not happy or sad music. It is a creative medium for stimulating self-awareness.”

All awardees were presented with an art-work by sculptor Blanca Muñoz (Madrid,

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Francisco González and José Ignacio Wert exchange impressions with José Manuel González-Páramo of the Economics,

Finance and Management jury.

Development Cooperation laureate Ciro de Quadros with one of the jury members, Francisco Pérez.

Awardees Michel Mayor and Carver Mead raise their glasses in the presence of Theodor Hänsch, Nobel Physics lau-

reate and Chair of the Basic Sciences jury.


1963), based on a series of spirals that represent the progress and interrelation of scientific disciplines. The spiral, in the words of the author, “is the optimal solu-tion for growth in a limited space as well as the best way to represent continuity.”

A roll of excellence

The thirty-seven winners to date of BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards form a mosaic of contributions of single impact in their respective disciplines. Listed below are the Frontiers laureates in the three previous editions:

In the Basic Sciences category, Ignacio Cirac (Spain) and Peter Zoller (Aus-tria), Richard N. Zare (United States) and Briton Michael E. Fisher, and Gabor Somorjai (United States). In Biomedi-cine, Joan Massagué (Spain), Robert F. Lefkowitz (United States) and Shinya Yamanaka (Japan). In Ecology and Con-servation Biology, Americans Thomas E. Lovejoy and William F. Laurance, Peter B. Reich and Edward O. Wilson. In Informa-tion and Communication Technologies, Jacob Ziv (Israel), Thomas Kailath (born in India) and American Donald E. Knuth.

In the category of Economics, Finance and Management, Jean Tirole (France), Andreu Mas-Colell (Spain) and Hugo Son-nenschein (United States), and another American, Lars Peter Hansen. In Contem-porary Music, Cristóbal Halffter (Spain) and Helmut Lachenmann (Germany), following on from U.S. architect Steven Holl in 2008 (Arts category). In Climate Change, Wallace S. Broecker (United States), Klaus Hasselmann (Germany) and Nicholas Stern (United Kingdom). In Development Cooperation, awards in the first three editions went to the following organizations: two of them headquartered in the United States – the Poverty Action Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology and the Development Research Institute at New York University – and a third in the Philippines: the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

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Biomedicine jury member Angelika Schnieke converses with Andrea Goldsmith, Chair of the Information and

Communication Technologies jury.

Pedro Jordano and Daniel Pauly of the Ecology and Conservation Biology jury with laureate Daniel Janzen.

Salvatore Sciarrino (right) with three members of the Contemporary Music jury: Sigfried Mauser, Cristóbal Halffter

and Jürg Stenzl.

18 BIOMEDICINE BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012

nderstanding what allergies are and how they are produced can help sufferers to identify the

problem, so they approach a medical spe-cialist for the right diagnosis and treat-ment. In the 52 chapters making up the book Libro de las enfermedades alérgicas de la Fundación BBVA, sixty-four reputed allergologists from all over Spain sum up the latest scientific and clinical knowledge on these conditions.

This BBVA Foundation publication is the third in a collection devoted to problems of health. Partnering the Foundation on this occasion is the foundation of the Sociedad Española de Alergología e Inmunología Clínica (SEAIC).

Allergies arise when a patient’s immune system responds aggressively to a harm-less substance tolerated by the majority of people. No one is born allergic, but some individuals are predisposed geneti-cally and become sensitized to particular agents, known as allergens, depending on environmental factors. Allergens may be airborne or result from foods, insect stings, reactions to medication, skin con-tact or occupational exposure.

“Having access to medical informa-tion brings positive dividends in the quality of life of the allergy sufferer as well as mitigating the impact of the condition. Our aim with this book is to educate people about the causes and symptoms of allergic diseases and the latest methods for their diagnosis, pre-vention and treatment, in order to help them enjoy a better quality of life,” in the words of Manuel Zubeldia, one of the project coordinators and head of the Allergology Unit in Madrid’s Hospital Gregorio Marañón.

The President of SEAIC and its founda-tion, José María Olaguibel, is convinced that “teaching patients about the condi-tion and techniques of self-management

is the cornerstone of any effective treat-ment. And encouraging prevention and good lifestyle habits is vital for the sus-tainability of our healthcare system, espe-cially with this kind of pathology where environmental factors play a key role.”

Carlos Senent, another member of the coordinating team, urges doctors dealing with allergic patients to recommend this book as a supplementary aid to resolve their doubts and inquiries.

The Director of the BBVA Foundation, Rafael Pardo, explained that this pub-lication stems from a strategic goal shared by both organizations: to provide reliable and pertinent information that helps improve population health. This is the purpose of the collection which the book belongs to, initiated with the Libro de la salud in concert with Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, and continuing with Libro de la salud cardiovascular in partnership with Hospital Clínico San Carlos in Madrid.

Prevalence and new allergies

The prevalence of allergic diseases is believed to have doubled in the last 15 years. One of every four Spaniards is a sufferer, and factors associated with industrialization and climate change are encouraging their spread to the extent that allergies have become a 21st-century epidemic in the countries of the devel-oped world. This increased incidence is compounded by the growing complexity of processes, with food and respiratory allergies more and more often occurring in the same patient.

The authors point out that the lifestyle of developed countries has meant a higher concentration of allergens inside peo-ple’s homes, including dust mites (due to improved insulation and other energy-saving measures), environmental molds (air conditioning systems) and pets. Other factors at work include the reported increase in pollutants such as ozone, diesel particles and tobacco smoke, and

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Sixty-four experts provide a comprehensive guide to allergies in a new BBVA Foundation publication

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José Manuel Zubeldia, one of the book’s coordinators, and Rafael Pardo, Director of the BBVA Foundation (second

and third left) shared a platform at the launch event with José María Olaguibel, Ignacio Jáuregui and Carlos J. Senent.

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changes in the dietary habits of pregnant women and newborn babies such as the decline in breastfeeding and the earlier introduction of solid foods. Further, peo-ple in general are consuming fewer anti-oxidants and have altered their intake of fatty acids.

Ignacio Jaúregui, also a co-director, offers examples of the new types or variants of allergic diseases: “The recent discovery and characterization of a series of ‘panal-lergens’ (ubiquitous allergenic proteins, like profilins, plant defense proteins, vicilins or shellfish tropomyosin) have brought to light new conditions such as latex-fruit syndrome (allergy to the proteins in rubber and other plant prod-ucts that share certain enzymes with the former), pollen-fruit syndrome (allergy to fruit, nuts and other plants associated with pollinosis caused by birch, mixed grass or other pollens), dust mite-shell-fish syndrome (allergy to crustaceans and molluscs associated with respiratory dust mite allergy) or the bird-egg syndrome (adult-onset allergy to poultry meat and eggs associated with respiratory allergy to feathers).”

He adds, however, that there is no solid evidence that the syndrome known as multiple chemical hypersensitivity or sick building syndrome is linked to an immune system disorder.

Despite the discomfort or distress that allergic conditions can cause, many patients fail to see a specialist. This is due at times to misinformation: “Many

patients have only read fairly inaccurate, one-size-fits-all accounts of the condi-tion, and end up treating it with sympto-matic medication rather than visiting an allergologist.”

Spain, unlike other countries, José María Olaguibel points out, operates dedicated Allergology and Immunology services where patients can be assessed and treated regardless of age or the specific manifestations of their condition.

The authors also provide scientific argu-ments warning, for example, against diagnostic kits of dubious or unproven value, especially in the case of food aller-gies. And a whole chapter is devoted to a discussion of the scientific evidence for complementary and alternative medi-cines based on the latest international studies. Results show, for instance, that certain products of traditional Chinese medicine may provide relief in cases of mild to moderate chronic asthma, but no proof has been found for the utility of acupuncture in rhinitis and asthma, and there is insufficient evidence to reliably judge whether homeopathy may be effec-tive against asthma.

The perils of misinformation

Among the consequences of poor or misleading information is the abandon-ment of treatment. José Manuel Zubeldia gives one example: “Despite the proven efficacy of immunotherapy (anti-allergy vaccines), half of all allergy sufferers in Spain either fail to follow their treatment

instructions or else give up prematurely.”

Carlos Senent adds that, contrary to the wide-spread impression that there is no cure for aller-gies, “vaccines have been found to be effective in modifying the natural course of the disease in cases of respiratory aller-gies to pollen, dust mites, mold spores and animal dander, and in some cases may even cure them completely.”

Specialists complain that allergy is one of the great

unknowns despite its prevalence. “This is because allergic conditions attack the immune system, which is itself a largely unknown territory. The fact that it is not contained within a particular organ means symptoms can arise in any part of the body, although the most usual sites are the skin or respiratory or digestive organs; those that have most contact with the external environment.”

The fact that these are chronic conditions which, in some cases, have no definitive cure is one reason, Dr. Zubeldia believes, why they do not receive attention com-mensurate with their importance. But he also assures that all this can change with the right information: “Vaccines can combat and even prevent certain allergic conditions. They can alleviate symptoms and modify the course of the disease, halting its progression and preventing the appearance of new sensitizations. Some studies show that better informed patients enjoy a higher quality of life, with fewer unscheduled visits to the casualty department and fewer hospitalizations.”

Research, moreover, has turned up prom-ising advances. “The big steps forward have been the introduction of molecular diagnostic techniques and the use of bio-logical agents and new, more powerful drugs with fewer side effects.”

The book’s contents are available free of charge in

various formats from the website www.alergiafbbva.es.

20 ECONOMY BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012

aron Acemoglu, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),

was the invited speaker at the latest JEEA-Fundación BBVA Lecture, with the title Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. In the course of his talk, he covered some of the main conclu-sions reached in over a decade and a half working on economic development.

Is there some way to understand why some countries are rich and others poor? The MIT professor is convinced there is. The answer, he believes, “is all in the economic institutions. Some economic institutions, which we call inclusive, pro-vide incentives for investment and inno-vation and they provide a level playing field so that the majority of a nation’s population can deploy their talent. These economic institutions generate prosperity. But most societies are ruled not by inclu-sive institutions but by extractive insti-tutions, which create insecure property rights, don’t allow contracts, discourage innovation and technology adoption and, most importantly, instead of creating a level playing field, they create a very tilted playing field advantaging a small segment of society, and sometimes even coercing people to work at low wages in occupa-tions they shouldn’t be in, and banning them from occupations they wish to enter. We call these institutions extrac-tive because they have been designed by the political powerful to extract resources from the majority of the population.”

The Arab Spring: between hope and frustration

Poverty causes the kind of discontent that recently gave rise to the Arab Spring and the overthrow of authoritarian systems in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, which Acemoglu does not shrink from calling “some of the most extractive regimes in the world.” He believes that the revolts “bring new hope for growth in the region,” but warns that “the process is a treacherous one. Many similar revolutions that came to power promising change ended up re-creating

a similar extractive regime, sometimes with different people at the helm. This is because of the extractive nature of the institutions they inherit. Good institutions are those that create constraints prevent-ing this type of behavior.”

Only time will tell which way the balance tips. “There is a real danger that in Egypt the military will re-create a system similar to that over which Mubarak ruled. Or the Muslim Brotherhood will try to re-create its own extractive regime. So there are great dangers. But there’s also room to be optimistic: the genie is out of the bottle; people know that they can go to the street and protest, and bring down the extractive regimes. This is very, very important.”

Acemoglu prefers to reserve judgment with regard to China, while acknowledging that it has become the motor of a crisis-ridden world economy. In the opinion of the MIT professor: “China may continue to grow in the near term, but the next stage of economic growth, generating genuine innovation, will be much more difficult unless its political institutions change to create an environment that rewards challenging established interests, technologies, firms and authority.”

Europe: the need for structural reform

Even with various European countries bit-ing their nails over the daily progress of their sovereign bond spreads, Acemoglu is optimistic: “The European Union has created an integrated market with reason-able institutions, and there is tremendous human capital and innovative potential there.”

But he is also clear that countries have to bite the bullet of structural reform, as and when needed. “While Europe has great prospects, Greece doesn’t unless it undertakes fundamental reforms in its political system, product market, labor market and government sector employ-ment. Spain has similar problems, even if they are not as serious.”

Austerity policies are making themselves felt in a whole string of areas, including cutbacks in the public funds available for research. The MIT economist under-stands the goal – “It is natural to look for cuts during periods of austerity” – but cannot sanction the means: “Innovation, especially for an economy like Spain’s, which can no longer just compete on

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Daron Acemoglu (MIT) discusses what makes nations prosper

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Daron Acemoglu in a moment of his lecture in the BBVA Foundation.

middle-tech products, is crucial. Cutting support for scientific research and educa-tion is short-termist and self-defeating.”

Promoting the “green” technology revolution

Another problem facing the economy in the short to medium term is our exces-sive dependence on oil. Progress on clean alternative energies has not come far enough for them to compete on a cost/benefit basis with fossil fuels. And the problem is further compounded by the impact of carbon emissions on cli-mate change.

Acemoglu is clear that the response must come from governments, by means of “a meaningful carbon tax. And once alter-native energies are being produced on a large-scale, technological change will become faster and there will be learning by doing, ensuring that in a few decades they can be competitive with oil and coal. Europe has done much better here than the United States. But, ultimately, the real barriers are also political. We need international agreements, and these are not possible because any comprehen-sive solution will create many domestic losers.”

A busy career

Holder of a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics, Daron Acemoglu is currently Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy, as well as participating in the Eco-nomic Growth Program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He is a fellow of eminent learned societies including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the European Eco-nomic Association.

His many distinctions include the prize for the best paper published in the Economic Journal in 1996, and, in 2005, the John Bates Clark Medal granted by the American Economic Association every two years to the best economist aged under 40 working in the United States. He has given lectures and led seminars all around the world and his articles have appeared in leading specialist jour-nals such as American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy or Review of Economic Studies. His fields of research interest include political economy, eco-nomic development, economic growth and the theory of human capital. His lat-est book – published last March with co-author James Robinson – is Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.

The JEEA-Fundación BBVA Lecture

The JEEA-Fundación BBVA Lecture is delivered annually at the World Congress of the Econometric Society and the Annual Meeting of the Allied Social Sciences Associations, and subsequently in the BBVA Foundation. It is also pub-lished in the Journal of the European

Economic Association (JEEA), one of the leading international voices in economic research.

Previous editions of the JEEA-Fundación BBVA Lecture featured Jean Tirole, Scien-tific Director at the Industrial Economics Institute, a member of the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) and 2008 BBVA Foun-dation Frontiers of Knowledge laureate in Economics, Finance and Management; Paul Seabright, Professor of Economics at the University of Toulouse; Alberto Alesina, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University; Jordi Galí, Director of the Cen-tre de Recerca en Economía Internacional (CREI) and a professor in the Depart-ment of Economics and Finance at Pom-peu Fabra University (UPF); and Richard Blundell, Professor of Political Economy at University College London (UCL) and Research Director in the London-based Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

A video news report with highlights of Daron Acemoglu’s talk can be viewed in the multimedia section of the BBVA Foundation website www.fbbva.es.

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“A meaningful carbon tax would speed up technological change in renewable energies, ensuring that in a few decades they can be competitive with oil and coal”

22 BASIC SCIENCES BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012

armen Vela, Secretary of State for Research, Development and Innovation, Francisco González,

President of the BBVA Foundation, and María del Rosario Heras, President of the Spanish Royal Society of Physics (RSEF), were the platform speakers at the Physics Awards ceremony held on May 25 in the BBVA Foundation’s Madrid headquar-ters. These awards, organized by the RSEF and the BBVA Foundation, afford annual recognition to the most outstand-ing achievements of the Spanish physi-cist community. Their aim is to showcase high-quality research in all its manifesta-tions, to encourage young research talent and to bring physics into closer and more fruitful contact with the educational and business sectors through the medium of eight award categories carrying a com-bined cash prize of 50,000 euros.

Francisco González reiterated “BBVA’s commitment to strengthening the links between knowledge and innovation,” in the conviction that our potential as a country relies on fostering this relation-ship, and that “we have the resources we need to face the challenges of the present and lay the foundations of a plainly better future.”

The BBVA chairman called for Spain to grasp the nettle of change in its economic growth model, in order to “prioritize the generation of scientific knowledge, the dissemination and application of frontier technologies, the concentration of finan-cial and human resources in high-value-added sectors and a culture of permanent innovation.”

For Carmen Vela, these awards “combine most of the ingredients which this State Secretariat believes are right for Spanish science, in recognizing the excellence per-sonified by José Bernabéu, the transfer of knowledge from the academic to the busi-ness world, and the young scientists who are without doubt the architects of our

future. They also honor those working to teach, communicate and explain science, to ensure that the work we scientists do is understood by society.” The Secretary of State reserved words, finally, for “the mag-nificent efforts of the BBVA Foundation. Spanish science needs more private fund-ing, and what they are doing here stands as the best kind of example.”

The RSEF President, María del Rosario Heras, believes physicists can do a lot to help the country emerge from crisis: “Many physicists are endeavoring to cre-ate innovative systems and devices and improve our national competitiveness from their posts in the universities, public research centers and corporations.” And the profession, she adds, is particularly well equipped, because “our training and our work teach us to systematically relate the worlds of objects and ideas.”

José Bernabéu (Mutxamel, Alicante, 1945), winner of the RSEF Medal funded with 15,000 euros, has authored over 200 papers in high-impact journals and is one of the pioneers in Spain of particle phys-ics. Collecting his award, he stressed that

physics was approaching a crossroads: in the next few months we will know if the LHC accelerator at the CERN labora-tory near Geneva has finally encountered Higgs’ boson, the particle that explains why everything has mass. “Particle phys-ics occupies the knowledge frontier in the structure of matter at the smallest scale,” Bernabéu explains, and in the last few decades it has advanced “spectacularly, though without solving the problem of the origin of mass; still one of the great enigmas.”

“We believe the questions have been framed in the right way for nature to answer us through the LHC experiments,” he continues. “The answer may be the Higgs or something else. If it does exist, it will be a remarkable success. If it doesn’t exist, even better, because the LHC will be pointing us in the way of a new physics, which we know exists, capable of explain-ing where mass comes from. In either of these two situations, fundamental phys-ics will have new problems to explore. Above all, the LHC will teach us how to set nature new problems. It is the advance-ment of knowledge that allows us to ask

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Awardees pose next to BBVA Foundation President Francisco González – in the center of the image –, María del

Rosario Heras, President of the Spanish Royal Society of Physics, and Carmen Vela, Secretary of State for Research,

Development and Innovation.

Accolades in the Spanish Physics Awards go to particle research and industrial applications

the universe started to expand. Ashtekar is the head of Agulló’s research group, working on a theoretical model to clar-ify aspects of the cosmic background radiation issued just after the Big Bang and which now fills every corner of the universe. Among their objectives is to ascertain whether the universe effectively began with the “great explosion”.

“If the universe existed before the Big Bang,” inquires Agulló, “what was it like? What do we really mean by the term Big Bang? Did that initial phase leave some mark on the current universe, for instance in the way the galaxies and stars are dis-tributed? In its earliest stages, the universe was incredibly hot and dense. Describing events under these conditions demands a theory that we still cannot entirely grasp.”

Spanish technology to create new materials

In Experimental Physics, the award went to Jorge Pisonero Castro of the University of Oviedo for his work on optical spec-troscopy and its application to chemical analysis.

One of his group’s breakthrough results has been the development of a new instrumental technique to measure the chemical composition of ultra-fine coat-ings on diverse materials, with a high degree of sensitivity. This technology, which is expected to be of great utility in

new materials creation, will shortly be marketed by a major multi-national company.

The importance of education

The awards for Physics Teaching and Dissemina-

tion in university and second-ary education, funded with 8,000

euros each, recognize teaching and pedagogical excellence as well as col-

laboration with the RSEF.

In the university sector, the winner was Vicent Josep Martínez García of the University of Valencia for his applica-tion of new technologies to the teaching and popularization of the physical sci-ences. The jury singled out his role in the creation of the Museum of Historical Astronomical Instruments at the Valencia University Observatory and his efforts to interest the public in astronomy.

Adolf Cortel Ortuño, a teacher at Pompeu Fabra School (Olesa de Montserrat, Barcelona), took the same award in the secondary education category for his role as educator, popularizer and trainer of trainers at both national and international level, and his campaign to encourage experimentation in the school environ-ment through the Physics Olympiad and the program Ciencia en Acción.

In the category Best Article on Physics published in the Revista Española de Física, the award went to Ricardo Arias-González of the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Nanosciences for his paper Manipulación láser de células, orgánulos y biomoléculas. And finally, the award for the Best Article on Physics Teaching pub-lished in the Revista Española de Física (REF) and the Revista Iberoamericana de Física (RIF) was shared by Julio Güémez from the University of Cantabria, and Carlos Fiolhais and Manuel Fiolhais from the University of Coimbra (Portugal).

BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012 BASIC SCIENCES 23

new questions and to formulate them in a precise way.”

Academia and business, closer then before

José Ramón Perán González was granted the Physics Award for Innovation and Technology, with 8,000 euros prize money, “for the technologi-cal applications that he has developed, and the impor-tance of his leadership in major projects for industry.” Perán is an industrial engi-neer, physicist and economist who has spent 30 years working in the private sector – he was Industrial Manager with Renault and head of its bodywork and mechanical factories – as well as holding prominent academic posts. He has developed and coordi-nated over 100 R&D projects in Spain and abroad, and has published around one hundred articles, books and book chapters.

For Perán González, research and innova-tion are inextricably linked: “The research process demands that we innovate in work methods, and stay constantly on the lookout for new physical and conceptual instruments; at the same time, in order to rise to the challenges posed by industry, we have to bring new knowledge into play or else refine what we have, something physics researchers excel at.”

Was there a universe before the Big Bang?

The awards for Young Researcher in Theoretical Physics and Young Researcher in Experimental Physics, each with a 4,000 euros prize, are reserved for researchers aged under 30 when nominations open. This year’s award in Theoretical Physics went to Iván Agulló Ródenas, a postdoc-toral fellow at the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos (Pennsylvania State University) in the United States. Agulló is the only Spaniard in possession of a Gravity Research Foundation Award, whose previous winners include such luminaries as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Nobel laureate George Smoot or Abhay Ashtekar, author of one of the theories that seeks to explain the events unfolding at time zero, the moment when

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24 BASIC SCIENCES BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012

he universe we observe today is a bubble with a radius of around 13 billion light years, but

even that is only “a small part of what’s out there. Rather than a single spherical globe, our universe could in fact be a mul-tiverse, a vast set of exponentially bigger globes where different physical laws oper-ate,” contends Andrei Linde, Professor of Physics at Stanford University (United States). Linde expounded his cosmologi-cal vision at a talk in the BBVA Foundation titled “Universe or Multiverse?”, forming part of the “The Science of the Cosmos. Science in the Cosmos” cycle.

The multiverse is more than an idea. It is the theory which, in Linde’s view, best fits with the available data: “At first it might have sounded like science fiction, but the latest advances in inflationary cosmology, particle physics and string theory sup-port this new cosmological paradigm,” he affirms.

Linde links the multiverse to the inflation-ary theory he co-authored, whose predic-tions are now being confirmed by obser-vational data. Inflation theory holds that just after the Big Bang, when the universe began to grow, there was a short period of ultrafast expansion at far above the cur-rent rate. This is the only theory which, in Linde’s words, “explains many properties of the universe, like why the observable part of it is so homogeneous or why paral-lel lines do not intersect.”

The homogeneity of the universe is evi-denced by the fact that wherever we look its appearance is the same, even in regions remote from each other. This sug-gests that these now distant areas were once close together. And here we have a problem: if the universe had always been expanding at the rate we know today, there would not have been time for those once close regions to pull so very far apart. Inflationary theory, with its ultrafast ini-tial spurt, offers a solution to the enigma.

“The uniformity of our world is explained by inflation: the exponential stretching of the newborn universe is what makes it so nearly uniform,” he continues.

This homogeneity has also left its sig-nature in cosmic background radiation, light emitted a relatively short time after the Big Bang that now fills the entire cos-mos. Several space telescopes have been studying this light, and their data bear out the predictions of inflation theory – which also holds that our universe is “flat”, so, as in any flat surface, parallel lines never intersect.

“Thus far, all attempts to develop an alter-native theory of the early universe have been unsuccessful,” says Linde, “though of course this doesn’t mean we should stop trying.”

A controversial idea

But though inflation may now be an accepted theory, not so the multiverse; a possibility that was not taken seri-ously until the start of our new century. “Inflation does not imply the multiverse, but it makes it a very natural concept.

Fluctuations in inflation produce new parts of the universe, with different prop-erties, so the universe becomes a multi-verse.” Under this hypothesis, what we can observe “is only a small part [of the multiverse in its entirety], which is why we see it as uniform and flat,” Linde explains.

In the last decade, the idea, Linde assures, has “gained the seal of approval of reputed scientists. Before then, those who defended it were considered ‘weird’.” This shift came about because the multiverse offers “the only possible solution for the moment” to the vexed question of why vacuum energy is so small. Linde indeed believes the burden of proof is on the shoulders of the multiverse deniers. “Before people asked ‘can you prove that we live in a mul-tiverse?’ Now the question is for them: Can you prove that the universe is not a mul-tiverse? Can you prove that it is the same everywhere, even in those regions we can never see?”

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Andrei Linde, co-author of inflationary theory, in a moment of his talk.

Andrei Linde (Stanford University): “The multiverse is the most natural concept, the theory that best fits the data”

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ay 24 marked the close of the lecture cycle “Aging-Associated Diseases” organized in Bilbao by

the BBVA Foundation and CIC bioGUNE, offering the general public the opportu-nity to learn first-hand from the authors about some of the latest results in this thriving research field, whose goal is to ensure that aging is not just about living longer, but also about maintaining a good state of health (for further information see Newsletter No. 30).

The last two lectures were delivered by Erica Villa, Head of the Division of Gastroenterology at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy), and Adolfo López de Munain, Clinical Director in the Neurology Department of Hospital Donostia in San Sebastián.

Erica Villa – whose research career has taken her to King’s College Hospital in London, the Institute Pasteur in Paris and the University of San Diego in La Jolla – explained that “hepatology is among the fields of medicine where the differences between the sexes are most clear-cut. This is true of the natural history of most chronic liver diseases. It is well known, for instance, that primary liver cancer affects men far more than women, while autoim-mune liver disease and cholestatic liver dis-order are preeminently a female problem.”

But the differences do not stop there: “Another recently confirmed instance of gender influence in hepatic conditions is the role played by hormonal aging in the gravity of the pathology, and the surprising impairment of antiviral therapy response in women suffering hepatitis C. Our stud-ies have shown that women with this dis-ease exhibit only mild symptoms and an optimal sensitivity to treatment while still in reproductive age, but lose these ben-efits when they enter menopause.”

The factors at work are varied, but certainly include: “Certain endogenous sex-asso-

ciated factors (hormonal activity, insulin resistance, response to cytokines), and oth-ers of an exogenous nature (like the kind of pegylated interferon used). The interaction of these factors substantially modifies the course of hepatitis C in women. Although many aspects of this clinical situation are better understood than in the past, we still have multiple theories to explore and, above all, multiple therapeutic interven-tions to design and test.”

The key to the brain’s secrets, in the skin?

Might the secrets of the brain be found in the skin? This is the premise occupy-ing much of the attention of Dr. Adolfo López de Munain. “Skin and brain have a common embryological origin. Both are derived from an embryonic layer known as the ectoderm.” It is accordingly possible to extract skin cells, reset them and transform them into neuronal cells for laboratory study, opening up exciting new avenues for research into neurodegenerative diseases.

“What this gives us is a human cell system where we can test what it is that makes neurons sick and try to modify these proc-esses by pharmacological means.”

López de Munain advocates a change of paradigm in the study of condi-tions like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. “Neurodegenerative diseases start long before the patient displays any symp-toms, and perhaps the treatments we have designed for the late stages of the condition are ineffective because most of its course has already been run.”

We need to act, then, before the symp-toms appear, as soon as we have identi-fied biological markers for the disease. “The right solution may simply be to do the same things only earlier.” One thing he knows for sure: following a healthy diet and taking exercise remain the top two strategies to reach old age in a good state of health.

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Adolfo López de Munain. Erica Villa.

Erica Villa (University of Modena): “Menopause alters the response to hepatitis C treatment”

26 MUSIC BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012

he Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria (OFGC), led by its Artistic Director Pedro Halffter,

makes its debut appearance on music label Deutsche Grammophon with an album wholly given over to the Argen-tinean composer Alberto Ginastera. The recording features the complete version of his ballet Panambí, alongside the Dances from Estancia and his Obertura para el Fausto criollo, and was funded by the BBVA Foundation with the collaboration of the Gran Canaria Island Government.

“This new OFGC disc is a natural continu-ation of our earlier recording work, and conserves our focus on rarely performed works of undisputable quality, including the best of the Latin American reper-toire,” remarked Maestro Halffter at the presentation event for the CD. Sharing the platform on this occasion were the Director of the BBVA Foundation, Rafael Pardo, the President of the Gran Canaria Island Government, José Miguel Bravo de Laguna, Larry Álvarez, Culture and Heritage Chairman of the Gran Canaria Government and President of the Fundación OFGC, and Álex Sánchez, Head of the Classical and Jazz Department at Universal Music Spain.

The ballet Panambí (1934-1936), which Ginastera wrote when he was just 20, draws on the rich palette of colors of Guaraní folklore to narrate a legend of love and the supernatural handed down through generations of indigenous dwell-ers in the Paraná and Paraguay river regions. The music recalls the lifestyle and customs of the smallholding com-munities of the north east of Argentina, the Paraguay basin on the banks of the Uruguay river, and the lands along the Brazilian border. The title of his sec-ond and last ballet, Estancia (1941), “on scenes from Argentinean rural life,” refers to an expanse of cultivated land or ranch. In it, we can hear the sounds of the River Plate basin – the famous Wet Pampa –

and the malambo dance style, with its elaborate footwork, guitars and bombo legüero drums. The piece that closes the disc, Obertura para el Fausto criollo (1943), based on a poem by Estanislao del Campo, reproduces the conversation of a gaucho telling a friend about a performance of Gounod’s Faust in Buenos Aires’ famed Teatro Colón. This Faust of Ginastera’s is not so much a map as a lively street plan, funny and ironic, recounting the customs of the city as seen by a country cowboy unable to distinguish fact from fiction.

Tradition and revolutionary spirit

These three orchestral works belong to the period that Ginastera himself labeled “objective nationalism”, when he sought to define his own identity by delving into the roots of Argentine tradition; its mel-odies, folk songs and tonal resources. The revolutionary spirit and primitivism of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring are also an inspiration for the score of Panambí.

Ginastera composed a first suite for the ballet never imagining that it would be staged, but after the success of the concert version conducted by Juan José Castro, the complete ballet had its premiere in the Teatro Colón in the year 1940, with a sce-nic concept devised by the painter Héctor Basaldúa and dancer and choreographer Margarita Wallmann. In the audience that night was the New York art patron Lincoln Kirstein, director of Ballet Caravan. Deeply impressed, he wasted no time in offering a commission to the young composer, who promptly shut himself away to write Estancia.

The Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria has completed successful tours in Europe and Asia, and under Pedro Halffter’s artistic directorship, has devel-oped a music program which marks a valuable addition to the cultural agenda of the Canary Islands, to be enjoyed by both local theater-goers and overseas visitors.

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Conductor Pedro Halffter performs a fragment of Panambí during the official presentation event.

The complete version of Ginastera’s ballet Panambí in the charge of the Gran Canaria Philharmonic under Pedro Halffter

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The Arriaga Quartet offers world premieres of works by Urrutia and LaraThe Foundation’s San Nicolás Building in Bilbao served as venue on June 12 for the closing concert in the BBVA Foundation Contemporary Music Season, featuring the Arriaga Quartet and, as guest art-ist, the clarinetist and conductor José Luis Estellés. The evening began with the world premiere of Lilurak, written on commission from the BBVA Foundation by Isabel Urrutia (1967), composer and professor at the Basque Country Senior Conservatory of Music. This was followed by a second world premiere, Quinteto con clarinete by composer Francisco Lara (1965), conductor of the University of Valladolid Youth Orchestra. Completing the program were works by Isang Yung, György Kurtág and Elliott Carter.

A concert honoring the Frontiers of Knowledge laureatesThe BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards Concert, held on June 20 in Madrid’s Teatro Real, was both a musical celebration and prelude to the presentation ceremony of the 2011 Frontiers of Knowledge Awards. Francisco González, BBVA Foundation President, was host at the evening’s event, whose guests of honor where the nine winners (see image) in this latest edition of the Frontiers Awards. Among the audience were the Foundation’s Director, Rafael Pardo, Emilio Lora-Tamayo, President of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and a wide representation of the diplomatic corps, the media, the scientific and cultural communities and the business world. The program opened with the Spanish premiere of El sonido y el callar, by Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino (1947), distinguished in the 2011 awards for developing a “new and unique syntax” and his renewal of “the possibilities of instrumental and vocal music.” The orchestra next performed Tiento del I tono y Batalla imperial by Cristóbal Halffter (1930), 2009 Frontiers of Knowledge laureate in the Contemporary Music category, before bringing the concert to a close with Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 25 by Johannes Brahms, as arranged for orchestra by Arnold Schoenberg.

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28 MUSIC BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012

A 3D multimedia tribute to Venancio BlancoThe multimedia project Music for a Visual Arts Collection. Homage to Venancio Blanco was presented on June 5 in the Marqués de Salamanca Palace, Madrid headquar-ters of the BBVA Foundation. Part of the initiative, which seeks to join sound with visual art in a common spirit, is a CD of works by Madrid composer Eduardo Armenteros (Madrid, 1956) – one of the early champions of electronic music in Spain. In this BBVA Foundation produc-tion with music label Verso, Armenteros offers a musician’s portrait in sound of a great plastic artist, Venancio Blanco, former director of the Spanish Fine Arts Academy in Rome and one of the most internationally recognized names in 20th century Spanish sculpture.

Wagner, Mahler and Berg in the Fundación BBVA-ORCAM concertOn June 26, the Symphony Hall of the Auditorio Nacional de Música in Madrid hosted a concert organized by the BBVA Foundation and the Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid (ORCAM). The program was particularly inviting on account of the artists involved and the inclusion of an unusual work – Alban Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces – scored for a large orchestra. To make up the numbers – 102 musicians on stage at once – the ORCAM was accompanied on the night by its youth orchestra JORCAM. Other works performed at the gala were Siegfried’s Rhine Journey by Richard Wagner, a symphonic poem of great theatrical vitality that works perfectly in concert. Closing the event was Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of folk poems with which Gustav Mahler took the German lied form to new heights of artistry. The Bohemian maestro also provided a symphonic version, with the orchestra replacing the piano. The ORCAM and Youth Orchestra were joined for the occasion by two leading soloists, both from Finland: the mezzo-soprano Monica Groop and bass-baritone Juha Uusitalo.

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BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012 MISCELLANY 29

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Francis Halzen to explain the role of the South Pole observatory IceCube in the search for neutrinos

Agreement between the BBVA Foundation and the Cuatrecasas International Institute to carry out labor and employment research

Under its auspices, the Cuatrecasas Institute will report on an issue compa-nies are struggling to come to terms with amid the current economic crisis and in the light of the labor law amendments of Royal Decree-Law 3/2012: the question of internal flexibility. The report will exam-ine the key points companies must con-sider in adapting their working conditions to the demands of a labor market in con-stant flux, in the framework of a modern system of industrial relations.

This is probably the main strategic flaw in today’s labor regulations, and the great-est obstacle in the way of their modern-ization. In view of this shortcoming, the rules on work procedures and conditions implemented by the decree-law and col-lective bargaining agreements assume particular importance.

The President of the Cuatrecasas International Institute for Legal Strategy on Human Resources, Salvador del Rey, and BBVA Foundation Director Rafael Pardo have signed an agreement in Madrid whereby the two organizations

will collaborate in the preparation of strategic research reports on labor and employment relations. The aim is to generate knowledge that can identify key solutions from an industrial relations per-spective in the mid- and long-term future.

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On October 30, Francis Halzen, pro-fessor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and principal investigator on IceCube, will give a talk in the Marqués de Salamanca Palace, Madrid headquar-ters of the BBVA Foundation, with the title “IceCube: A Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole”. The session has been scheduled as part of the second edition of the lecture cycle “The Science of the Cosmos, Science in the Cosmos” coor-dinated by Ana Achúcarro, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Leiden University (Netherlands) and the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU).

The construction of IceCube, the world’s biggest neutrino detector, was completed in December 2010. Neutrinos are tiny, nearly massless particles that come from the sun, radioactive decay, cosmic rays and violent galactic events such as exploding stars. This observatory focuses on seeing high-energy neutrinos, which can teach us more about the origin of cosmic rays,

about gamma ray bursts and supernovae and about the identity of dark matter.

IceCube is buried two thousand meters deep in the ice, a medium that offers uniquely favorable conditions to detect neutrino interactions thanks to the huge

pressure built up inside. Also, the pre-vailing darkness allows the digital optical modules that are the center’s basic tech-nological unit to capture the blue light that radiates from muons – particles pro-duced by the neutrinos when they interact with an atom of ice.

For more information about these publications, contact [email protected]

La productividad sectorial en España. Una perspectiva micro

Juan Fernández de Guevara Radoselovics

This report – produced by Ivie researcher and University of Valencia professor Juan Fernández de Guevara – analyzes the productivity performance of Spanish firms, using a panel of three and a half million observations corresponding to more than 730,000 companies in 29 industries. The study covers a substantial part of the last expansionary phase (2000-2008), during which the rapid growth of the Spanish economy was powered by the accumulation of factors (capital and labor) rather than improvements in productive efficiency.

Its results indicate that aggregate factor productivity decreased in the reference period, and that the decline, moreover, was common to many industries. In this light, we can see that the productivity shortcomings of the Spanish economy are not just a matter of specialization but in fact cut across sectoral boundaries. To judge by the evidence, improvements in aggregate productivity, and therefore the competitiveness of the national economy, can be sourced by removing barriers to the movement of productive factors across firms, allowing the most productive companies to gain market share in their respective sectors. This is especially true of services. Among other productivity drivers the author cites improvements in human capital and an increase in average firm size.

El trabajo no remunerado en la economía global

María Ángeles Durán Heras

“Work is not synonymous with employment.” This is the opening statement in María Ángeles Durán’s book El trabajo no remunerado en la economía global, which provides compelling evidence that most of the hours worked worldwide comprise not formal employment governed by industrial legislation but informal or unpaid work produced and consumed within the home. Informal, underground working is on the increase; it constitutes the weak flank of systems of national accounts and is a cause of major methodological difficulties as well as political discord.

Outside the corporate sector, some two billion households worldwide produce services to secure the wellbeing of their inhabitants. Yet this vast output is not factored in GDP or other widely used macroeconomic indicators.

This book offers a novel analysis of such essential concepts as work, need, quality of life, freedom and coercion. In doing so it explores the constant interactions between paid and unpaid work, between households and state, and their internationalization via migration movements.

Caring is an economic activity of vital importance in all societies. Paradoxically, those most in need of care (children, the sick, the elderly) are those least able to acquire it on the market. Each society must choose a distribution model for its global workload, especially now that the sexual division which historically placed the care burden on women has lost both legal force and social support.

Drawing on source material from the United Nations, the author estimates the likely short-and long-term demand for care in the world’s main regions, as well as in countries of particular interest for their demographic or economic weight or their relevance to Spanish and Latin American readers.

An English-language version of this publication will shortly be available.

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For more information about these publications, contact [email protected]

Poesía completa

José Antonio Ramos Sucre

José Antonio Ramos Sucre’s Poesía completa is the latest addition to the Biblioteca Sibila-Fundación BBVA Library of Spanish Poetry. The work of this Venezuelan author offers a fine demonstration that an artist can take on a literary genre and transform it with impeccable aesthetic taste. We need look no further than his three books – La torre de Timón (1925), El cielo de esmalte (1929) and Las formas del fuego (1929) – where poetry is combined with prose and essay, or Los aires del presagio (1960), a posthumous collection of his articles, aphorisms and translations of poems.

Ramos Sucre’s life, from his birth in Cumaná in 1890 to his death in Geneva in 1930, was marked by constant insomnia and a devotion to the study of literature and languages unrivalled in his day. Afflicted by an incurable disease, he was driven to commit suicide at the age of forty, a premature end to the life of a gentleman both discreet and erudite, solitary and sociable; a man who in his time was teacher, translator and diplomat and whose unclassifiable output would be reclaimed by later generations of Venezuelan poets who saw in him the founder of the country’s modern poetry.

Among the themes running through his texts are the careless cruelty of the wider collective and individual will at the service of the art of skepticism. It has been said of him: “There are authors whom we only get to know when we re-read them: one such is Ramos Sucre.” His poetry, however, is not a morbid dissection of his own pain but a striving to achieve lucidity and transfigure the feeling of loss into a new awareness. Unable to find an I, he splits into various characters or figures through whom he may observe himself and understand.

Tablas de vida de decrementos múltiples. Mortalidad por causas en España (1975-2008)

Francisco J. Goerlich Gisbert

Mortality tables numerically represent the evolution of a given population over a period of time, and are in standard use for a variety of purposes. They are essential, for instance, to make accurate demographic projections and actuarial calculations, while providing a valuable and long-trusted indicator in the public health and economics fields: the life expectancy at birth of different age groups.

Although life expectancy at birth remains the most widely used indicator to assess the population’s global health status, it has lost some of its explanatory power as lifespans have lengthened in developed countries. In effect, its variability across first world societies is now relatively small and discriminates less for a series of target development indicators than the figures of a century or, even, a few decades back.

For this reason, the literature has been engaged in a search for supplementary indicators. One such is to incorporate cause of death in mortality tables. The present working paper is part of this effort to supplement life table information on biometric functions by factoring in data on the cause of death. Classically, mortality tables have a single decrement format, given that cause of death is irrelevant for calculating life expectancy. However, a mortality-by-cause structure can depict gender and age differences according to the degree of development of the society concerned, and is also able to distinguish between avoidable and unavoidable mortality. The information it provides is especially useful when, as in the case of this paper, the time-period analyzed is longer than standard for the relevant literature.

he difficulties being endured by the Spanish economy and, par-ticularly, the depressed state of

the labor market throughout the current crisis have magnified concerns about the real utility of university studies in Spain. In effect, the most widely used data reflect high jobless rates among university stu-dents, enormous obstacles in the way of young graduates finding employment, high rates of overqualification among those in work (which exceed those of neighbor countries, as does the incidence of temporary contracts), and a decline in the pay premium of higher education since the end of the last century.

The employment situation of Spanish graduates is worse than before the crisis, and also compares unfavorably with that of their peers elsewhere in Europe. Note, however, that they have conserved and even enlarged their relative advantage compared to job seekers without univer-sity training. Indeed the less-than-satis-factory labor market success of Spanish graduates is strongly conditioned by the degrees they completed along with the particularities of our country’s institu-tional, labor and corporate framework.

On the one hand, branch of university study is a good predictor of graduates’ employ-ment success. The differences in their probabilities of finding work, securing an indefinite contract or experiencing a situa-tion of overqualification (holding a post not requiring university education) can vary by up to ten percentage points depending on the degree course taken (the biggest advan-tage being that of Health Sciences students over those in Humanities). It follows that the universities should adapt their degree offerings to facilitate students’ transition to the labor market. For individual students, the choice of degree course can prove to be a decision of profound and lasting consequences. A vocational choice is not necessarily at odds with labor-market suc-

cess (as the case of Health Sciences dem-onstrates), but in other cases (Humanities for instance), graduates will face greater difficulties finding employment. A useful strategy here would be to draw up reliable statistics on how degree course choice can influence students’ future employment prospects and make them available to interested school leavers and their families.

Aside from branch of study, the pros-pects for Spanish graduates are affected (negatively as a rule) by certain character-istics of our economy. The professional experience graduates can gain is a key determinant of their productivity, which augments to the extent that the human capital acquired through education is combined with growing amounts of expe-rience, especially in the case of younger graduates. Yet the increased incidence and duration of graduate unemployment in Spain, in this age group particularly, tends to reduce their productivity in compari-son with other developed countries. Not only that, employment turnover has been exacerbated by our country’s labor laws and institutions, which have reduced the concept of flexibility to a disproportionate recourse to temporary hirings. This places yet another obstacle in the way of produc-tivity and wage growth, considering that cumulative experience in a single com-pany is especially productive in the case of employees with university studies. In fact, the report Universidad, universitarios y productividad en España, produced by the Ivie for the BBVA Foundation, shows that the increment in graduates’ wages attributable to length of service within a firm can run to three times that obtainable from years of experience in other compa-nies. In addition, temporary contracts fur-ther depress productivity by reducing the incentives to invest in human capital and weakening workers’ motivation. Stronger incentives for stable employment, target-ing young graduates in particular, would help remedy this situation.

Graduate productivity and labor-market insertion are also impaired by Spanish firms’ small average size, and a business fabric dominated by microenterprises and SMEs. This stands in stark contrast to the other big economies that are our trading partners, and affects both the overall per-centage of graduate employees – gradu-ate recruitment increases substantially along with enterprise size – and the wages they receive, which are notably higher (up to 20% all else being equal) in larger firms. A small size often predisposes organizations to an inefficient use of the most skilled human resources, which are employed less and also in a less produc-tive manner. Therefore, regulatory and tax measures that encourage companies to grow in size could impact favorably on both their graduate employment and their productivity.

Other factors affecting the employment situation of graduates in Spain include the small percentage of entrepreneurs who are university educated (smaller than in other developed countries), the produc-tive specialization of its economy (biased towards sectors that are less human capi-tal intensive) and the kind of jobs on offer (a lower percentage of skilled employ-ment). Promoting entrepreneurship in the universities and lifelong training, and giv-ing entrepreneurs access to higher train-ing opportunities could go some way to bringing about the necessary change.

In sum, the kind of education offered, the activities that firms engage in and the workings of our economic institutions all share some responsibility for placing today’s graduates in a less-than-satisfac-tory employment situation. It follows that improving results will call not only for changes in the training models of Span-ish universities but also in the corporate and labor-market environments, which are equally vital for the harnessing of human capital.

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32 FORUM BBVA FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 31 - III/2012

The complex employment situation of Spanish graduates

Prof. Lorenzo SerranoAssociate Professor of Economic Analysis at the University of Valencia and research professor at the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (Ivie)

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