She has just been awarded the coveted “Prémio Pessoa” for innovation in the field of science, and molecular biologist Maria Manuela Mota seized the opportunity to sound a warning, alerting people to the fact that due to the crisis scientific progress in Portugal is “on the edge of the precipice, with the risk of everything that has been constructed being destroyed”.
Speaking to newspapers after winning the €60,000 prize for her research into a vaccine for malaria, Mota, 41, said her accolade was one to be shared with “a whole generation of investigators who the country had supported with scholarships abroad and who had returned to give Portuguese science an enormous boost”.
But member of the jury Maria de Sousa, also an immunologist, added that hanging over young scientists today was “a warning to the country, and to the government” that there is currently “insufficient, not to say incompetent” administration in the field of scientific research in Portugal.
