CAREERS

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Water supplies are scarce in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo because of poor infrastructure.

L AB L IF E

Science and strife

Five researchers explain how they run productive labs in war-torn or resource-poor regions.

A
well-equipped laboratory stocked with non-profit organization Pure Earth. There are
reagents and supplied with uninter-
rupted electricity and unlimited
MARLO MENDOZA many polluting industries upstream, including
the largest lead smelter in the Philippines, gold
water might seem like a basic requirement for
conducting research. But scientists who work
Engage with smelters, jewellery workshops and tanneries.
Downstream are fish farms. We found elevated
in regions that have limited resources or that
are riven by conflict cannot take such ameni-
stakeholders levels of heavy metals in the water, in the sedi-
ments and in fish, especially shellfish, which
ties for granted. They must perpetually seek Forestry researcher, University of the are sold in the local markets (M. E. T. Mendoza
scarce grants, publish their own journals, form Philippines, Los Baños et al. J. Nat. Stud. 11, 1–18; 2012). At least
their own scientific societies and — crucially 100,000 people in the municipalities of Marilao,
— draw on their deep reserves of resilience. For the past 13 years, I have been profiling the Meycauayan and Obando, and in the metropol-
Nature asked five such researchers how they contamination of the Marilao, Meycauayan itan Manila area, are eating contaminated fish.
run productive labs in the face of electricity and Obando River System (MMORS), which There are no toxicologists in the area who can
shortages, border-checkpoint closures, poor was on the ‘Dirty 30’ list of the most polluted accurately diagnose illnesses connected with
Internet connections and other challenges. places in the world in 2007, according to the heavy-metal ingestion. So when we looked

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 CAREERS

at medical records, there were no entries people worldwide get their drinking water effectively. We are also studying plant extracts
for heavy-metal poisoning. If we cannot prove from a source that is polluted with faeces. As that can be used to treat antibiotic-resistant
that these metals are causing harm to people, part of our work, we are developing hybrid clay Mycobacterium tuberculosis (K. B. M. Jose et al.
it’s very difficult to convince policy­makers and composites to adsorb enteric bacteria, such as Med. Clin. Rev. 4, 5; 2018), using a grant from
local executives to take action. We have no local Escherichia coli, Salmonella species and Vibrio The World Academy of Sciences.
laboratories that can analyse heavy metals found cholerae, from water. We also use composites We don’t get money from the state. In our
in fish, or in water or blood samples. made from readily available materials such as lab, we don’t have equipment. We don’t have
Local officials, the governor and some of the kaolinite clay, papaya seeds and plantain peels money to buy solvents. Water is available
mayors were really antagonistic because the to extract heavy metals from water. between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., so we have a con-
fishing industry is a major source of income We are not funded by the government. On tainer that collects
for these municipalities. I have been very care- average, for close to 100 days a year, we have “To scientists water at night, and
ful, even from the outset, to always update the no electricity. We have an alternative utility working in during the day we
mayors on our projects, and I am accompanied on campus, so when the power goes off at the comparable have a pump. For
by local and regional government representa- national grid during work hours, the generator circumstances, electricity it’s much
tives whenever I do my monitoring activities. I comes on. If we get lucky with timings, we are I would say that harder. In the middle
do nothing without their consent and am very guaranteed 36 hours of uninterrupted power although it’s of the day, it can come
transparent in my work. to run experiments. But when the generator hard, it’s not and go many times,
One of my strategies was to build a network isn’t running and the grid power has gone off, impossible.” and you hope it won’t
of stakeholders — including national agencies we just have to wait. go while you’re work-
such as the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Sometimes I use my salary to fund my ing. We used to have a small generator as a
Resources and the Department of Environ- research and to keep our students. Then I have backup for computers, but it’s broken.
ment and Natural Resources — that share my to struggle to write international grants. I’m so We don’t fold our hands and cry and say that
concerns. I also built a good rapport with peo- grateful to The World Academy of Sciences in things will get better. We do whatever we can.
ple who live in the region. There are several Trieste, Italy; the last grant it gave in 2014 (for Most of the time we buy our own reagents and
associations for fishers and leather-makers US$63,230) took care of stipends, school fees solvents with our salaries. We try to motivate
in these areas, and we work with them and and research expenses for the students, and we our master’s and PhD students by finding a
include them in consultations and meetings used part of it to buy equipment. A colleague way to collaborate with the outside, writing to
about water-quality management. Our project at the University of Edinburgh, UK, sent us a foreign labs to see whether our students can get
helped to have the area declared as a legally $600 bacteria-testing kit last year, but we can’t overseas fellowships. One student, Joséphine
designated water-quality management area. use it now because a related microscope part Ntumba, went abroad three times, to the
That’s why we’re able to continue our work. was damaged by a power surge. Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain-la-
We used funding from Pure Earth to do We have a lot of wonderful ideas, wonder- Neuve, Belgium. She has completed her PhD
regular longitudinal sampling in sections of ful theses just hanging about the shelves, but and teaches at the University of Kinshasa. I
the river system, including of sediment, water, nobody’s utilizing them. Some young scientists did my PhD at Northwestern University in
fish and other aquatic life. There’s a problem developed cheap electrical power systems from Evanston, Illinois, and then went to the Max
collecting data and samples, because it is costly electronic waste materials, but they don’t have Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim
and the national and local governments have the money to develop them further. Nigeria an der Ruhr, Germany. It was hard to come
limited funds. There is also no single reposi- has a thriving oil industry, but the govern- back. It was not only material, but mental too.
tory of data with which monitoring can be ment’s Petroleum Trust Development Fund I knew that some things would be impossible,
more effectively planned and analysed. uses oil-industry proceeds mostly to fund but I feel that I have to contribute and inspire
Our monitoring results were included in scholarships for Nigerian students abroad, and young people in science.
a Pure Earth database that was shared with spends very little on scientific research. For the past five or six years, I have been the
other stakeholders, including regional envi- editor-in-chief of the journal Congo Sciences,
ronmental-management offices and local which I co-founded. We started it because we
government units. In turn, this encouraged
those agencies to conduct studies to comple-
KALULU MUZELE TABA wanted to bring visibility to research done
in the country. The journal was financed for
ment our work and to share their data. So I
was able to get money from the Asian Develop-
Aim for the some time by the Academy of Research and
Higher Education (ARES) in Brussels. The
ment Bank, Green Cross Switzerland and the possible academy has stopped funding it now, but we
Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation, are still publishing the journal.
as well as a small amount from the Coca-Cola Organic chemist, University of Kinshasa, For the past ten years, I’ve been trying to
Company, to conduct environmental monitor- Democratic Republic of the Congo create an academy of sciences for the DRC,
ing — including assessment of heavy metals in similar to the American Association for the
selected aquatic organisms. Our research seeks to solve problems that Advancement of Science in Washington DC.
have societal impacts, such as malaria, which We have to try to get scientists together and
is endemic in Kinshasa, the capital of the Dem- to speak as one voice, and then perhaps the
EMMANUEL I. UNUABONAH ocratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). People
in the poorest areas of Kinshasa are growing
state can start understanding that financing
research at the university is important. These
Use available about 55 different plants, including citronella
and papaya, to try to treat the symptoms of
are some of the things that make me feel happy
that I came back home. Maybe I lost a lot as
resources the disease. We thought, why not investigate a scientist, but as a Congolese, I hope I can
these plants? We tested eight of the most-used do something for my place, and for the world.
Materials chemist, Redeemer’s plants and showed that extracts and metabo- To scientists working in comparable cir-
University, Osun State, Nigeria lites had considerable antimalarial activities. cumstances, I would say that although it’s
We have a small booklet in French and in the hard, it’s not impossible. Know that you
Potable water is a challenge for us here in local language, Lingala, that we send to peo- should find maybe not the best solution, but
Africa and across the world: around 1.8 billion ple to explain how to use these plants more the least-worst one.

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 CAREERS

ELIZABETH TILLEY
Focus on small but
crucial changes
Sanitation economics researcher,
University of Malawi, The Polytechnic,
Blantyre

I came to Malawi in 2015 after 9 years as a

project officer and PhD student at the Swiss
Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and
Technology in Dübendorf. I had worked on san-
itation projects in Nepal, South Africa, Tanza-
nia and Nicaragua. Most of my work in Malawi
now is teaching and supervising master’s and
PhD students on such projects as making fuel
briquettes out of dried faecal sludge. We work
on ‘shit-flow diagrams’ — trying to map and
understand where excreta is being generated
and how much of it is being treated.
We have a very bad Internet connection,
and it’s a barrier to downloading files or
making Skype calls. We don’t have subscrip-
tions to journals. We have 30 computers for
GGateway students on the training scheme in information technology funded by the Basque government. 4,000 students. Paper and photocopying are
very expensive. We go days without water to
Two days after a ceasefire ended the conflict, even flush the toilets. At the university, we
MOHAMMED SAFIA

RASHA ABU-SAFIEH we wrote up another eight new concepts for

different projects, and the UNRWA agreed to
don’t have toilet paper, so I bring my own each
day and I keep a secret bottle of soap.
Choose the operate three. We could either be positive or
cry all day. We chose the positive side and to
The research agenda in Malawi is driven by
big donors from the global north, including
positive move on. national governments such as Norway and
The cables that we use for all our techni- Japan, and private donors and non-govern-
Computer engineer and co-founder of cal networks are on the list of items that Israel mental organizations. Very little funding goes
GGateway,Gaza Strip does not allow to enter Gaza. With the sup- to African researchers for work on topics that
port of the UNRWA, it took us nearly four they’ve identified themselves. The fact that
I co-founded GGateway, a social-enterprise months to bring them in from Israel. Without northern countries offer funding opportuni-
company in the Gaza Strip that provides the UNRWA, it would have taken us a year or ties to those in the global south is an excellent
outsourcing services for information and more. We also use a generator because most form of development.
communications technology (ICT) around the days we get electricity for two to four hours. But some proposals call for the participa-
world. We offer training and employment to The overall unemployment rate among tion of a southern partner with no require-
recent university graduates in Gaza with ICT graduates in Gaza with ICT degrees is 70%. ments for the division of funding. This means
degrees. Our main goal with GGateway is to Among female ICT graduates, it’s 92%. We that the southern partner is sometimes given
help people to have a source of income. With applied for grants that focus on vulnerable a limited budget for limited work that has
the shortage of clean water, the polluted sea women, and got one from the Basque govern- limited impact.
and the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt ment in Spain to train 60 female graduates for I would encourage northern researchers to
since 2007, living conditions here are dire. jobs. We also got a grant from the US-Middle think about doing sabbaticals in African univer-
We came up with the idea of GGateway in East Partnership Initiative to empower and sities. It gives the southern researcher a chance
2012. In November 2013 we launched a pilot, train 300 ICT graduates to become profes- to focus on publications or research, to be
and in February 2015 we got the green light sional freelancers, and won a $3-million grant exposed to new ideas and methods, and to con-
from the Korea International Cooperation in June from the World Bank to train students nect with a broader network, and the northern
Agency for a $1.3-million grant to fund our and software engineers. We have contracts researcher can learn how things operate in the
plan. That was one of the biggest, happiest with UN Women and UN Habitat. south and appreciate what works well at home.
things that ever happened to us. We are able to travel outside Gaza only When you start to think about how crushing
We were running a pilot project for the two to three times a year, maximum, and the whole system is, you can go crazy. I had a
United Nations Relief and Works Agency sometimes not at all; we need to apply for an student who just wrote to tell me that he got
for Palestine Refugees in the Near East exit permit from Israel with support of the into a master’s programme in the United States,
(UNRWA), but in July and August 2014 we UNRWA. Sometimes we are accepted, some- and to thank me for the reference letter. He’s so
had the 50 days of conflict with Israel. That times rejected; no reason is given. We often excited, and that’s the kind of thing I can hold
was difficult: the bombing went on all day, lose opportunities if we are registered for a on to for a couple of months. ■
there was no electricity and we had limited conference, for example, or for training.
access to water and food. There was no safe When we see what we are doing — that INTERVIEWS BY JOSIE GLAUSIUSZ
zone, no safe area. So we had to stop our first it’s changing people’s lives, despite all of the These interviews have been edited for clarity and
project. difficulties around us — it makes us feel good. length.

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