{"id":1929,"date":"2025-08-15T14:11:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T14:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/scientist-essences\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T10:48:02","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T10:48:02","slug":"scientist-essences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/en\/scientist-essences\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientist essences"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Many people take photos with their idols, whether they are singers, athletes, actors, politicians, influencers<\/em>, etc. For me, taking a photo with Francis Mojica or James Lovelock is an honour. <\/p>\n\n

The feeling you get when you are in front of a scientist who has done so much to advance our knowledge is quite special. You get the impression that that person is much ahead of you, that ideas, concepts and experiences have circulated through their head that no one has ever had before. You would like their knowledge, which seems to flow from their words, to flood you and fill every corner of your head. Often, the peace and confidence that emanate from such unique people are also characteristic. <\/p>\n\n

I consider both Francisco Juan Mart\u00ednez Mojica (1963), a microbiologist at the University of Alicante (Spain), and James E. Lovelock (1919-2022), an English atmospheric chemist and independent researcher, heroes of our society, people we should look up to. These great European innovators took a giant step forward in knowledge. Thanks to Mojica and his research work over many years with halophilic bacteria, many lives will be saved, the quality of life will be increased and gene therapies will advance considerably. Thanks to Lovelock, and his Gaia theory, the vision of the behaviour of planet Earth in the face of overheating may finally give us the necessary clues to make us react to the effects of climate change. <\/p>\n\n

I greeted both in Barcelona on the occasion of conferences about their work. Mojica, in 2025, at the ceremony to award the 10th Leandre Cervera Award for Professional Career of the Catalan Society of Biology (SCB), where he explained his path through science and how a fact that he discovered and surprised him in his early years ended up being a spectacular discovery. Persevering until he finally understood what was happening is the essence of every scientist. <\/p>\n\n

Those surprising repetitive DNA sequences that he found in bacteria ended up being one of the most fascinating mechanisms of modern biology (defence mechanisms by bacteria) and thus established the conceptual foundations that, years later, would lead to the development of genetic editing tools based on CRISPR-Cas9. Although other teams, such as those of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020), applied these findings in revolutionary technologies, Mojica’s contribution to the understanding of the natural mechanism was essential. <\/p>\n\n

Lovelock gave a lecture in 2010 at the Sal\u00f3 de Cent of the Barcelona City Council. You must be a genius to be able to conceptualize life on Earth in the way he did. He broke the prevailing logic in which people think that living organisms live where environmental factors allow them to develop. His knowledge as a chemist helped him understand that life on the planet behaves like a superorganism that controls the environmental conditions of its habitat, making the Earth habitable. Thanks to the theory that Lovelock developed, we can now understand the effect of greenhouse gases and how life alters the habitability conditions of our world. This should make us much more responsible than we are today. <\/p>\n\n

James Lovelock’s latest book (Novacene. The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence) is a lesson in how we have been able to alter the living conditions of Earth during the current era, the Anthropocene, and how we will be able to survive as human species in the future. If we start doing something positive to achieve that… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many people take photos with their idols, whether they are singers, athletes, actors, politicians, influencers, etc. For me, taking a photo with Francis Mojica or James Lovelock is an honour. The feeling you get when you are in front of a scientist who has done so much to advance our knowledge is quite special. You … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,80],"tags":[92,91,93],"class_list":["post-1929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microbiology","category-scientific-communication","tag-lovelock-en","tag-mojica-en","tag-scientist","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1929"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1944,"href":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929\/revisions\/1944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jordimas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}