Home » Doctor Honoris Causa to a life of science for Vicente Vérez de Cuba

Doctor Honoris Causa to a life of science for Vicente Vérez de Cuba

by Tess Hutchinson

Accompanied by a team of leading researchers from the country, he defends in each scenario the capacity of Cuban science to face the current pandemic and the exceptional quality of vaccines.

With proven experience, he is the lead author of the synthetic antigen vaccine against Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib).

Referring to the imprint of this discovery, he said it was a collective work.

“I don’t like it never being personalized, it is always the work of great collectives. If you have to command a ship, the ship is nothing with a captain; the ship with a captain is a drifting ship; It’s just a ship with all her crew … to whom I owe everything, “he told Space Broadcasting Mesa Redonda.

A graduate in chemical engineering from the Lomonosov Institute in Moscow, he also holds the title of doctor honoris causa from the Canadian University of Quebec in Montreal.

“The magic of chemistry… and seeing that something new is generated just by mixing the previous reaction. It’s something that has always fascinated me, ”he said.

A member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, he did his doctorate at the University of Orleans, France, in 1983.

Neighborhood award for the Finlay Vaccine Institute

Doctor Vicente Vérez Bencomo has repeatedly told that the year he defended his doctoral thesis at the European House of Higher Education, he dedicated it to his parents, his wife, his professor from the USSR and to the Cuban Revolution. .

“It really upset one of the jurors, who was a well-known scientist, but a right-wing person who didn’t understand him. He spent more than an hour asking me questions, trying to downgrade the thesis, but I don’t regret having done it, ”he recalls.

In 1984 he assumed the management of the Carbohydrate Laboratory, which in 1990 was strengthened and changed its name to Synthetic Antigen Laboratory of the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Havana.

In 2008, he was appointed director of the Center for Biomolecular Chemistry, born from the union between the Center for Pharmaceutical Chemistry and the University Laboratory.

It has other awards such as the Special Prize of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment for the result of greater scientific relevance (1999 and 2004), the gold medal of the Organization world of intellectual property.

It was also awarded in the Health category in 2005 by the Tech Museum of Innovation in San José, California, United States.

In 2015, he received the decoration of the Order of Knight of the Legion of Honor, which is the best known and most important of the French distinctions awarded to men and women for extraordinary merits.

The Finlay Institute presents to PAHO and WHO the results of the application of the Cuban vaccine candidate

Editor Maria Romero

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