Recent events thrown at us by nature (the all encompassing laws governing the surrounding universe, not our parent journal) have had me thinking about how a timely investment into a proper scientific infrastructure could have lessened our troubles, or at least presented us with some forewarning.

There has been an outbreak of Infectious Salmon Anemia (ISA) virus in the fish farms in the south of our country, most likely imported inadvertently with eggs or fry from the Northern Hemisphere, where this virus has been around for a couple of decades. Atlantic salmon were introduced into Chilean lakes and protected fjords due to the excellent natural conditions found here, and they have proven to be of huge economic impact; the country is second only to Norway in farmed salmon production. The ISA outbreak has had two consequences. First, production is affected due to a decrease in the survival of the fish. The stressful growth conditions required for intensive farming of this resource are not forgiving to the diseased animals. Second, the use of chemicals to treat the disease and of antibiotics to treat opportunistic bacterial infections are getting attention from regulatory agencies in countries that buy the fish. Moreover, the use of these agents is a matter of environmental concern.

A week ago, a volcano that was dormant for over 9,000 years, in the same region mentioned above, went into eruption, displacing hundreds of inhabitants away from their towns. (For pictures of the eruption see this, and for a high resolution image taken by a NASA satellite, see this). Our country has over 800 volcanoes, most inactive, but many with a chance to enter into an active phase with little notice. While predicting eruptions is as difficult as predicting earthquakes (another one of our national delicacies; we had a major one six months ago in the north of the country), it is likely that a modern monitoring system could have warned of this event with some anticipation.

Programs for training and funding research groups in the areas of fish virology (aquaculture in general) and geology, and for new equipment and infrastructure have been somewhat prioritized, but only once insufficiencies in these areas became evident. One could argue that my comment is misusing the hindsight advantage to expose a shortcoming in our political and scientific planning system (if there is such a thing…) and that it is impossible to guess what might be needed at a given future time. That is exactly the point I’d like to make: since we shouldn’t be in the business of guessing, it seems that the best policy is to have a wide base of trained scientists and technologists, hopefully with as little bias as possible. Even extremely down to earth necessities can benefit from seemingly undirected initiatives (a.k.a., the shotgun hypothesis).