The scientist Francisco Laurindo, from InCor-FMUSP and a member of the RIDC Redoxoma, was elected president of the Society for Redox Biology and Medicine (SfRBM), for the biennium 2022-2023. Also from RIDC Redoxoma, Professor Sayuri Miyamoto, from the Instituto de Química-USP, was elected for the SfRBM Council, and postdocs Phablo de Abreu and Verônica Paviani were chosen for the Trainee Council. The elected will be installed during the 27th Annual Society Conference, which will be held virtually next November.

According to Laurindo, these elections consolidate the long-held Brazilian participation and close involvement with SfRBM, which is the main society in the redox area, and reflect the scientific excellence of Redoxoma. In an interview, he said that the Society and scientists in general cannot stay passive against the growing wave of scientific misinformation and obscurantism. Also, he pledged, despite the enormous current challenges, to adopt as much as possible a good mood for his presidency. “We have to enforce some culture changes, we have to fight, we must have a drive for excellence, but we have to those things with good humor and a gentle touch to help congregate people towards these goals and to make the overall scientific endeavor worthwhile”. Established in 1987, SfRBM is a professional organization formed by scientists and clinicians investigating redox biology, a unifying theme in the pathophysiology of human diseases.

Francisco Laurindo is the director of the Vascular Biology Laboratory at the Instituto do Coração of FMUSP and is the RIDC Redoxoma’s vice-director. He is an Associate Professor in Cardiology at the Faculdade de Medicina of USP, where he completed his undergraduate and doctorate. He has a postdoctoral degree from Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in the United States. He is a member of the board of directors of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the scientific advisory committee of FAPESP.

Read the interview with the researcher below.

What is the importance of being the first Brazilian to preside over SfRBM?
This election consolidates the sustained and high-quality Brazilian participation in the SfRBM. This participation is already quite traditional, having occurred over 25 years in several forms. First, our investigators have often been invited to speak or to take organizer roles at SfRBM meetings and other educational activities. Second, our students have won many prizes - almost every year at least one Brazilian investigator wins a Travel Award or a Young Investigator Award. In addition, several Brazilian scientists sit at the editorial board of the Society’s journal Free Radical Biology and Medicine, of which Ohara Augusto [RIDC Redoxoma’s director] was Associate Editor, and more recently of Redox Biology, of which Alicia Kowaltowski is an Associate Editor. Also, several scientists from Brazil have played roles in councils or as vice-presidents of SfRBM over the years, as now exemplified by the election of Sayuri Miyamoto. So Brazil’s participation is strong in SfRBM, which is the main society in the redox area, and I see my election for president as a reflection of all this long success history. It is also worth remembering that SfRBM had a South American president, Rafael Radi and as such I think the election is also marks an important milestone for South American investigators.

How do you see the SfRBM?
My main goal as a president is to help catalyze the growth in scientific excellence, which is the basis of SfRBM. At the same time, SfRBM has to have a global vision and universal ambitions. Being a president from Brazil, I pledge not to administrate SfRBM for Brazil or South America, but rather help to take the Society towards global excellence and, in this process, drag Brazil and South America even further in this growth. I think it is crucial that the Society is not driven towards any regional group, while at the same time it must have a broad scope in terms of geographic origins and diversity.

What are your plans for the SfRBM?
The main plan is to strive for scientific excellence. I think this is the SfRBM main asset, which made it a very strong Society. Another important point is to maintain a strong biochemical basis, which is at the core of its tradition and its foundations. But at the same time, biology has exploded over the last recent years in incredible ways and we must completely open up our society to those new emerging areas, including redox systems biology, omics sciences, data science, molecular biophysics, structural biology and many others. I see an enormous potential to foster redox biology through interations with those emerging interdisciplinary fields. The third most important point is to incorporate young researchers more and more into the Society, so as to make SfRBM a leverage point for their careers, as it was for me and so many other colleagues. That is, SfRBM activities should catalyze more and more their scientific growth, being an occasion for healthy debates and constructive discussions as they present their work or communicate with other investigators. I would love SfRBM to mark the career path of these students on their way towards future leadership: this already happens and we have to make it happen even more. In this process, the Society has to foster a definite and clear ethical and social path towards enhancing investigator diversity in all its aspects, with no racial, geographic, gender, or any other type of restrictions or handicaps. More and more, being a scientist is to face these questions as our own and we have to fully take this responsibility as a Society.

And what will be your biggest challenges?
I think I will assume the presidency of SfRBM at a very challenging time. First, we are already experiencing very challenging circumstances under several standpoints, and it is very likely they will keep one way or another for some time ahead. For instance, in 2022 we will be, perhaps, in the rite of passage for a full return of conferences to the face-to-face format, as I am skeptical this will happen fully in 2021. Over the next years, I believe we will face economic constraints that may limit the capacity of scientists to perform work and to present it in a Society’s meeting. Also, we have to face complex and uncertain decisions regarding the issue of open-access publications, which are here to stay, and pre-prints, which are helping to accelerate knowledge diffusion - but simultaneously for the good and for the bad. In parallel, since publications are a source of funds for our Society, this creates further challenges as to additional sources of income. Thus, other sources of support will have to be searched. Another major challenge is to incorporate to our Society needed discussions and concrete actions related to the increasingly needed ethical and social roles of scientists in the pursuit of diversity, equality and tolerance. In parallel, SfRBM must incorporate more and more discussions related to the growing challenges faced by young investigators in their career path. That is, SfRBM and in general all scientific societies in my view, have the challenge and responsibility of a tutorial role that must be increasingly fulfilled. Having said this, I believe a major challenge is to keep good humor. We have to enforce some culture changes, we have to fight, we must have a drive for excellence, but we have to those things with good humor and a gentle touch to help congregate people towards these goals and to make the overall scientific endeavor worthwhile. Doing science is, above all, a very positive and rewarding endeavor. On a simbolic note, I will begin my president term in 2022, a year in which the SfRBM scientific meeting will be in Uruguay, which will help, I believe, to congregate more students from Latin America and involve them in the Society.

How was your trajectory from Medicine to research in redox biology?
It is a trajectory full of switches. I graduated in Medicine, underwent a long and demanding residency training, seeing lots of patients, working on duties, etc. - that is, everything that a an aspiring doctor normally does. However, somewhere in the middle of my medical course and, later, at the residency training, I began to feel the need to better understand mechanisms of the diseases that I treated, thinking that the level of knowledge I had, that the usual medical training gave me, was incompletely satisfactory. Thus, I started looking for professors in the most basic areas. Here I emphasize only the name of my mentor, Prof. Protásio da Luz, to whom I was linked at that time and who guided me in the cardiovascular physiology field. I started doing research work during the residency and this area attracted me a lot. I did a research fellowship abroad after residency training and this changed my career radically because basic science provided a new horizon to expand something which nowadays is called translational medicine. When I returned to Brazil, I went straight way to build a laboratory and at this very time my interest for redox processes started to emerge – and it was kept all the time since. At this time, a very important turning point was the interaction with colleagues at USP’s Chemistry Institute, Prof. Etelvino Bechara and Prof. Ohara Augusto. I still consider Ohara as my role model in science, due to her scientific rigor and healthy skepticism, and it is very rewarding that we kept interacting through her leadership of the much expanded Redoxoma group. The interdisciplinarity and excellence of this group have been essential along my career and that of the students and post-docs that I was able to mentor. I continued for some time with clinical activities, shifts, office, until these activities started to consume a lot of time and I had to make the option to stop, unfortunately. These are painful decisions you have to make in order to give meaningful directions to your career. So, since the late 1990s and early 2000s, I’m not practicing anymore and kept myself entirely to basic science. The rest of the story is the building of an increasingly strong group, in several aspects starting from scratch at our institution. And, over the years, our goals have been to try to enhance ou mechanistic research. Without knowing mechanisms at the molecular level, translational science stays incomplete or will not happen at all.

You are RIDC Redoxoma’s vice-director and other Redoxoma researchers have been elected to SfRBM councils. How do you evaluate Redoxoma’s performance?
I think it is a reflection of the scientific excellence of Redoxoma, which channeled to this Society several years ago, as I said. Several other colleagues held important positions: Alicia Kowaltowski was already on the council and was vice-director, Luis Netto was on the council, Ohara also was on the council, and I was on the council too, in the past. This reflects the increasing and sustained pathway for international outreaching of our Redoxoma group. The basis for it, as I said rests on the scientific excellence of this group, which found in SFRBM a fertile ground for growth and dissemination. This has also expanded to further interactions through other means, for example other conferences in the area, in particular several Gordon Conferences related to the redox area.

With the pandemic, we have received mixed messages: on the one hand, people seem to recognize the importance of science; on the other hand, we see the spread of misinformation and fake news and the deleterious performance of the negationists. What can scientists do in this war of information versus misinformation, of science versus obscurantism?
This is a very important and crucial issue, one in which I have been increasingly involved through my roles at the board of directors of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and at the Advisory Committee of our FAPESP agency. I believe that as scientists - and now in the position of president of SfRMB even more - we have a responsibility. Today it is no longer possible for the scientist to be quiet and working in isolation, just thinking he is doing his/her best. Of course, as a first thing, the scientist has to pursue good science. But today, working side-by-side with society has become more and more fundamental. This involves building communication channels – social media in particular -, doing altruistic work, getting involved in multilevel education and several other forms of action. I believe a modern scientist should not escape this role on way or another, and the pandemics crudely and sadly exposed the urgency and importance of these actions. In this process, we will have to advocate for science at distinct levels, but I believe that a confrontational position is not a good one. Studies have shown that directly confronting negationists or this wave of obscurantism does not work and only tends to exacerbate these distopic views. I don’t know exactly what works and I don’t think anyone knows for sure. But most likely this starts with a patient approach involving dialogue and tentative understanding of the other person’s needs. Unexpectedly, I am starting to believe that another important target audience nowadays are the students, PhDs and post-docs themselves. I will explain. Today, mainly because of obscurantism, pandemics, fierce spirits, political polarization, etc young people who do science are completely exposed to misinformation and hostile attitudes. That is, these people do hard work for 8, 10, 12 hours a day in the laboratory, often in weekends, to complete their doctorate or their projects, with the healhy enthusiasm of discovery, and they come home and are bombarded on TV, newspapers, cell phones, social networks… I am afraid their sense of belonging is getting disrupted and they get stressed or confused. They need some sort of reinforcement to position themselves in this scenario and we have to pay attention to this, doing things we did not need to do before. We are often criticized for preaching to converts. But I think that nowadays we also must preach to converts.