Andrés Paris, scientist and poet, stars this week in a new episode of the #TalentMadrid campaign that the Government Delegation in Madrid has been developing on social networks.
In Madrid in 1995, Andrés Paris graduated in Biochemistry at the Autonomous University of Madrid and completed a Master’s Degree in Molecular Biomedicine. He then received a grant from La Caixa to develop his doctoral thesis, focused on the study of new therapies against autoimmune diseases.
Your work as a scientist and scientific popularizer
In the conversation we have had with him, Andrés explains to us what he is currently working on: “Right now I’m in a joint research group at La Paz Hospital and the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) and I’m working on how to improve current T-cell transfer therapies in pediatric tumors,” so that cell treatments work where needed and the side effects associated with them are avoided. “The thing is to refine and improve current therapies,” he says.
Andrés Paris is also interested in scientific dissemination and recounts an experience in this regard: “The communication of science is such an inherent and intrinsic part of our profession as manual labor, which we call the wet labor of poiata.” “On the occasion of Science Week, my lab colleagues and I designed a card game to explain to schoolchildren, from ESO to Baccalaureate, how this type of therapy works. And the results are very positive. We liked the experience.” He adds that when you collaborate with associations such as ‘Cris contra el cancer’, where the visibility of what is being done is the driving force that drives society to support you, you see this idea reinforced. “Scientific communication is necessary.”
His obsession “for platonic beauty, for truth”
He goes on to refer to “what obsesses me about the world, about its perception”: “It is beauty, it is the idea that beauty, and platonic beauty, that is, the truth, must be found in the world. For me, science and poetry are two sides of the same coin and two ways to face the truth, to reach it. For me, poetry is knowledge, it is knowledge of myself, it is exploring the ways to express that knowledge and to make the reader recognize or recognize me. I understand poetry and also scientific poetry as forms of knowledge, of approaching the truth.”
Poetic science or scientific poetry as a way of doing science also
Thus, he points out: “I wrote the poem I’m most proud of when I was 17, and I think I’ll never write anything like that again. It’s a visual poem, a calligram, a molecule of DNA, a kind of letter from the universe to the cells to work according to their instructions, because it could be understood that DNA are the instructions that the cells follow to be as they are.”
“That poem has come a long way, in fact it has been translated into English, maintaining the visual form, the nucleotide sequence, which is the main reason for the poem, and it has been published in an American science journal. With which even finance poetic science or scientific poetry was doing science, but at the same time poetry. It’s been quite a revelation,” he says.
Your poems and first prize
Andrés Paris is the author of three poems: Avant-garde sonnets and candles, which he published in 2011 (“I was 15 years old. It was horrible!”), Between Infinity and Zero (2015) and How Water Is Born (2019).
He then published his last poem, Desde el azul del mundo, for which he received his first prize in 2022, the II José Antonio Santano International Poetry Prize. Remember with affection the communication of this award: “I got a call from the award the day I was celebrating my first scientific paper. I knew that day that I was more happy with poetry than science.”
The unique experience of the poem ‘The Piano’
This work includes the poem The Piano, which he composed in room 438 of the Student Residence. Andrés Paris tells us about this unique experience: “I was a Student Residence Fellow in the year of the pandemic, from October 2019 to March 2020. I arrived at the Residence of a trip to Barcelona on March 14, infected and not knowing that it was and the one that was going to be triggered. I locked myself in the room and did not leave for almost a month. One of the things I had was the possibility of playing this piano – that of the Residence – from 1912, and that Federico García Lorca played when he was a resident. I was closely and emotionally linked to this piano. And when I was in the solitude of my room, I just missed him. When I left and we returned home, I kindly asked the Residence to let me touch him even though I was no longer a resident. They let me do it and it makes me very happy,” he concludes.
The Government Delegation’s #TalentMadrid campaign
The Government Delegation has been carrying out for weeks a campaign on social networks with the hashtag #TalentMadrid to support initiatives and people who live and/or develop their activity in the region, highlighting in very varied disciplines, artistic, sports, scientific or social, among others.
For the episodes disseminated so far, a long list of talents has already passed: the billiard club Madrid Escuela Nacional; the professor of Technology and writer of books of scientific dissemination Javier Fernández Panadero; the researcher of the Higher Council of Scientific Research (CSIC), María Mittelbrunn; the champion of Cartomagic in 2022, Pepo Capel; the director and screenwriter Víctor Matellano; the sculptor Luis Berruti; the Baroque Orchestra of the Professional Conservatory of Music Arturo Soria, the researcher Lucía El Fernández, the team.
The content of this campaign can be followed in the profiles that the Government Delegation in the Community of Madrid has on social networks:
"X" : @DGobiernoMadrid
Instragram: @DGobiernoMadrid