Outraged citizens, creative citizens

Over the past few years, Barcelona has become a magnet for high-level scientists, who have found the city to be a great place for conducting research, especially in the areas of biotechnology and biomedicine. This has been possible thanks to European funding, but most of all to government efforts to protect research from the instability of political change and to build a system based principally on the criteria of scientific excellence. Thanks to these efforts, capturing talent has become more important than the academic hierarchy, and the tangled web of University bureaucracy has been prevented from interfering in the autonomy of the research centres.

Today, Barcelona is spearheading research, with at least a half dozen institutes and major infrastructures dedicated to biomedicine, chemistry, nanotechnology and photonic science. These centres have already found their place among the best in Europe in the area of Biomedicine. The ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) shelters a notable number of researchers who are making great strides in the study of cancer and Alzheimer’s, the disease that will most likely be the great epidemic of the 21st century.

The bio- prefix also identifies other studies that seek to understand the complex world of biology, like bioengineering, biomathematics or bioinformatics, which have made giant strides over the past few years thanks to the use of big data. All of these centres are part of a network that also includes the hospital research institutes of the Hospital Clínic, Bellvitge and Vall d’Hebron.