Researcher Alicia Kowaltowski, from the Instituto de Química at Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and a member of the RIDC Redoxoma, has been selected as the 2024 Laureate for Latin America and the Caribbean of the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Awards in Life and Environmental Sciences.

The scientist was awarded for her fundamental contribution to the biology of mitochondria, which are “the cell’s main energy source, acting as their batteries.” According to the award organizers, ”Her work has been critical in understanding the implication of energy metabolism in chronic diseases, including obesity and diabetes, as well as in aging. Her outstanding contribution as an investigator and mentor as well as her advocacy for science in Latin America and its dissemination to the public are inspirational for young scientists.“

The L’Oréal-UNESCO International Prize for Women in Science is awarded each year to five outstanding women scientists from the following regions: Africa and Arab States, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and North America. Each year, the international jury alternates between Life and Environmental Sciences and Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Computer Science categories. The program was founded in 1998 with the motto ”The world needs science and science needs women.“

“Being awarded is a bit uncomfortable in a way because the award goes to one person, but the work belongs to a group. I don’t see it as my award, I think it is a recognition of the laboratory’s work”, said the researcher, who has a degree in medicine from the University of Campinas, a doctorate in medical sciences from the same university, and a post-doctorate at the Oregon Graduate Institute. She is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the São Paulo State Academy of Sciences.

In an interview given to the RIDC Redoxoma website, Kowaltowski, who has published over 160 scientific articles, spoke about her career and the challenges of doing science in Brazil. “Those who manage to do science here do it out of heroism. We manage to do so. And we do internationally recognized science,” she said. Read her interview below.

Could you talk a little about your background and how you became interested in science?

I believe that human beings are born scientists. We are born curious, wanting to understand the world, asking why. I am lucky to have grown up in a family of scientists, my parents are professors at the University of Campinas and I grew up in a scientific academic environment, I got a chemistry kit as a child, and also a microscope. So I never lost that curiosity. Around the 7th or 8th grade, I took science classes about the human body, what hormones were and that kind of thing, and I became very interested. In high school, I left the school I was in and went to a Technical High School in Biochemistry, ETECAP, a state technical school that is part of Centro Paula Souza. It had both the normal high school curriculum and additional technical education, so we had more Chemistry, Biochemistry, and laboratory classes. I think this was very important for my training because I learned in high school most of the basic techniques that we use in the laboratory to this day.

At the end of high school, we start thinking about entrance exams, and in Brazil you enter a very specific career, which I’m super critical of. I really liked the biological area, but at a molecular level - I liked biochemistry, I wasn’t very interested in taxonomy, or classification, which is a lot of the Biology we see in high school. So I chose Medicine. Today I see that Biology has also become extremely molecular, I think I would also have found my niche if I had done more general biological training. In my first year of medical school, I had the opportunity to go to the Weizmann Institute of Science, a program for young students to spend a vacation period in a laboratory there. When I returned, I asked Professor Aníbal Vercesi a question in class related to this internship and he said he could only answer me in his laboratory, he called me to the lab and invited me to work with him. He is good at selecting interested students. I started working as an undergraduate student in his laboratory in my first year of medical school and, by the time I reached my internship years in medical school, when we started seeing patients, I was already enamored by the process of doing research. In internship, we go through several specialties, some of which I really liked, but I couldn’t keep interest for long, I couldn’t see myself doing that for the rest of my life. In the laboratory, the discovery process is different every day, and every day you think about where you are going next.

Did your interest in energy metabolism and mitochondria come from your work with Professor Vercesi?

Aníbal was already working with energy metabolism and mitochondrial bioenergetics. He did postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Albert Lehninger, who was a great leader in the field, and wrote the textbook that we still use today. I was lucky to have been invited to participate in a laboratory in an area that I ended up really liking.

What in this area interests you most?

I think the important thing about metabolism is that it is the very definition of what a living being is. A living being is a difficult thing to define. Some of the definitions that exist are the ability to reproduce, but not everyone reproduces; the ability to grow, but once we are in adulthood we no longer grow; the ability to transform the environment: this is metabolism. Changing the molecules we eat or exchanging molecules with our environment, the set of chemical reactions that transform molecules is what metabolism is. This means that ultimately any cause of death is a metabolic failure. It has applications for everything. Metabolism is at the heart of what a living being is, and affects any biological process and any biological system.

What are your main contributions to the field?

More recently, I think we have contributed a lot to understanding how different diets alter energy metabolism in ways that affect age-related diseases. This is a line of research that was established just over 15 years ago in the laboratory. Before that and during my postdoctoral studies, a very important discovery we made was understanding how mitochondria can protect the heart against heart attack by transporting ions across the membrane. And, before that, in the doctorate and also in my undergrad work, it was to understand processes that regulate the mitochondrial production of oxidants, because mitochondria are an important source of free radicals and oxidants, precisely because metabolism involves so much electron transfer.

You wrote the scientific popularization book ’What is Metabolism: How Our Bodies Transform What We Eat Into Who We Are’ and maintain a fortnightly column in the digital newspaper Nexo, among other activities. Could you talk about your science communication work?

It’s interesting. When I started working here in Brazil as a researcher, I was working a lot on heart attack protection and the general public was less interested. When I started working with diets and metabolism - people have a huge interest in obesity, being thin, diets, etc. - I became more sought-after. We have always publicized the laboratory’s publications through Agência FAPESP, Jornal da USP, and the RIDC Redoxoma website. But at that moment I started to be more and more sought-after for more general topics. Then you start to learn how to present this to a more general audience and you start to realize that the public’s doubts are more basic, for example, about what metabolism is. People don’t even know that there are chemical reactions that happen inside us, also the difference between carbohydrates and calories is not clear to many people. These are much more basic things. I started giving some lectures about what metabolism is, defining it, showing people their first view of a metabolic map. From there it grew, I wrote the book, I wrote some columns, I started with more general things for the Instituto Questão de Ciência, which also catalyzed this, and for the USP newspaper. Then I was invited to write for the Nexo, at the end of 2019. This coincided with the pandemic shortly after, which required a lot of scientific dissemination. I also had many students interested in science communication, like Ignacio Amigo, who became a full-time science writer, Graciele Oliveira, and Ana Bonassa [I’ve never seen a scientist]. So there’s this laboratory environment where a lot of people were doing this and you also learn what works.

Another front line in which you have been active is the discussion about the high article processing fees charged by scientific journals for open-access. How is this going?

In academic life, you end up doing several different things. I happened to see this transformation in the publishing world happening. First, open-access journals appeared and were an option, but not the main option. Then it started to get more expensive and the European Plan S came along, proposing to change all journals to open-access only. When this plan came out, at the end of 2018, I had already been discussing with a group of fellow mitochondrial scientists, Marcus Oliveira, from UFRJ, and Ariel Silber, from ICB-USP, about publications, about the impact index being much less important than the editorial board of a magazine, about how we wanted to choose where to publish best. Ignacio Amigo and I had already published in the Redoxoma newsletter about the branded magazines that were appearing. So when this idea of Plan S came out, the three of us discussed it and Marcus and I ended up sending a letter to Science magazine saying that this would be destructive for developing countries, because it was not clear how they would control prices. Unfortunately we were right, because prices increased a lot, a large number of journals became open-access only and the options to publish without paying decreased. This reduces our visibility. There is a lot of talk about having accessibility to the full article, I agree that it is a problem, but it is worse if we are not read. So I started writing and talking about it and when you start making waves, you start getting sought-after too.

How do you see the preprint option and the issue of preprint peer review?

I really like preprints. Initially, I didn’t see much of an advantage. But then I understood that it is an option for you to put the full text on line for free, because these databases are maintained by public institutions, and start a debate about your work. It’s also a way for you to protect yourself from having your idea stolen. I think this could be the path to free open science and also a way to take some of the power away from the big publishers, who are known to make too much profit. I’m not against professional publishing being for profit. But their profit is disproportionate. And it’s a way to take away some of that power and perhaps transform this publishing market into something more controlled by us scientists.

But the vast majority of preprints are not peer-reviewed and I see this as a problem. Peer review for me is super important, but it is also in crisis because there are so many articles submitted, that we are not getting good reviewers. It is a transformation process that is not good. I think we also have to rethink how many works we need to publish and publish less and better. Responsible scientific evaluation is closely linked to this transformation in the world of publications. If we evaluate responsibly, people will publish more responsibly too. And that interests me. I am a representative of Fapesp - which is the Brazilian representative- at the Global Research Council, an organization of funding agencies, where scientific evaluation and how to do it more responsibly way are discussed a lot. It is very clear to us that we have to stop counting papers or factors or indicators and start looking more at what is progressing in terms of knowledge and training.

How important, in your opinion, is an award for women scientists?

First, I like the fact that this L’Oréal UNESCO award has always been an award for women. I find it interesting because it was established to create role models and inspire people, to say ’You can also be a scientist’. On the other hand, I come from an area and a country where the majority of us are women and I find this interesting and I wonder how much science there is behind this. If we want more women in different areas, in different countries, shouldn’t they look at the Brazilian model and ask why in the biological area we are the majority? Maybe it’s because Mayana Zatz won this same award in 2001. I think we should approach everything, even inclusion, with more science. We should study this phenomenon to try to understand why.

And, for you, how important is receiving this award?

Being awarded is a bit uncomfortable in a way because the award goes to one person, but the work belongs to a group. I don’t see it as my award, I think it is a recognition of the laboratory’s work and the laboratory does not exist without its surroundings, first of all, and Redoxoma is very important in this sense. Furthermore, the people in the laboratory, I always say that Camille Caldeira is the most important person in the laboratory, and the secret to success is having a long-term laboratory specialist, who trains all the students. And the students; if I have a talent as a scientist, it is choosing these young people. The trainees in the laboratory are of the highest quality, they are the ones who do the science.

What is your biggest scientific challenge at the moment?

I have several scientific challenges, but I think there is an institutional challenge before that. Again I say that this award is collective because the students work their hearts out here. We have very serious infrastructure problems - we have always had very serious infrastructure problems in Brazil. But degeneration in recent years has increased greatly, and the difficulty to fix problems has also escalated. Everything became more bureaucratic and more difficult: there are leaks, infiltrations, mold, we had serious electrical problems and we couldn’t get institutional responses to resolve them. Providing minimum conditions for research is essential and I feel that the university is sometimes getting lost in other causes and forgetting the core of what a university is, which is teaching, research, and extension, and that these things have to be priorities. We have to keep the research areas of this institute working. This problem is not just here, and in recent years it has become very challenging. Last year my laboratory really had infrastructure problems to the point of not being able to move forward scientifically here - I had students achieving results abroad. I think it’s an act of heroism for who is still trying to do science here. And more and more challenges appear. Now the state government has included the DREM clause [Decoupling of Revenues from States and Municipalities, in the budget guidelines bill for 2025] that can withhold 30% of FAPESP’s funding. FAPESP is essential for research in the State and it doesn’t matter that the governor says he has no plans to use this money. This cannot be written into law because FAPESP’s investment in research is long-term. This is very serious. The decision regarding the reduction of resources for universities was reversed, but not the decision regarding FAPESP. And it seems like every week, every month, we have some other problem like this. There always seems to be something that distracts us from being able to really focus on science. Sometimes I see my colleagues abroad and they are sitting there, reading papers, while I am looking for an electrical engineer and trying to learn what a harmonic is. So I think our challenge is more institutional. The fact that we do science at the same level as people out there is incredible. The students are heroes.

What are the main challenges for Brazilian science, in addition to what you have already mentioned?

It’s the unpredictability, the ease with which you can dismantle institutions, because Brazil doesn’t have such a great institutional strength. This is complicated. There are more specific problems. In addition to the problem of institutional infrastructure, there is a huge lack of specialized technicians in our institutions, and there are problems with importing and acquiring reagents, which here takes months and abroad happens the next day. Those who manage to do science here really do it out of heroism. We manage to do it. And we do internationally recognized science.

Would you like to add anything else?

The importance of RIDC Redoxoma in all of this. Being surrounded by these very intelligent and inquisitive people who are working at the frontier of knowledge. This morning there was a meeting about aim three of Redoxoma, and sitting down and talking about our science is what catalyzes ideas, what inspires us; the leadership of Ohara Augusto, who really shows how to ask big questions, never giving up on doing important science. I value this a lot, almost two decades now between Milênio, INCT, and RIDC, this group of people that surrounds us that I think is essential for us.