The specialist in the origin of life, Antonio Lazcano, and the cardiologist, José Jalife, both who studied at the Autonomous National University of Mexico, were invested last Friday as new “honoris causa” doctors of Universitat de València. In this session, principal Esteban Morcillo named them as “examples of great researchers and teachers, and great diffusers of knowledge”
In his words, Esteban Morcillo explained: “In a society as the present one, where knowledge is omnipresent, the university has to produce a fundamental research which allows to contribute to the progress of science, answering those questions which people make at night, but favouring also the accumulation of knowledge which, nourishing collective wisdom, are the base of future developments of research”. And he added: “We have to, however, be conscious that this type of investigation does not allow an immediate quantification of its return, as it does not allow an immediate application either, but which is fundamental for the development of science. On the other hand, we cannot stop outlining that, together with the research and transference of the results of the research to the productive fabrics and society, which is the base of scientific innovation, social and cultural, public university has to also look for other goals beyond teaching, spread of science and its social value, producing world cultural goods”. Here, the principal distinguished the example which represent the new “honoris causa” doctors.
Complete intervention of the principal is accessible clicking here.
During his speech, Antonio Lazcano paid tribute to the Republican exiles in Mexico, whose inheritance gave results in an extraordinary way, and whose personal and collective history was founded a long time ago with cultural and scientific history of Mexico”. And he also made a defence of public and laic university: “Public university is an essential component of every educational project with academic quality. For this reason, the excess of fiscal policies which many governments adopted before an economic crisis is alarming, and they bring associated to them drastic budget cutbacks to public universities and to institutions of higher education, and this is a risk and an insult for the scientific and cultural development of a town. There are additional risks. Besides the tendency towards privatisation of education which can be observed in some European and Latin American countries, the attempt is persisting, unsuccessfully up to now, for the return of privilege of the church and religious education at public schools”.
Full programme is available clicking here.
Likewise, José Jalife reminded his origins and his premature passion for Medicine and for research: “I am a son of Syrian Jews who, in their traditional diaspora fled away from prosecution and during the first years of the twentieth century they found refuge in Mexico, a dear country where I was born, and which gave me the opportunity to educate myself as a doctor and were I started my degree in rate. I always wanted to be a doctor, since I was little and biology was always my favourite matter during the primary and secondary education I studied. However, the same year I entered the faculty of medicine, I found out that being a doctor not only means diagnosis and daily care of patients in the clinical practice, which I consider highly meritable, admirable and of great importance, but it can also evolve the privilege of working at an experimental lab, with the aim to participate in the acquisition of new applicable ideas to medicine; that is to say, to the practice of biomedical research, whose goal is among others to advance knowledge of fundamental mechanisms of the diseases”.
Integrate intervention of professor Jalife can be found in this link.
Professor Luis Such read the “laudatio” corresponding to Jalife, from whom he outlined the related research with implied mechanisms in establishment, maintenance and the stop of ventricular fibrillation (the main cause of sudden cardiac death). “Before this theory which has traditionally sponsored fibrillation as a ventricular activation process totally disorganised and at random, professor Jalife set up that ventricular fibrillation is in fact the result of very well organised electric waves which rotate at highly elevated frequencies”. In a similar way, professor Jalife, made some researches on the mechanisms of the most frequent rate of all which is auricular fibrillation.
Full programme of Luis Such is available clicking here.
Antonio Lazcano Araujo (Tijuana, México, 1950) is a full university professor of Origin of Life in the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM) and honorary Director of the Lynn Margulis centre of Evolutionary Biology from the Galápagos Island, which depends on the San Francisco de Quito University. Between 2002 and 2006 he directed ISSOL, the international society for the origin of life. He is currently a member of the School Nacional of Mexico.
He studied at the Autonomous National University of Mexico, he was a professor who visited several universities such as Orsay Paris-Sud, Alicante, Autonomous of Madrid, Valencia, La Habana, California – San Diego and Rome, in the ETH Zentrum of Zurich, the Pasteur Institute of París and he was a member of the Astrobiology Institute of NASA.
Professor Lazcano stands out because of his studies about the evolution of life, the history of the ideas on appearance of life and the application of phylogenetic methods to the study of the cellular and metabolic evolution, as well as for its trajectory in the divulgation of science.
Co-director of the series of Evolutionary Biology from the scientific books collection “Without Borders” of the Divulgation Chair of Science at Universitat de València. He received numerous awards, among them there is the Nacional University Award (UNAM), the Medal of Merit from Veracruz University and from the UNAM and the “honoris causa” doctorate from the University of Milan.
José Jalife Sacal (Ciudad de México, 1947) is the co-director of the Centre for Arrhythmia Research, an Intern Medicine and an Integrative Physiology and Molecular professor and The Cyrus and Jane Farrehi Professor of Cardiovascular Research at the University of Michigan.
He studied at the Autonomous National University of Mexico, the National Institute of Cardiology *Mexico and at the General Hospital of Oviedo. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Upstate Medical Centre in Syracuse and in the Masonic Medical University of Utica, and director of the de Pharmacology Department of the Upstate Medical University.
The research of doctor Jalife is principally centred in the implied mechanisms in the establishment, the maintenance and the stop of the ventricular fibrillation, which is the main cause sudden cardiac death. His researches suggest that the ventricular fibrillation is result of very organised electric waves which erupt highly elevated frequencies.
He is the author of more than three hundred scientific articles and thirty books. He was distinguished with more than thirty high distinctions among which the following ones outstand: American College of Cardiology, of research of the Upstate Medical University, Pierre Rijlant of the Académie Royale de Médecine de Belgique, and the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.
Last update: 22 de may de 2015 14:00.
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