The most important news of the day

We very often talk about the disconnection of politics from "reality" (although that expression, like the much-worn "people's problems," always tends to refer to personal obsessions and very domestic issues), but little about the distancing of journalism from what is authentically transcendent. Last Thursday, while Barcelona residents were distracted by the unequal fight of squatters against Nazis and we saw how the very boring mayoral candidates of the capital squeezed the news to bring it to their own ground, we also learned that a group of our researchers has just taken a very important step in envisioning a remedy for pancreatic cancer. This was news that – due to its oceanic transcendence in the world of facts and its radical impact on the lives of tutti quanti – should have become the proclamation of the day, but most news programs in the country served it as an appetizer to sports.

Let's go back to it, then. The headline says that researchers from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) of Barcelona and Sloan Kettering of New York have been able to detect which cells trigger pancreatic cancer (a disease with 90% identical genetic alteration), concluding in this way that its malignant nature has something to do with a prodigious ability to establish connections with its environment. The person responsible for the discovery (Direna Alonso-Curbelo) has had the delicacy to translate these investigations for laypeople, stating that mapping these cells, analyzing how and with whom they speak, will become a key tool to intercept their message. Like most readers of this article, I would have serious difficulties defining a cell without using a dictionary and even mapping the pancreas. But I do understand that the discovery will be the first step on a path that will save many lives.

We spend the day busy with trivial controversies, paying attention to highly absurd people and keeping an eye on the latest Twitter spat. But fortunately, while many of us waste our existence on nonsense and lecturing everyone, toothpick in mouth, there are people like Dr. Alonso-Curbelo & team who have the kindness to talk little and work a lot to save our asses (literally). It makes me happy that our scientists have embarked on this path of hope and that their work is possible thanks to an optimal institution for gigantic laboratory work and computational data analysis only within reach of the first world (in fact, anything that equates in excellence the two cities that have taught me the most makes me happy). And it hurts me that we, who have the privilege of the media loudspeaker, only think about this when there is no news of politics or leisure.

Perhaps we should amend our sluggishness and change the order of the news broadcasts to silence the hackneyed statements of any minister or the footballer of the moment who again says that "there is no small rival" to pay a little attention to professionals who are the best researchers on the planet and who, I insist, work so that our organs do not rot. It pisses me off a bit that everyone knows which footballer is retiring from Barça this week and that not a soul, including myself, had the slightest damn idea of the work of these most eminent researchers. Dr. Direna Alonso-Curbelo and her team, and forgive my reiteration, are the best in our country and they prove it with very palpable results (but compensated, I would bet many chickpeas, with a much lower remuneration and social impact than that of their Yankee colleagues). Well, that cannot be; there is nothing more important than their work.

It pisses me off a bit that everyone knows which footballer is retiring from Barça this week and that not a soul, including myself, had the slightest damn idea of the work of these most eminent researchers