Viral comments (9): scientist and resilient in Spain
Some, perhaps many actually do not remember but there was a very famous quiz show when there was only one TV in Spain where the proceedings were presented as “so and so, friends and residents ….”. In Spain, now, talking about scientists is talking about “so and so, scientists and resilient to … and to talk about science is to talk about resilience.
For the few who still do not know, resilience is defined as the human capacity to assume extreme situations with flexibility and overcome them. The original definition had a mechanical base as was the ability of a material to absorb and store elastic deformation energy.
And this government that we suffer (the Spanish and to a lesser extent the Catalan as it has use their tools differently) is working hard on finding the point of no return in the resilience of the system of science and innovation in Spain. The point that we could not recover the potentialities we had and we had shown. The point where we could not maintain a level of excellence in our scientific infrastructures and facilities but also in our technical staff and scientific that gives significance to such facilities, either because part of them seek new opportunities abroad or to be irrecoverably discouraged.
The attack progresses in two ways: first, a pay cut and the loss of certain employment benefits acquired by previous agreement or by reduction and restructuring some self-disposition days; secondly a much more serious (which has little parallel in other sectors) that affects the basis of the system and the general future of the country by delaying, cutting, reducing and even annihilating calls, plans or programs, training research staff, complementary aids, aids to specific sectors…
But resilience has a strong relationship with self-estimation both individual (any scientist) and collective (the scientist). Although it could drive to misunderstandings (sometimes rightly) the collective of researchers tend to have high self-estimation. They considered themselves as highly trained in their fields and they don’t sink to the first negative result or bad feed-back. But this amount of self-estimation will also have some limit somewhere because the system needs to feed them with new challenges, new developments, new results and all this will only be possible while maintaining research funding at a certain level. And especially if the governmental managers of science do not fall back on one of the evils of this state, Spain, the Spain’s strategy to match below, using the methodology of “coffee for everyone”.
In short, the unknown resilience of the system is the sauces in which the idiots trust while pour their nasty decisions on Spanish science to hide the taste of their incompetence (this sentence is a free loan from the very “big” Tyrion Lannister).
But this, this is another story.
