For Researchers in Mexico, Apathy Has Been the Smotherer of Invention

When Mexican physicist Victor Castano came up with a novel way of extracting a substance from crude oil so strong it may end up replacing steel in car manufacturing, he notified the country’s energy secretary.

He thought his government could profit from it.

All he got was the cold shoulder -- although oil giants Repsol, ExxonMobil and Shell subsequently approached him about commercializing his idea. The experience was far from unusual in Mexico, where institutionalized indifference to innovation is costing the country jobs, investment and economic growth.

“You can’t be a prophet in your own land,” Castano, 43, said as he walked around his research center here in this city 120 miles northwest of Mexico City.

Especially, it would appear, if that country is Mexico. The nation’s scientific output has been abysmal for years -- as has the working environment for innovators such as Castano. Faced with scant research funds, Mexico’s old-boy scientific network, lack of monetary incentive and entrenched complacence, many scientists pack up and leave for institutions in Europe or the United States.

Now it is dawning on the government that its economic future may depend on improving its home-grown technology, and the care and feeding of its inventive scientists. President Vicente Fox has given innovation new emphasis since he took office in 2000, elevating to Cabinet level a federal commission that monitors and helps award $400 million in research and development grants.

A World Bank report published last month warns that Mexico must seek “creative policies to spur productive innovation and entrepreneurship” or continue to watch jobs drain away.

“Innovation is important because it lies at the heart of productivity growth in the long run,” World Bank economist Daniel Lederman said. “In the age of global capital flows, only centers of innovation will be able to permanently capture the interest of investors.”

Foreign investment dedicated to new factories and offices in Mexico declined this year for the first time in a decade, with much of it diverted to China and elsewhere. Not only does an “innovation gap” cost Mexico points in the global battle for jobs, it also raises consumer prices and hurts efficiency, said Nobel Prize-winning scientist Mario Molina.

“Mexico is certainly paying the price, which is that it has to rely on outside science and technology. You have to import all this,” said Molina, a Mexico City native who is now a professor at MIT. He won the 1995 Nobel in chemistry for his work on ozone layers.

The commission Fox elevated, known by its Spanish abbreviation, Conacyt, has instituted programs to link business and science while forging relationships with the University of California system and Texas A&M; to speed the transfer of Mexican science to the marketplace.

“Our worst problem has been one of attitude. Mexican companies were for decades dedicated to exploiting the right to make something licensed by a foreign company, not to developing their own technology,” said Guillermo Aguirre, the commission’s deputy director for technology. “Science and innovation were divorced.”

Aguirre said the Mexican research establishment has been too focused on pure science and not enough on how to make it useful or marketable.

The country faces an uphill struggle. In patent awards, publication of scientific papers and dollars spent on research and development, Mexico usually lags behind countries such as Brazil, Chile, India and China that compete with it to attract jobs and industry.

As a percentage of total economic output, Mexico’s government and private industry combined spend one-seventh of what the United States does on research, and less than half of what Brazil spends.

One of Mexico’s big disadvantages is that it lacks the infrastructure to support innovation, such as venture capital financing, and the small-business research grants that exist in the U.S., said Rodney Ruoff, a mechanical engineering professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

But others say the problem goes deeper. Living in the shadow of the U.S. technology dynamo has bred complacency among Mexicans, said Molina.

“Mexican students are not educated to be innovators or to create their own science or inventions,” he said. “Even the best scientific university in the country, the Technological Institute of Monterrey, does very little research, although it is starting to do more.”

Manuel Villagomez, a Guadalajara inventor of tortilla-making machines that he sells in 20 countries, says the best thing the government could do is simply speed up the patent approval process, which can take up to 10 years -- compared with an average of two years in the United States -- and enforce intellectual property rights against the swarm of “pirate” companies, which he says steal his technology.

“It’s difficult enough to get one, and then you can’t make it stick because the professional pirates are good at finding loopholes in them,” said Villagomez, 67, a self -educated inventor with a third-grade education and 17 patents. “That’s why many Mexicans just go to the United States to get their patents.”

No one knows better than Castano the Mexican obstacles to innovation. He’s been butting his head against them for 16 years as a physics researcher at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, with which his Queretaro center is affiliated.

The problems will take generations to fix, Castano said, citing the entrenched old-boy network and a dependence on foreign innovation. Mexican researchers most adept at receiving government grants are those who follow the innovations of foreigners, he said, not those who propose original projects.

“If I propose a project to follow an original idea coming out of Harvard or Oxford, I have a good chance of success because the committee will say, ‘Oh it must be good,’ ” he said. “But if it’s an original Mexican idea, they raise their eyebrows and say: ‘Are you sure? Well, we don’t know about that.’ ”

Jorge Jose, a Mexican physicist who heads an interdisciplinary research program at Northeastern University in Boston, said it is hard for any country to duplicate the U.S. research environment, which “encourages innovation, creativity and a critical approach to each other’s work.”

“There is no way of saying here that your friend is doing a great job when he isn’t,” Jose said. “That’s not always the case in Mexico.”

Castano’s research revolves around a super-strong and ultralight carbon molecule called a nanotube that is touted for future use in auto parts, marine coatings and semiconductors.

Because of its potential for transforming industry and lifestyles, the field of nanotechnology is one of the hottest areas of scientific research. This year, the National Science Foundation, a leading U.S. government research arm, is granting $770 million in funds to public and private researchers pursuing nanotechnology discoveries.

That kind of money is nowhere to be found in Mexico. Still, Castano and his partner, Rogelio Rodriguez, have already succeeded in commercializing nanotube technology for use in anti-graffiti paint. Last week, their university licensed the technology to Mexico’s biggest paint company, Comex.

But in commercializing their discoveries, Castano and Rodriguez are the exceptions in Mexico, because there is no incentive to transfer their science to the marketplace. Rules prohibit Mexican researchers who work at universities from sharing the royalties their inventions may generate. Prestige is supposed to be enough, Castano said.

U.S. academics in the UC system, meanwhile, receive 35% of any royalties their discoveries produce. Some of the greatest U.S. product innovations in recent decades, from cellphones to Gatorade, involve university professors who were spurred on by the profit motive to make on-campus discoveries that later became commercial hits.

“Our salaries are good -- we aren’t starving. And if I left and took this technology to the United States or Europe, I would be making just one small difference, among hundreds of thousands of scientific differences,” Castano said, explaining his drive. “Whereas in Mexico, if I succeed, I could make a difference in the way Mexican society and government regards science.”