Perspectives in Health Magazine
The Magazine of the Pan American Health Organization
Special Centennial Edition
Volume 7, Number 2, 2002

For decades, perhaps centuries, education and health have been trumpeted as official priorities by virtually every Latin American government. Many countries' constitutions "guarantee" these as inalienable rights. We have often heard, "We will not rest until every child has access to decent doctors and good teachers." But are health and education really priorities in Latin America and the Caribbean, and are priorities in and of themselves enough?

Some have argued that the citizens of economically successful countries simply work harder. That is false. The average Mexican works longer hours than the average Japanese (the average number of hours worked annually in Mexico has increased by more than 100 since 1990). Indeed, throughout Latin America, people are working longer and harder than ever. The key difference is productivity. And productivity depends on whether a country's workers get enough to eat, whether they are healthy, and whether they understand and have the education to use the dominant economic language.

Investing in public health is essential. But it is not sustainable without parallel investments in science, technology and corporate R&D. A society has to generate wealth to be able to invest more in its human resources. And today, one rarely generates widespread wealth in a knowledge economy without developing a digitally literate population. More than 90 percent of all information produced in 1999 was in digital format, according to the University of California at Berkeley's School Information and Management Systems. Those who remain functionally illiterate in Microsoft or Linux have a much harder time making a living.

Many bureaucrats and policymakers argue that you can't have it all; either you invest in basic health care and basic education or you shift resources to R&D. This is a false dichotomy. Striving to improve basic health conditions and investing in R&D are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they eventually reinforce each other. While this may seem a distant objective in places like Africa or poorer parts of Latin America today, it should be remembered that South Korea had the same income per capita as Ghana in 1960.

If Latin Americans are to reap the benefits of the life sciences revolution, they must rediscover the importance of science and scientists as a key component of development. Development summits, like the recent United Nations hosted International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, will have no impact if science and technology are not at the core of any development strategy.

Patenting knowledge
One good barometer of a country's ability to produce knowledge, apply it and have it generate wealth is its ability to get patents. Unfortunately, Latin America and the Caribbean do not do well by this measure. Of the 13,566 patent applications presented in Mexico in 2001, for example, only 5 percent actually came from Mexicans. From 1997 to 2001, Argentine, Brazilian and Mexican universities failed to obtain even one patent per year, on average, in the United States. Yet over the same period, the Yissum Research Development Company at Hebrew University in Israel was granted 191 U.S. patents. The University of California was granted more than 1,800 patents between 1997 and 2000. This dismal record on patents is not surprising if you consider that Mexico has, for every 1 million people, 214 scientists engaged in R&D, and Argentina has 660 per million. By contrast, Korea has 2,235 and Singapore 2,318. Not surprisingly, the average South Korean worker today earns three times more than the average Mexican (even though as recently as 1975, Mexican workers earned five times as much as their South Korean counterparts).

Increasingly, investments, information technology, patent and licensing activities, and other commercial activities are related to advances in the life sciences. The ability to speak and work with the new language of ATCGs is changing almost every industry throughout the world: agribusiness, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, health provision, insurance, energy and military, among others. Today, most of the patents granted in the United States are related to biotechnology, not information technology or telecommunications.

The majority of Latin American countries missed the digital revolution; they cannot afford to miss the life sciences revolution by betting their future on exporting commodities and cheap labor. Neither countries nor people can continue to do what they have always done without falling further and further behind. This does not mean that every country must become a biotech cluster. But what it does mean is that at least some citizens and companies have to be literate in this new language, and the more the better. Every time Latin American countries reduce their already miniscule R&D budgets, they have less chance of participating in the new economy, and it gets harder to improve their long-term economic and social conditions. Mexico decreased its expenditures in R&D from 1985 to 1995 from 0.44 percent to 0.33 per-cent of GDP. In 2001, expenditures of the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) were cut by almost one-third.

We in Latin America and the Caribbean must generate more knowledge in our own countries and patent more knowledge in the United States and Europe. Lowering inflation and further decreasing public expenditures can help stabilize the Region's economies, but these are stopgap measures that rarely generate much new wealth. Only highly trained individuals can do this rapidly and consistently.

There are three fundamental lessons of the past decades. First, investing in massive natural resource recovery projects is not a path to riches. Consider the oil-rich states of Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Mexico and the former Soviet Union. Second, countries need to invest primarily in people, particularly in public health and science-based education. Third, science-based literacy has to lead to profitable companies; otherwise incomes and investments in people tend to collapse.

As World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland wrote in the WHO report Genomics and World Health published earlier this year: "It is a reality that most genomic and biotechnology research is presently carried out in the industrialized world, and is primarily market-driven. Genomics also needs to be applied to the health problems of the developing world. It is crucial that we actively seek means to involve developing country scientists in innovative biotechnology."

For Latin America and the Caribbean, the future of public health could become much brighter, and quality of life in general much better, as a result of the life sciences revolution--but only if the Region's countries invest in their people and prepare them, not just to adapt, but to truly capitalize on change.

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