\nField of expertise<\/strong>
\nMolecular Biology
\nInstitution<\/strong>
\nFederal University of Rio Grande do Sul
\nEducation<\/strong>
\nDegree in Veterinary Medicine from UFRRJ, PhD in Molecular Biology from the S\u00e3o Paulo School of Medicine at UNIFESP
\nScientific output <\/strong>
\n197 articles, 1 book, and 28 book chapters<\/div>\n
How did the son of a pair of farm laborers establish an academic career at a time when few people took that path in Brazil?<\/strong> Could you read at that point?<\/strong> Why did you choose to be a veterinarian?<\/strong> How did you meet him?<\/strong> Sometimes our stream would flood and the precarious bridge would collapse. To get to school, I had to swim across the river<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And how was your first contact with scientific practice?<\/strong> How did that affect you?<\/strong> Did you follow their advice?<\/strong>
\nThere weren\u2019t many expectations for a person like me. My father never went to school. He learned to read and write from my mother, who only attended elementary school. We lived the farm life. My mother had nine children and only me and one of my sisters, who is ten years younger than me, went to college. My mother had tuberculosis after I was born. Penicillin had just been developed and my father spent what little money he had\u2014which wasn’t much\u2014to save her. But it left him with nothing. He had a storage unit and a small property that he had to sell. Two of my older brothers had moved to Rio de Janeiro and convinced my parents to follow them. My father got a job at the city hall, but he couldn\u2019t adapt. At that time, at the end of the Second World War, he found out about a major agrarian reform project by Get\u00falio Vargas in the Itagua\u00ed region, between the old Federal District and the state of Rio, to settle the families of Japanese immigrants and to give land to soldiers returning from the war. My father went there and convinced a former soldier to let him be a sharecropper on his property. That’s how we started: my father, my mother and I, to plant, cultivate, and harvest crops. But there was no school nearby. A year or two later, the project was expanded and my father was given some farm land. I was 10 years old when he decided that I should go to school.<\/p>\n
\nMy father taught me the basics of math: the weights of things, size, volume. But not how to read and write. The closest school was \u201cPonte dos Jesu\u00edtas\u201d in Santa Cruz, on the Federal District side\u2014we were in the state of Rio. There was a river that separated one region from the other. From time to time, our stream, called the S\u00e3o Francisco River, would flood and the precarious bridge would collapse. To get to school, I had to swim across the river. I completed elementary school there. I was an excellent math student. One of the agronomists from the Ministry of Agriculture involved in the land division process told my father that the government was opening a rural university nearby that had a technical school, and that he should send me there. It was the Ildefonso Sim\u00f5es Lopes Agrotechnical School, and the competition for spaces was fierce. It was based on the model of a military school and provided all the necessary support: food, clothes, shoes, a dormitory, discipline, sport, rural work. I applied, passed, and spent four years boarding in the old gymnasium school system. Soon after, the school opened its technical course, equivalent to the old scientific course. I then spent seven years as a full-time student. The subject I was most interested in was chemistry.<\/p>\n
\nAt what was then the Rural University of Brazil (RUB) and is now UFRRJ, there were only two higher education courses: agronomy and veterinary science. To do chemistry, I would have had to change university and my family wouldn\u2019t have been able to support me. That’s when I met a professor of biochemistry on the veterinary course: Fernando Braga Ubatuba. He was my scientific mentor. Many years later, I invited him to work in my laboratory when I was a professor at UFRJ. He worked with me until he died.<\/p>\n
\nUbatuba was an incredible physician, biochemist, and educator. He was also a researcher at the Manguinhos Institute, which is now FIOCRUZ. The only place he taught part-time was the veterinary clinic at RUB. Biochemistry was a similar path to chemistry. I took the entrance exam for veterinary science, which in addition to the written tests, included an oral exam with four professors. He was there and he asked me: \u201cWhy do you want to become a veterinarian?\u201d I responded: \u201cBecause I want to work with you.\u201d I passed and when the first semester ended, he offered an opportunity to all students to work with him during the holidays. \u201cBut it has to be at my lab in Manguinhos.\u201d It was me and one classmate. In the second semester I became a teaching assistant.<\/p>\n
\nIn front of RUB was what at the time was called the Agricultural Research Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture, now known as EMBRAPA. Two German veterinarians worked there, studying toxic plants and mineral deficiencies in animals. They convinced a farmer to sacrifice a sick animal so they could take a sample of its liver to analyze for mineral deficiencies, but they sent the sample to Germany for analysis. They asked Ubatuba for help, and he said: \u201cJorge will do it\u2014I\u2019ll train him.\u201d I spent three years working on the topic of mineral microelement deficiencies in cattle and sheep. At the end of the course in 1963, I started a specialization course in the physiology of microorganisms, at the then Institute of Biochemistry of the University of Paran\u00e1 [currently UFPR], directed by Professor Metry Bacila [1922\u20132012]. I returned to RUB on March 30, 1964. And on April 1, the dictatorship began.<\/p>\n
\nI had been president of the academic board and Ubatuba was considered a leftist. There was a barracks nearby and the soldiers came to the university cafeteria, climbed onto a table and started reading out the names of students and other people who were to be arrested, including mine. But fortunately they didn’t find me, because I had switched to the Ministry of Agriculture side of campus. I was extremely lucky, and that allowed me to get away from the RUB environment. I found a former chemistry teacher from the Agrotechnical School who offered me a job at a multinational company where he worked in Resende. The company was Lederle, the Brazilian division of Cyanamid. I was in the industry for a long time. I was engaged and earning well, but I was still really interested in academic life. I stayed in the private sector until things calmed down at RUB. When they began hiring for a teaching assistant, I applied. I passed and went back to working with Ubatuba and the German researchers. Then in 1968, Ubatuba was arrested. He was escorted by soldiers to his biochemistry classes\u2014it was really terrible. At the end of 1968, he told me: \u201cWe’re going to have to leave, but first you need to get your graduate degree.\u201d He and his colleagues at FIOCRUZ decided that I should switch to studying proteins at USP’s newly created Ribeir\u00e3o Preto School of Medicine, working under Professor Jos\u00e9 Moura Gon\u00e7alves [1914\u20131996].<\/p>\n
\nNo, because it changed. Moura Gon\u00e7alves became director of the School of Medicine and Ubatuba said “he won’t have time to supervise you.” So I went to do my master’s degree at the S\u00e3o Paulo School of Medicine [EPM], supervised by the couple Jos\u00e9 Leal Prado [1918\u20131987] and Eline Prado [1921\u20132007], who welcomed me with open arms. I broke the prevailing internalism a little. I went there at the end of 1969, and on April 1, 1970, Ubatuba was removed from office along with nine other FIOCRUZ researchers, in an event known as the Manguinhos Massacre. The group that we formed at RUB was disbanded. After six months at EPM, Jos\u00e9 and Eline Prado decided that I should go straight onto a doctorate, which was rare at the time. Things got complicated because when my two-year master’s period ended, RUB demanded that I return. That was a difficult issue.<\/p>\n
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