Written in NATIONAL the 25/8/2022 · 10:02 hs
the emeritus professor of the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM that 2001 changed the dogma in the treatment of idiopathic fibrosis, daily transforms the minds of young people.
On May 18, 2015, Dr. Annie Pardo Cemo, became the first non-American woman to receive from the American Thoracic Society, the Recognition Award for Scientific Accomplishmentsaward given for his outstanding scientific contributions in the study of the lung and its biopathology in chronic degenerative diseases, in particular idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Added to the above are a series of national and international awards that Dr. Pardo Cemo has received throughout her almost five decades academic and research career. Among them are the 1992 Glaxo Foundation Investigation Annual Prize; the Glaxo Wellcome Foundation Research Award 1995; the 2001 Canifarma Prize for Basic Research; the 2005 GlaxoSmithKline Foundation National Research Award; the Heberto Castillo Medal in Basic Sciences and the recognition of the most cited academics of the UNAM in 2013, 2014, 2015, among others.
The Recognition Award for Scientific Accomplishments, however, is special, as it not only places Dr. Pardo Cemo among the world’s leading specialists in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis research, a disease that, according to the National Institute of Respiratory Diseases (INER), cost the lives of half of its patients, three or four years following diagnosis.
Added to this, recognition allows us to appreciate the very foundations of science through the characteristic look of a woman, her talent, her sensitivity and, of course, her rebelliousness, because in the beginning, Annie had to confront the dogma that fibrosis it was the result of a chronic inflammatory response, for which the patient received a powerful and prolonged anti-inflammatory treatment. Anniehowever, made the affront of seeing those same data with her own mind and a passion that in fact distinguishes her and beyond experimental models, leads her to pay special attention to human beings.
“We focused on the fact that the patients, unlike patients with other types of pulmonary fibrosis, always progressed despite receiving powerful anti-inflammatory treatment.”, he recounted on one occasion. On this basis, the response of Annie Pardo and doctors Moisés Selman and Talmadge King changed the treatment of the disease forever: idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis was different from the other types of pulmonary fibrosis in its pathogenic mechanisms.
In other words, it was not an inflammatory disease, but of an aberrant reaction of the epithelial cells that in this way generated the scars that destroyed the alveoli. From that moment on, the world of the specialty was never the same once morebut Annie he continued to act in the same way; as the confrontational scientist that she was and who also receives from young people the impulse to undertake her questioning. Hence her motto: “learn by learning” and that leads her to stimulate that same scientific rebellion in young people, from the high school level to the postgraduate specialty.
That is why in his 45 years of teaching career, Annie Pardo He works closely with his students, which not only fosters the potential of erudite minds, but also brilliant, diligent, restless and creative ones. An example for Mexican science that notwithstanding the heights that can be obtained in its different specialties, it actually receives its decisive impulse in the formation of critical human beings committed to knowledge.