Havana, Cuba: Vicente Vérez is a constant reference in Cuba and today he will be news again when he adds to his history the honorary title of Doctor Honoris Causa in Chemical Sciences from the University of Havana, Prensa Latina publishes.
The name of this prominent scientist, current director of the Finlay Vaccine Institute, appears in national and international media always close to three firm steps from the Caribbean island to counteract Covid-19: Soberana 01, Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus.
Accompanied by a team of leading researchers from the country, he defends in each scenario the capacity of Cuban science to confront the current pandemic and the exceptional quality of vaccines.
With a recognized track record, he is the lead author of the synthetic antigen vaccine against Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib).
Referring to the imprint of that discovery, he said that it was a collective work.
“I do not like that it is never personalized; these are works of great collectives always. If you have to captain a ship, the ship is nothing with a captain; the ship with a captain is a ship adrift; It is just a ship with all its crew… to whom I owe everything”, he said on the Round Table radio television space.
Graduated 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 simply by mixing the previous reaction. That was something that I was always very passionate about ”, he said.
A member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, he did his doctorate at the University of Orleans, France, in 1983.
Dr. Vicente Vérez Bencomo has narrated on different occasions that in the year in which he defended his PhD thesis at the European Higher Education House, he dedicated it to his parents, his wife, his professor from the USSR, and to the Cuban Revolution. .
“That upset one of the jurors very much, that he was a well-known scientist, but a right-wing person who did not understand it. He spent more than an hour asking me questions, trying to devalue the thesis, but I don’t regret having done it”, he recalled.
In 1984 he assumed the direction of the Carbohydrate Laboratory, which in 1990 was strengthened and changed its name to the Laboratory of Synthetic Antigens of the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Havana.
For 2008 he was appointed as director of the Center for Bio-molecular Chemistry, created from the union between the Center for Pharmaceutical Chemistry and the University Laboratory.
He has other awards such as the Special Prize of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment for the Result of Highest Scientific Relevance (1999 and 2004), the Gold Medal of the World Intellectual Property Organization.
He was also awarded in the Health category in 2005 by the Tech Museum of Innovation in San José, California in the United States. In 2015 he received the decoration with the Knight Order 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.
Redacción Digital
Equipo de redactores del sitio web de Radio Mayabeque
