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"Thirty-eight years ago I made one of the best decisions of my life: start my studies of the Biology degree at the University of Murcia."

This is how Professor Francisco J. Martínez Mojica began his speech on the occasion of the Honoris Causa doctorate from the University of Murcia, number 61 granted by this academic center since the musician Narciso Yepes was invested in 1977.

The ceremony has been held this morning since 11:30 at the UMU Veterinary School.

Martínez Mojica, born in Elche in 1963, a student at the University of Murcia during the first three years of his career, is a microbiologist and researcher who currently develops his work at the University of Alicante, and is a pioneer in the study of CRISPR systems, a technology responsible for the greatest scientific revolution of the 21st century, with an enormous impact on agriculture, livestock, biotechnology and medicine, which has allowed to improve the productivity of agricultural crops and cure diseases of viral component and cancer among many other applications.

His discoveries have been so momentous that today he is one of the most serious candidates for the Nobel Prize.

The sponsor of the event, the UMU professor Antonio Sánchez Amat, has highlighted Dr. Mojica's career "as a paradigmatic example of the relevance of basic research, and particularly of research in Biological Sciences, highlighting that the discovery CRISPR of its techniques was so important that it was recognized by the journal Science in 2015 as the scientific milestone of that year.

Thanks to Professor Torrella

During his speech, the new Doctor Honoris Causa had fond memories for the city during his time as a student at the University of Murcia, as well as for several of his professors, especially towards Francisco Torrella, "who was largely to blame" for his dedication to Microbiology: "After 35 years he said- I'm glad I had the opportunity to publicly thank Professor Torrella, for being for me, and surely for many of his students, an inspiration."

Martínez Mojica highlighted in his speech his commitment to pure research, "not contaminated by economic interests, motivated by curiosity and justified by the need to know," and stressed that in science, sometimes fortunate findings occur in a way casual, by serendipity accident - as happened with penicillin or as it happened to him in Santa Pola in the 90s, when he discovered that small regions of his DNA were repeated in the genome of small organisms in the salt, symmetrically, a discovery that would give rise to CRISPR techniques, a technology that is "responsible for the greatest scientific revolution of what we have of the century".

UMU Rector José Luján closed the event, who had a memory for the recently deceased scientist Margarita Salas, first Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Murcia, who "like Dr. Martínez Mojica, have no more effort than that of understand the universe for the good of humanity. "

Luján alluded to Ramón y Cajal when he argued that the secret of his success had been spending 40 years of his life bent over his desk, and said that the new Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Murcia has "worked patiently, without fainting, with determination. , passion and conviction. Overcoming the avatars and disappointments that the university profession sometimes has to keep its line of research and experiments active. "

Source: Universidad de Murcia