Francisco José Ayala, one of the most renowned Spanish scientists, has died at the age of 88, scientist Lawrence Krauss has published on his website. The graduate theologian and physicist was ordained a Dominican priest in 1960, but a year later gave up the habit of studying in the USA with Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the fathers of today’s understanding of evolution. He had been interested in genetics at the University of Salamanca, studied the vinegar fly with Fernando Galán, and was attracted to evolution under the influence of the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin.
He has been director of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine since 1989, and his contributions include a better understanding of the molecular clock, which makes it possible to estimate the moment when two species diverged during evolution. He also made important contributions to the propagation of Trypanosoma cruzi that causes Chagas disease or the evolution of Plasmodium that causes malaria.
A member of the US National Academy of Sciences, which he joined at the age of 45, he was involved in the early stages of the Human Genome Project, which would result in the complete sequencing of the first genome. “One of the things that was considered was sequencing the genome, but we didn’t know how to do that. In the mid 1980’s sequencing methods came up and they thought about it and they asked the Academy if it should be done and our committee said yes let it be done. It was calculated to take 15 years and cost around $3,000 million. Then it was completed two years earlier and at a lower cost,” he recalled in an interview with EL PAÍS.
Ayala lost all his positions and credits at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 2018 following allegations of sexual harassment by four women. The scientist was forced to resign after an internal investigation into a series of allegations of sexual harassment against him, which was concluded after questioning more than 60 witnesses at the facility alongside the complainants. After that investigation, the US National Academy of Sciences disfellowshipped him when it was proven that he was sexually molesting his companions.
The so-called Ayala case broke out on June 28, 2018, when the University of California, Irvine (UCI), to which he had dedicated more than 30 years and donated $10 million, announced the withdrawal of all honors to the most important professor of these Institution. In a note, he assured that Ayala, a US citizen, had received four sexual harassment complaints from as many of the center’s staff. After half a year of research and more than 60 interviews conducted by two specialists, it was decided to approve three of them because the report found evidence of a violation of the university’s regulations protecting its staff from sexist behavior.
science and religion
During his career, the scientist has published dozens of books on scientific topics, but he was also interested in ethical issues or the relationship between science and religion. In his opinion, Catholicism is compatible with the teachings of biology, although he does not think so for creationism. For these contributions to the dialogue between science and religion, he received the Templeton Prize in 2010, which is endowed with 1.2 million euros, more than the Nobel Prize.
In 2001, among many other awards and recognitions, the late scientist received the National Medal of Science, awarded by the President of the United States to individuals with outstanding contributions to the advancement of knowledge. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences or the American Philosophical Society and received honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He was also President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the institution that publishes Science magazine.
Ayala also found success as an investor in California vineyards, where in the 1980s he bought a tract of land on which he produced highly regarded wines. This enabled him to amass a considerable fortune. He donated some of that money, around $10 million, to his university, a figure that represents the largest donation to a public university by a Spanish researcher and broke the record set by the University of California at Irvine itself, in a country where private Donations are much larger and more frequent than in Spain.
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