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sciencemag.org SCIENCEteaching courses at UCR and the
Organization for Tropical Studies
(OTS), a nonprofit research and
education organization based in
the United States and Costa Rica
(see sidebar, p. 1561). “Now, a lot
of us want to be back here, to do
research where we learned from
the environment. But there’s not
enough space.”
ALTHOUGH DEFINITIVE statistics
aren’t available, observers say it’s
clear that Costa Rica’s growing
pool of Ph.D. tropical biologists
marks a departure from 30 years
ago. Then, for example, just 13 of
32 faculty at the UCR School of
Biology had a doctorate. Now,
80% hold that degree, and a Ph.D.
is mandatory for new hires.
Rocha, who is 62, experienced
that transformation firsthand.
While earning a master’s degree
at UCR in the 1980s, he worked as
a manager at La Selva, a research
station some 80 kilometers north
of San José run by OTS. The expo-
sure to visiting scientists helped
inspire Rocha to go abroad; he
earned a Ph.D. from Pennsylva-
nia State University in the United
States in 1990. He then returned
to Costa Rica and later became
chair of UCR’s School of Biology.
In that job, Rocha promoted ef-
forts to send Costa Rican students
abroad to Ph.D. programs—to avoid “inbreed-
ing,” he says—and then lure them back. His
department bolstered training in the analyti-
cal skills students needed to qualify for for-
eign programs. Faculty worked to place them
with colleagues in the United States and
Europe, and helped students win funding
from foreign sources. Under a system called
reserva de plaza, Costa Rican universities
also directly funded graduate studies abroad
for some students, if they agreed to return to
a reserved university job. “The ball started
rolling,” Rocha says.
Many of the biologists who have emerged
from such efforts have moved beyond the tax-
onomy and descriptive science that has long
been a tradition in Costa Rica. Vincent, for
example, pursues broader, hypothesis-driven
research as UCR’s first ecosystem ecologist,
working to reveal how physical processes like
geochemical cycles shape organisms and eco-
systems. “There was a sense long ago that we
were more like passionate technicians,” says
forest ecologist Roberto Cordero, of the Na-
tional University of Costa Rica, who at 58 is
part of Rocha’s generation. “Now, we are de-
manding more and providing more insights.”
MICROBIAL ECOLOGIST ADRIÁN PINTO, 42, is
one member of this new generation. Ear-
lier this year, he stood in his lab on the
UCR campus in San José peering into glass
boxes housing leafcutter ants that he uses
to educate schoolchildren. Some of the busy
ants carried leaf fragments, others tended a
brown fungal structure. Pinto’s graduate re-
search at the University of Wisconsin (UW),
Madison, showed how bacteria in the ants’
fungal gardens fix nitrogen, or convert it
from the air into a biologically usable form;
the work was published in Science in 2009.
He then returned to Costa Rica, where he
had a job awaiting at UCR because of the
reserva system.
Pinto has shifted his focus from the
nitrogen-fixing role of such bacteria to-
ward mining them for useful chemicals.
“Here basic research is very hard to fund,”
he says. He and two co-investigators now
lead a 22-person team devoted, in large
part, to probing Costa Rica’s insect eco-
systems for compounds that might be
useful in medicine. (Biologists found one
promising antibiotic, dubbed selvamicin,
in a leafcutter ant garden at La Selva.) “It’sa great country for microbial
ecology,” Pinto says.
Pinto is a rarity in Costa Rica:
He’s also a co–principal investiga-
tor on a U.S. National Institutes
of Health grant with researchers
at UW. His lab screens bacteria
for antimicrobial activity, then
ships promising leads to UW for
expensive animal studies. Pinto
“has created a really good model
for how to be successful” in Costa
Rica, says UW evolutionary bio-
logist Cameron Currie.
Other returning biologists
have focused on conserving
Costa Rica’s vulnerable species.
Gilbert Alvarado, 37, a wildlife
pathologist who studies threat-
ened tropical frogs, earned his
Ph.D. in Brazil. Now at UCR,
Alvarado has helped rediscover
several populations, and one
entire species, of frogs in Costa
Rica that were thought to have
been wiped out in the 1980s and
1990s by a fungus called chytrid,
which has killed amphibians
worldwide. He and U.S. collabo-
rators recently used Costa Rican
museum specimens to show chy-
trid was present in the nation’s
frogs a half-century ago, suggest-
ing it spread slowly or evolved to
become more lethal. He is now
raising chytrid-resistant frogs in
the lab that will be released to
shore up vulnerable populations.
UCR evolutionary biologist Beatriz Willink,
32, who came back to Costa Rica 2 years ago
after a Ph.D. in Sweden, is pursuing more
fundamental research. She has studied why
damselflies evolved certain colors to attract
mates. She returned home not only because
Costa Rica’s ecology abounds “with ques-
tions,” but also because she feels a moral
obligation to teach here, attracted by “the
idea that people from all backgrounds in this
small Latin American country can have this
great publicly funded education.”ALTHOUGH VINCENT, Pinto, Alvarado, and
Willink have secured tenure-track posi-
tions, many other Costa Rican researchers
are finding it difficult to land satisfying jobs.
“I know people who are extremely qualified
and have published lots of good papers who
are just waiting in line,” Willink says.
One obstacle, several scientists say, is
Costa Rica’s reserva system. Its intent, to
lure back and retain talent by assuring doc-
toral candidates a job, once made sense,
they say. (Only Vincent did not get her job
this way.) But now, with an abundance of PHOTO: TAMARA JANE ZELIKOVAAdrián Pinto is probing symbiotic bacteria, such as those living
in leafcutter ants’ fungal gardens, for medically useful compounds.1560 25 SEPTEMBER 2020 • VOL 369 ISSUE 6511