On June 5, 1948, one of the greatest celebrities of the time, the father of penicillin, Alexander Fleming, inaugurated the Tropical Pathology Research Department associated with the Municipal Hospital for Infectious Diseases, currently the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona. It is the oldest operating research center in Spain and celebrates its 75th anniversary with an exhibition and a book that collect a rich history of the past that is projected towards a radically innovative future under a new name: Hospital del Mar Institut de Recerca .
What began in a very modest way, a project framed by a multitude of anecdotes, is today a center that brings together 600 researchers, immersed in a process of increasing the recruitment of international talent. In 1948, Barcelona had fresh memories of the exanthematic typhus epidemic that it had suffered in 1942 and 1943, a health alert that made it necessary to mobilize all municipal resources, including seeking international aid. During the epidemic, the councilor for health, Lorenzo García Tornel, maintained close contact with the tropical diseases research institute in Hamburg (Germany), so much so that from Hamburg they sent the plans and design of what was to be the research center for Barcelona.
“García Tornel, a fairly unknown local figure, was very open to international trends. He traveled a lot and thought, through his contacts, that Fleming could be the one to inaugurate the center ”, recalls the historian and museologist Daniel Venteo, author of the book on the history of the institute. “It is curious, because Fleming was a pacifist and an allied one, and the pavilion had been designed by Nazi Germany. His contact in Barcelona is a friend of Dr. Josep Trueta, exiled in Oxford. In any case, Fleming has words of great praise for the initiative that Barcelona launched, for a hospital to carry out scientific research beyond the care practice that is innate to it”.
This is how the eminent scientist arrived in Barcelona (the municipal authorities prevented him from having to set foot in Madrid first by organizing a flight with a stopover in a French city), in a climate of expectation that was not going to be equaled until the landing of the Beatles in 1965. It was a stay of almost two weeks packed with activities, gala dinners, speeches, even an afternoon of bullfighting at the Monumental, where 17 years later the four from Liverpool were going to perform.
"He says that in Barcelona they use him as a star to pose for photos and that this makes him uncomfortable," explains Venteo, who consulted in London and detailed the scientist's diary on the trip. La Vanguardia reports on the event with detailed chronicles and an abundance (for the time) of graphic material. At the inauguration of the Research Department, "the wise bacteriologist" avoids the fact that it is still in a precarious state, emphasizing that researchers are more important than the facilities and wishes that in the future the institute could perform a service not only to the city but also to to the whole world, a message that the Hospital del Mar has vindicated ever since.
And now that? Fleming continued his tour of Seville and Madrid, well exploited by the regime, before returning to London. With more voluntarism than means or personnel, doctors Jordi Gras and Amadeo Foz take charge of the center. The first investigations are on cardiac infectious diseases. They dealt with the 1971 cholera epidemic, which caused three deaths and more than 400 hospital admissions, with a case study. On the roof of the center, on Doctor Aiguader street, there lived a goat, the object of research on brucellosis. In 1958, the WHO selected Dr. Foz as a member of the international study group on this disease caused by milk.
In the mid-80s, after the retirement of the founders, Jordi Camí took over the management and undertook a deep modernization of the center to adapt it to real needs. Needs such as the study of the numerous asthma outbreaks, with dozens of people affected and several deaths, due to the inhalation of soybean dust that was unloaded in the port. The installation of filters ended the problem. On the other hand, he started specializing in drug addiction. Later, in alcoholism and AIDS. In 1992, it officiated as an anti-doping laboratory for the Olympic Games, a function that it hopes to repeat next year in the America's Cup of Sailing.
Today, the Institut Hospital del Mar for Medical Research (IMIM), about to face a new name change as the rubric of a new drive, focuses on three major types of diseases (cancer, neurosciences and infectious diseases) and two more transversal programs (epidemiology and informatics). The researchers are very aware of the tradition of the institution, affirms its current director, Joaquín Arribas: “This has its advantages and disadvantages. Advantages is that we have survived many ups and downs and we are still here, and I think that we are in a very good moment of growth. This gives you security. The difficulties, the inertia of centers that have been around for a long time. It is easier to build from scratch and not have certain inertias. Here they are a little harder to beat. It handles more like a large ship than a motorboat. But overall, it seems to me that it is a source of pride that there are centers, which there are not so many in Spain, with almost hundred-year-old research traditions”.
"It's a very competitive medium-sized center, with a Barcelona scientific environment but with a clear tendency towards internationalization", defines Arribas - who is also a researcher at Vall d'Hebron and a professor at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (Icrea) -, ready to take advantage of the "moment of strengthening biomedical research" to promote an increase in activity.
Mar Albà is the first woman director of an IMIM research program on biomedical informatics, and that was only two years ago. “Here there are many girls, but perhaps there are not so many older women, 35 or 40 and up, to be group leaders,” she reflects. She notices that there are those who leave the investigation. I guess there are many factors, and some have to do with more traditional roles and how women are perceived."
From the visit of the father of penicillin to Albà's research, using high-throughput sequencing methods, on how mutations in cancer give rise to alterations in the transcriptome and proteome and how this affects the response to treatment. This is the IMIM.
