A polyfaceted personage in the last few years in the country’s scientific and technological circles, Cylon Gonçalves da Silva has today a baggage of knowledge and experience that few have. He has been through the academic world, working directly with private enterprise. At the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), he was a professor of the Physics Institute, where he entered in 1974 and was given the title of professor emeritus in 2001. In 1986, he took on the coordination of the implantation of the National Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS), inaugurated 1997, in Campinas. Until 2001, he was a director of the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Technology Association (ABTluS), which maintains the laboratory for all the Brazilian researchers that are studying the atomic structures of materials by means of high intensity electromagnetic radiation.

In 2000, Cylon was one of the coordinators of the National Science, Technology and Innovation Conference, held in the following year. He was responsible for the Green Paper, launched before the event for reflections from the participants about the themes at the conference. Retired from Unicamp, Cylon was a consultant for the Ministry of Science and Technology (MCT) in the area of nanotechnology, during the Fernando Henrique administration. In the Lula administration, he ran the MCT’s Secretariat for Research and Development Policies and Programs, where he stayed for almost two years. In 2005, at the age of 59, he took up the position of technology director of the Genius Technology Institute, passing, as he himself says, “to the other side of the counter”. His academic life began with his graduation in physics, at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), the state in which he was born, in the city of Ijuí. He took a master’s degree and a doctorate at the University of California, in Berkeley, and he was a professor of UFRGS for two years, before entering Unicamp. As an academic, he published over 70 scientific articles and books in his specialty, condensed matter physics, studying the electronic and magnetic properties of matter. He was also visiting professor at the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, between 1978 and 1980, and at La Trobe University, in Melbourne, in Australia, between 1999 and 2001. The interview he gave us in his office at Genius, in São Paulo, now follows, in its main moments.

You went through the academic world, you created the LNLS and was its director, afterwards, on two occasions, you went through government, and now you are with Genius, a private research institute. How are you feeling in this new environment?
— I like to joke that I am in my fourth incarnation. And each incarnation involves a childbirth. You have to learn new things, understand different institutional cultures. What motivated me to this experience was the fact that, in my three previous incarnations, I was acting basically on the side of the counter that takes care of the generation and the supply of knowledge. And Brazil’s great challenge today is innovation. We know perfectly well how to offer science and technology and which buttons to press for the country to produce more scientific articles and to produce more doctors. But we don’t know which buttons to press to generate innovation. Incidentally, I suspect that we don’t even have adequate institutions for this. There is a lack of legal landmarks for stimulating innovation, because many of those that there are inadequate for the task that is placed ahead of us. One example is the Brazilian legislation on biodiversity and biotechnology. Just to give one concrete example, the other day I was talking to someone from Embrapa [Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation] who was given the mission of setting up a special purpose company to speed up the transfer of knowledge from Embrapa to the private sector, in a model for public-private partnership. After one year of work, he hasn’t found out how to do it.