Page 143 - Genomic Medicine in Emerging Economies

132 CHAPTER 7: Experience in the Development of Genomics Companies

In this chapter, and by relating our own experiences as PhDs in molecular
biology—specializing in human genetics and forensic genetics—we will try to
synthesize how genomics advances of the last 30 years have been implemented
in Argentina.

A BIT OF HISTORY

Less than 100 years had passed between 1869, when the Swiss chemist Friedrich
Miescher isolated a milky substance from the white blood cells present in the
purulent secretions of discarded bandages after wounded soldiers were healed
(which he called “nuclein”), and 1953, when Watson and Crick described the
structure of DNA (https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~mcclean/plsc411/History-
of-Genetics-and-Genomics-narrative-and-overheads.pdf). During that period
of time, Walter Flemming, a German physiologist who was dedicated to the
study of cellular structures, discovered that the cell nucleus contains a sub-
stance that is tinged with color, which he called “chromatin;” this substance
was able to separate during cell division into filaments, which received the
name of “chromosomes.” Thomas Hunt Morgan, while working with the fruit
fly, confirmed the Mendelian hypothesis that genes are located on chromo-
somes; while Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty, during their work with bacteria,
were able to prove that DNA was the vehicle to biological specificity and that
this molecule resided in human genetic information. They also claimed that
DNA was the gene and chromosome genetic material, and through DNA cer-
tain characteristics were inherited from parents and transmitted to children,
and so on, from generation to generation.
Since then, the concepts of inheritance, genes, DNA, and chromosomes have
merged. Scientific thinking has finally managed to bring them all together into
one box.

Thus in 1953 the Age of Genomics began (Smith, 2005; https://www.future-
learn.com/courses/the-genomics-era/0/steps/4866).

In all societies, scientific policies are correlated in one way or another with
past and present political moments. That is why in order to understand what
happened with genomics in Argentina in recent years, especially in the private
sector, we need a brief historical account.

From 1930 to 1983, Argentina suffered numerous coups d’état. On July 29,
1966, during the de facto government of General Ongania, the episode known
as the “The Night of the Long Police Batons” took place (Morero et al., 2002).
On that day, hundreds of teachers, students, and nonteachers who occupied sev-
eral of Buenos Aires University buildings in defense of university autonomy and
academic freedom were savagely beaten by the security forces. The government
ordered the intervention to national universities, their military occupation, and
the academic “purification,” that is to say, the expulsion of opposing professors,