News & Views item - April 2007

 

 

He Was Not Amused -- Computational Physicist's Sarcastic Comments Gets Him the Sack. (April 12, 2007)

 Dr Claudio Mendoza

The journal Nature reports Claudio Mendoza having been head of the computational-physics lab in the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC) in Caracas for a decade was stripped of the position and sent to the research bench.

 

In a newspaper article promoting Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, which dramatizes the 1941 meeting between the Dane Niels Bohr and the German Werner von Heisenberg, and their struggle to comprehend the feasibility and consequences of developing nuclear weapons during the Second World War, Dr Mendoza opined that although Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez might want to pursue nuclear-weapons development there was little to worry about because, "Here bridges are built without engineers, diagnoses are made without doctors, oil is refined without petroleum experts, one can teach without being a teacher, you can govern without being a statesman. We will therefore explode nuclear energy while ignoring the physicists."

 

According to Nature the "American Physical Society's Committee on International Freedom of Scientists... has written to Venezuelan officials to request details of the case. Although no other scientists there have reported similar harassment, the government has been accused of waging a campaign against freedom of speech in the media, and the fear is that similar repression is now extending to the research community. [The committee's chair, Juan Carlos Gallardo,] has pledged to monitor the situation and take further action if Mendoza is sacked outright."

 

Mendoza says he has been accused of treason despite his comments having been written as wit.

 

 "He has manifested many times his nonconformity with IVIC decisions," IVIC director Máximo García Sucre told Nature. "In a certain sense he is an activist. In this situation it is not possible to be head of a lab — there must be a minimum of affinity with scientific politics."  And he added that such personnel changes are routine, and that Dr Mendoza still has all the rights of any IVIC staff member.

 

Michael Hopkin concludes his article in Nature by reporting this thinly veiled threat: "I hope he will understand that the measure that has been taken is a mild one," says García Sucre, adding that in making fun of government officials, Mendoza has indirectly criticized president Hugo Chávez. Asked whether Mendoza will be fired outright, García Sucre says: "He should start to work in his lab instead of being in the newspapers all the time saying he is being victimized. Then I don't see any problem."