Juan Modolell, in a 2007 file photo. Silvia Varela
Despite a good appearance, especially in the print press, scientists in Spain enjoy a high degree of social and political invisibility. However, they exist and move. In fact, they do it well, with a level of production and quality well above what you would expect for what you get. But in the 1970s, science and scientists themselves seemed absent from the press. They celebrated our living Nobel Laureate, Severo Ochoa, enjoying his retirement in his homeland, and prayed to Ramón y Cajal, without knowing exactly what he had done.
Those who then devoted themselves to science did so out of vocation, without seeking recognition and with very limited resources. At the time, biology was in the midst of a revolution: molecular genetics was being forged that would shed light on many discoveries about our nature and origins, and lay the foundation for the technological revolution we now call CRISPR. Once again Spain was missing the boat. At that time, Juan Modolell Mainou (Barcelona, 1937), a CSIC career scientist, made the decision that he would become a pioneer in Spain and the world from his laboratory at the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center. Modolell died in Madrid on Tuesday at the age of 85.
Juan received his PhD in chemistry from Complutense University of Madrid and in biochemistry from Ohio State University in the United States. In 1970 he began his career at CSIC, where he worked until his retirement. He began his scientific work studying protein synthesis and its relationship to antibiotics, but by the late 1970s he felt he was gaining intellectual traction. He feels the need to do something more exciting than studying the biochemistry of bacteria. His restlessness leads him to a conversation with Antonio García-Bellido, founder of the Spanish School of Developmental Biology, who proposes a problem that sounds mysterious at first.
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a tool of geneticists. One of its characteristics is that it is covered in setae: sensory hairs that adorn its body and are positioned precisely and reproducibly from one fly to another. The questions are simple: where does this order come from? Where is it coded? How does each of the Quetas know where to appear? The challenge that García-Bellido poses to Modolell is to answer these questions.
For many years, geneticists had collected mutant flies that remove setae, add new ones, or change their position, always in a precise, controlled, and reproducible way. The mutation set is associated with a region of fly chromosome 1 with the acronym Achaete-Scute Complex (AS-C). Collecting mutants and analyzing them is complex, but where there are mutants there are genes, and the conclusion of these studies, in which García-Bellido had invested a lot of time, is that when there is order, there is a mechanism and the der way to find it has to be through the genes.
The roadmap is clear and has implications beyond the Setas. If we learn how the fly’s bristles are placed, perhaps the answer will show us the way to understand how the arms, eyes, and fingers are positioned. The problem is how to get the genes. At that time in Spain, the silent science, there was good genetics and good biochemistry, but very little if any technology that was then forged to analyze and manipulate genes. Juan accepted García-Bellido’s challenge, gave up the antibiotics, took his suitcase and, in the midst of his career and life, went to Matt Messelson’s laboratory in Harvard (USA) to learn the new techniques that make it possible to edit genes find and detail. It is important to stop and recognize what you are doing. With a purposeful career and a quiet life, he ties the blanket over his head and takes his family abroad to pursue his curiosity. This is science.
Juan Modolell with his collaborator Sonsoles Campuzano in a file photo Denis Duboule
Returning from the US, Juan brings the technology to manipulate DNA and reinvents his lab with Sonsoles Campuzano, his longtime collaborator, to delve into the DNA of the mysterious AS-C. The techniques are still evolving and Juan’s lab is involved. From that moment on, over several generations of students he trains, he carries out a job that has not changed much over the years: study, discover, educate. His laboratory was the radio focus of DNA technology in Spain. Everything, as those of us who knew him know, was done with method, calm, elegance, patience and an exceptional human class.
During the 1980s and 1990s, his laboratory was a hive of scientific activity that produced discoveries that are now in textbooks. Juan and his team solve the mystery of the location of the setae: there are sections in the DNA that direct the activity of certain genes to defined locations in the fly’s body. The mutations that eliminate the location of the setae destroy or alter the information in these sections. Nowadays, similar sequences have been found in all genes, they are called regulatory sequences and they are considered to be the most common targets for mutations in many diseases. Moreover, the study has an additional prize: the AS-C genes not only form setae, but also endow them with a neuronal character that allows them to exert their function not only in the adult but also in the embryo. The AS-C genes are key to understanding how a nervous system is constructed.
The next step was to find the code, the landscape, that these regulatory sequences read. Juan and his lab are figuring out how the landscape that leads to the global pattern is constructed. In doing so, they create paradigms that are extrapolated to other systems of pattern construction.
Juan does all his work in Madrid and although he is little known in late 20th-century Spain outside of the CSIC, his work has international implications. The genes that Modolell and his group identified were found in all animals and have similar function and function to those described by his group in Drosophila. Juan is a pioneer of the connection between classical and molecular genetics, between the so-called genotype (the genes) and the phenotype (what we see).
A humble person, Juan never missed well-deserved national recognition, but his work could not go unnoticed and has been recognized with several awards including the Jaime I for Scientific Research (2002) and the National Research Award (2006). However, his greatest scientific prize was undoubtedly the pride of having solved a fundamental problem in biology and the success of the long line of students who are now researchers, doing what Juan taught them, working on interesting things, never falling short Allow yourself to be pressured and always do it. with consideration and respect for the subject of study and fellow students. His students and friends always had him at hand or on the other end of the phone, always available for a chat or advice.
Juan was Catalan and remained closely linked to Catalonia, although he described himself as ‘the Catalan of Madrid’. This relationship with his roots led him to make a unique contribution to the important boom in biomedical sciences that took place in Barcelona at the beginning of the 21st century and is now reaping its rewards in a vibrant biomedical community. He did this as a consultant at the Center for Genomic Regulation and, until recently, at ICREA, an institution central to the research explosion in Catalonia. He also played a key role in founding the Andalusian Center for Developmental Biology in Seville, another of the leading centers in this field in Spain.
In addition to his flies and his genes, Juan had passions and interests that he carried with his proven sobriety. The first, his wife and daughters, with whom he always shared everything. A level below nature photography, especially butterflies, which he enjoyed. He was a great photographer, and the token of his appreciation to his friends was always a nice, sharp, well-framed photograph of a butterfly in the field or mountain, with its scientific name in text describing the conditions of the photograph. . He was also a collector of books of discovery, particularly from the late 19th century, and scoured antique shops everywhere in search of such volumes. Secretly, perhaps because of Jose Luis Gomez Skarmeta, his brilliant Chilean student who recently passed away at the wrong time, he was in love with Chile. Since the 1990s he has traveled repeatedly to the country where he liked to feel like the explorers he admired so much and, as always, fell victim to a quiet curiosity and serene contemplation of the mysteries of nature in the laboratory.
Juan was diagnosed with stomach cancer at the age of 54. In an interview with that newspaper in 2007, he recalled what he was doing at the time with amazing wisdom. “My reaction was curious because after the surgery was over and I knew the cancer was under control, I didn’t want to read about this type of tumor, I wanted to forget it. I didn’t want to investigate and was very thankful that no one told me about probabilities because probabilities mean nothing when you only have one card, they mean when you play many times, but I only had one card,” he explained. And Juan survived another 31 years, until another prostate tumor he’d been battling since the pandemic took him away.
Juan belongs to a generation that is failing us and that has been doing a quiet and unrecognized work in our country – and not just in science – from which many of us are descended. People like him, quiet, who speaks to his work and who shows that daring need not be shrill, go unnoticed, but as the saying goes, those who walk the desert leave their footprints in the sand, although sometimes they wear them Wind This is not the case with Juan Modolell, whose figure, personality and company live by his example and his scientific dynasty and legacy.
Alfonso Martinez arias He is ICREA Research Professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University.
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