WINTER IN MONTEVIDEO----SETTING FOR ANOTHER NOVEL???

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A small slice of my real life day job that might be of interest to some of you.  I'll be teaching some of the lectures in this class next summer (winter in Uruguay).  Does anyone think this may give us some ideas and locales for another novel set in Montevideo?

Course and Workshop on Cyanotoxins in aquatic systems: Monitoring and analytical methods.

The course will review the current knowledge on the factors that determine the development of cyanobacterial blooms and their toxins (cyanotoxins) in aquatic systems, as well as the main environmental and health issues related to the problem. With this background, the available monitoring and analytical tools will be presented.   The basis for a better management of the phenomenon will be also discussed.

The approach is interdisciplinary and the course is aimed at students and researchers from different fields of knowledge (chemistry, biology, veterinary medicine, human medicine, etc).

URUGUAY HERBICIDE TEST SPURS REGIONAL INTEREST

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Here’s a very nice description of what I did in Uruguay when I wasn't trying to write and sell mystery stories and novels. [Reprinted From Global Health Matters, Fogarty International Center's newsletter, January / February 2013 | Volume 12, Issue 1]

“Focus on water”

By Cathy Kristiansen

What started as an initiative to protect Uruguayan drinking water from an herbicide commonly used by rice farmers has blossomed into an international network of budding researchers focused on solving water problems in Latin America. With Fogarty support, researchers and trainees are teaching others how to develop and use molecular-based tests to measure water purity.  Researchers in Uruguay devised a simple test to measure herbicide levels in water.

The project began in 2001, when Dr. Jerold A. Last of the University of California (UC), Davis, received his first International Training and Research in Environmental and Occupational Health grant.  This Fogarty program aims to nurture trainees from a variety of disciplines to help developing countries and emerging democracies develop capacity in both environmental and occupational health.

Our Dinner With Mussolini

Prologue to the story:  My Fogarty Center training grant for Uruguay and Argentina was designed to see the resources used to train graduate students to increase the talent pool for the local university faculties.  They also wanted to see a regional impact on public health of the enhanced programs.  Thus, as Director I spent a lot of my time trying to build collaborations across national borders among countries that historically did not tend to help one anther or co-operate easily on a regional scale.  That led to a lot of failed initiatives along with a few spectacular successes.

            Once upon a time, in a land long ago and far away, my colleagues from Uruguay were with me at a scientific meeting in Santiago, Chile.  We arranged to meet separately with a local academician with ties to the salmon fish farming industry in the south of Chile who had a problem that I hoped the Uruguayan colleagues might be able to help solve for him.  The problem was to be able to analyze the fish at an exquisite level of sensitivity to be able to certify that they were free of any residues of antibiotics, so as to allow their export to Japan and the European Union countries.  My Uruguayan colleagues had the necessary methodology, while the Chileans had a need.  Hence, the small meeting within the larger meeting made sense.

Uruguay and Me---a Personal Memoir

This post originated as an invited article I wrote for the Fulbright (Uruguay) Newsletter in 2005.  I've twice been a Fulbright Professor in Montevideo (the second time as a shared award with half of the time spent in Salta, Argentina), which has led me into a series of continuing collaborations with scientists there and a rich store of people and places to use as background for my novels.  The Newsletter asked for a 5-year retrospective on what my experiences during the tenure of the prestigious Fulbright award there in 1999 were like, and what has occurred since then.
 

            Besides acquiring an occasional taste for yerba mate and parrillada compleada, the Fulbright award had several other influences on my life, then and now.  Most important was the result of a promise I made to myself that relationships made during this Fulbright award, my second (the first was to Uruguay in 1982), would progress beyond the nominal exchange of Christmas cards after I returned to California. Fortunately I was at a time in my career when this commitment was possible to pursue. 

The Nexus of Fiction and Reality

In "The Ambivalent Corpse" and in my upcoming (Summer, 2012) novel "The Matador Murders", we meet a character named Andrea, a scientist at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, who is studying affordable methods for the analysis of the microcystins, a family of toxins produced in rivers, estuaries, and lakes by various species of blue-green algae.  She also gets mentioned in some of my other blogs.  Her character is based on a real scientist studying these algal toxins in Uruguay who I've been collaborating with for more than a decade.  So, what's real and what's fiction?  Let me give you a few hints; these are references to, and abstracts from, actual scientific papers published in the peer-reviewed literature that I have copied from Pub Med:

1.  From Brena et al., (2006). ITREOH Building of Regional Capacity to Monitor Recreational Water:  Development of a Non-commercial Microcystin ELISA and Its Impact on Public Health Policy. INT J OCCUP ENVIRON HEALTH 12:377–385.