Scientists are Leaving the Country Due to Lack of Support
Joaquim Marques had recently finished a PhD in Biochemistry at University of São Paulo (USP) when he had to make an important decision for his career. Disappointed that his alma mater USP did not hire him to work as professor, he decided to accept an old invitation made by a renowned researcher. Marques hit the jackpot when he met professor Norman Lewis, with whom he worked in 2008 during a PhD exchange. Thanks to Lewis, he was now flying back to the United States, but this time it was to work as postdoctoral research associate at Institute of Biological Chemistry of Washington State University (SWU).
His girlfriend decided to join him and began a master in Architecture at the same university, located in Pullman, Washington. In 2010, she flew a bit before him and picked him up in the airport on February 2nd. Their car broke down on the way to the city center, but this misfortune did not make him have a bad first day in the land of opportunities. While the car was in the repair shop, Marques bought in a mall the newest iPhone available. He wanted to get a smartphone, in Brazil he would pay much more for the same product.
Excited with the opportunity, Marques planned to spend a few years in the United States learning new techniques that he did not have much access in Brazil, like biosynthesis. He would then later return to São Paulo to work either as professor in a public university or to open his own lab. His plans did not happen; he never went back.
Joaquim Marques works in a biotechnology start up in Boston and is an example of brain drain in the scientific community – an ongoing phenomenon that in the long run can jeopardize Brazilian development, as it makes our country dependent on knowledge and technology produced abroad.
The expression brain drain means flight of human capital and was coined in 1963 by the British Royal Society to refer to the emigration of British scientists and engineers, who moved to the United States and Canada during the cold war. Seeking better work opportunities and a better life, the flee of high skilled professionals concerned the Royal Society about the United Kingdom's future technological production losses, both in short and long term. Nowadays, the same concern is shared by the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science.
Current emigration panorama
The Brazilian Federal Revenue has revealed that the number of Brazilians declaring to leave the country for good has been increasing. In 2011, the institution received around 8,000 non-residency statements. Surprisingly, the amount in 2016 was over 19,000 – an increase of circa 140% in five years. Technicians of the institution have detected that part of the increase was due to tax payers trying to avoid the Brazilian taxation system, non-residents have to report only to the tax authorities of their residency country. Nonetheless, Joaquim Adir, national supervisor of income tax of the Federal Revenue, told Rio’s based newspaper O Globo that the number also represents a small sample of an emigration tendency.
Brazil still does not have accurate information on emigration, since there are not efficient methods to calculate this data. This can be seen as the latest demographic census realized in 2010 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics reported an underestimated amount of 491 thousand emigrants, while the Ministry of External Relations’ (MRE) estimated between 2 million to 3 million. Yet, data provided by governmental institutions suggest that emigration is an ongoing phenomenon, specially to North America. The MRE shows that in the United States, where 47% of our expat community lives, the increase was of circa 40% between 2013 and 2015, totalizing 1,4 million.
Low investment in science causes brain drain
Last year, the worldwide known neuroscientist Suzana Herculano gained the attention of media by announcing that she was leaving the Biomedical Science Department of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) to become an associate professor in the departments of Psychology and Biology of Vanderbilt University, United States. In her farewell letter entitled “Bye Bye, Brazil”, published last March by Piauí Magazine – a high ranked long format literary publication - Herculano said that Brazilian researchers are competent, capable and willing to do great deeds, but lack unfortunately proper conditions to do so. “I tried as long as I could”, unburdened the scientist, who considered leaving the country a smart choice for opening new doors and future possibilities.
Joaquim Marques studied chemistry and did a PhD at University of São Paulo, one of the top ranked higher education institutions in South America. Despite the status, USP also suffers with the lack of resources, like any other public Brazilian university. Marques remembers that some of his experiments were delayed either because there was no money left to buy inputs for the lab or because they were seized by Customs. During a PhD exchange at Washington State University, he realized that many of the experiments he did at USP with much struggle were easily performed at WSU. “In the United States, if an equipment broke or an input was lacking, it would arrive in the next day, whereas in Brazil it would take much longer”, explained Marques.
Depending on the type of research, inputs like chemical reagents, stem cells or high tech equipment are needed. The items are normally imported and cost a lot of money, but the budget researchers receive to carry on their experiments is not enough to buy all necessary material. In 2014, Suzana Herculano asked the federal funding agency CNPq R$ 120,000 to work on a research, but the agency approved only R$ 50,000, less than half of the required amount. By mid 2015, she still had not received the money. To avoid the interruption of her research, she has afforded R$ 25,000 out of her own pocket to pay the production costs and her master and PhD associates, who needed money to pay their bills.
A few months later, the situation became more critical. Parts of an important microscope broke, each costing between R$ 1,500 and R$ 3,000 – not including customs duties, which make the items 50% more expensive. In her farewell letter, Herculano concluded: "If it was already hard doing excellent science with lack of resources, with non-existent resources it became impossible", which shows that brain drain happens because Brazilians researchers are frustrated with their working conditions and thus look for better opportunities abroad.
Marco Mello, Ecology professor at Federal University of Minas Gerais, warned aspiring scientists in his personal blog: think twice before becoming a scientist. "There are more vacancies to work as professor in Brazil than in other countries, but the conditions vary greatly depending on the region. Having a job doesn't mean you will have conditions to do researches that are minimally relevant", explained the professor, who advises master and PhD students to go abroad if they have the opportunity.
In contrast to the United States, where funding comes both from the private and public sectors, most of our funding for science comes exclusively from the public sector. Science and Technology are considered a State matter, as the constitution assigns to Brazilian public universities the responsibility of teaching, offering support to the local community and creating new knowledge. Nonetheless, only 1.5% of the gross domestic product (GDP) is spent with the field, while the United States invests circa 2.8% of its GDP and the European Union intends to reach 3% in 2020.
The economic crisis worsened the investments in science and technology, impacting the budget of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications (MCTIC). The 2017 budget of the ministry is the lowest in 12 years, at R$ 2.8 billion - nearly half of the R$ 5 billion originally planned. Despite the economic scenario, investment in science has always been a political decision. Even before the crisis - considered the worst in the country's history – the federal government did not reach previous goals set by the ministry that could make Brazil have a competitive technological market.
Between 2007 and 2010, when the aim was reaching 1.5% of the GDP, the average expenses were 1.1%. Last year, MCTIC’s minister Gilberto Kassab evaluated the need to invest at least 2% of the GDP to launch Brazilian development, a challenge that will only happen if there is a change in mentality, according to the academia. Helena Nader, president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science, sees the lack of investment as an evidence that politicians do not see Science, Technology and Innovation as a strategy for socio-economic development. “Do you want to get over the crisis? So learn with China, the United States and the European Union, that are investing more in science and technology", said Nader in an interview to São Paulo's newspaper Estadão.
Excessive bureaucracy also frustrates researchers
Not only the lack of investment makes the life of a researcher harder in Brazil, bureaucracy is also a major issue. To have an idea of the problem, opening a small or medium size business requires 11 bureaucratic procedures and it takes an average of 79 days, while in the United Kingdom there are only four procedures and the average time is 4 days. When it comes to paying taxes, the situation is even worse. Brazil is among the countries that have the greatest tax compliance bureaucracy in the world. The administrative burden of complying with tax obligations and post filling processes make businesses spend an average of 2,038 hours a year reported the World Bank.
The issue is so concerning that between 1979 and 1986 the federal government created the Ministry of De-bureaucratization to help cutting red tape. Researchers have to deal often with bureaucratic administrative tasks, as they have to fill up papers, prepare accountability reports and solve problems at Customs. In public universities, labs do not have exclusive administrative clerks to assist them. Each one has to handle the paper filling own their own, which drains energy and time.
When it is time to require new equipment for the TV Lab of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Labtele), Carlos Henrique Guião knows that he will be stressed for at least a whole week. In 2011, Guião needed to buy new cameras for Labtele, since he is in charge of the lab. To start the purchasing process, he had to spend many hours researching specific features of the desired equipment, finding three different companies to provide him stamped and signed budgets, and writing a document to require the items. Any mistake could imply in months of delay, as the public service guidelines to acquire goods are strict and have many steps until a purchase can be done. Guião made mistakes; the purchasing process took almost 10 months to be over.
Fortunately, he managed to finish it before the end of the year, as funding returns to Brasilia if not used during the academic year. Yet, the new cameras arrived only in the end of 2013, two years later, because the delivery process suffered delays. Behind a single purchase, a lot of effort was put. “We always wait until we need to get a lot of equipment before starting a purchasing process. It is a lot of bureaucracy and it takes a lot of my time”, said Guião.
Researchers struggle with excessive bureaucracy also outside the university. Bruno Pires has been through a real life soap opera during a master at Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). Normally students take two years to finish their research and write a thesis, but Pires did it in three years, the maximum time frame. He wanted to investigate how patients in Florianópolis were adapted to medical equipment used in their houses. Before submitting the research project to UFSC’s Ethical Committee, a requirement was to have an informed consent of the local health authority.
The expected time to get the signed document was one month, but three months passed and his request was still on hold. Frustrated with the long waiting time and the excessive bureaucratic requirements, he changed the scope of his research to obtain valid results. After the traumatic experience, Bruno Pires wants to do a PhD in biomedical engineering abroad. However, he will only leave the country if he receives a grant, as he cannot afford it at the moment.
The road ahead
Although the working conditions of scientists are not ideal, which make them frustrated, brain drain may not occur if there are non-existent job opportunities in international research centers. Suzana Herculano emigrated, after all, because she has networking and got a job offer in the United States, whereas Bruno Pires, as described above, would only leave Brazil if he had an opportunity abroad. Knowing the right people and the existence of work opportunities moderates brain drain, otherwise many other scientists could have already left the country and the damage could be worse. A survey published in 2015 by the headhunter company Catho reported that 8 out of 10 Brazilians would emigrate if they had a job abroad. This suggests that Brazilians are avoiding taking risks, such as having no perspective of what they will do abroad or becoming an illegal immigrant, as it was common decades ago.
This discussion leads us to the following question: is there a way of halting brain drain, even with the existence of work opportunities abroad? The answer is not simple, but it seems that a big step to weaken the phenomenon starts with more governmental investment in science and more autonomy in public institutions to reduce the effects of bureaucracy.
Seven years have passed and Joaquim Marques is still living in the United States. He still would like to return to São Paulo to have his friends around and the support of his family. Yet, he does not know when that will happen. Marques is currently devoted to make science advance in the field of biotechnology and the conditions to do that in Brazil are still lacking.