At the beginning of 2003 the authorities of PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela, S. A.), the Venezuelan State oil holding, proceeded to lay off half of the scientific, technological and administrative staff working at INTEVEP, its Technological Development Center, which had become a regional leader institution in the development of specialized technologies and technical service to the oil industry. On that occasion, Interciencia editorialized about the situation (Vol. 28 Nº2, p.65) and raised a voice of alert about the very negative consequences that would derive from such action, not only for those professionals whose careers were being affected, but also for the oil holding, an enterprise considered by many as one of the most dynamic and efficient energy corporations in the world. With this action, PDVSA was depriving itself of its most important resource, the intellectual asset of its staff. Today, two years after the technological holocaust, we sadly confirm that what was announced is a fact that did not require great future vision but, on the contrary has been an obvious result.

In the aforementioned editorial it was stated that INTEVEP had achieved such important technological developments as that of giving an economical and rational utilization to the oil sands of the Orinoco River basin, the largest hydrocarbon reserve on earth. It is known that, despite the debates about the realities of Orimulsion (Interciencia, Vol. 29 Nos 1 and 4), this product has been virtually relegated to the last level of commercialization and, thus, opportunities of introduction to global markets have been lost, while the state enterprise has acquired some commercial quarrels and even lawsuits. Also, failures in the sophisticated catalytic processes in the gigantic refining complexes of the Venezuelan oil enterprise have become commonplace, a fact that reflects the lack of the highly trained personnel that INTEVEP used to provide to the industry so as to keep the operations free of interruption.

It was also pointed out that in 2002 INTEVEP was the most relevant component of the national research and development system, representing up to 55% of the total investment by Venezuela in the science and technology sector. At present, it is not possible to know how much PDVSA has invested in INTEVEP during 2004; even the authorities of the Ministry of Science and Technology recognize this fact in its web page. Nevertheless, the current very low indexes of scientific production and development of new technologies are what shows more clearly that the loss of qualified personnel in 2003 became a true catastrophe.

As a matter of fact, the scientific and technological staff of PDVSA’s research center published, on the average, some 24 papers per year. The serial reports from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) about the publication of science and technology papers in indexed journals during 2004 reveal that INTEVEP only has four entries. In other words, from an average of 3.7% of all papers published in Venezuela, INTEVEP fell to one tenth of that. While it could be argued that papers subjected to peer review and published in prestigious journals are not the best indicator of its activity, basically of technological nature and industrial service, the number of patents granted by the US Patent Office reveals the magnitude of the setback produced. During 2004 only eight patents were granted to INTEVEP while, historically and every year, it used to obtain over twice this number.

It cannot be denied that the massive layoff of scientists and technologists from INTEVEP deeply affected the national capacities to produce new knowledge and locally achieve important technological developments. Beyond these deficiencies that affect the performance of the main source of income for the country, it is evident that if national authorities do not promptly adopt the needed corrective measures, the creative process in Venezuela will continue to decline, but will now slide down the path of irreversibility.

Jaime Requena

Academia de Ciencias Físicas, Matemáticas y Naturales

Caracas, Venezuela