Dies, aged 95, Isaias Raw, notorious Brazilian researcher and former director of Butantan

Brazilian researcher and physician Isaias Raw died on Tuesday night (13) at the age of 95 in São Paulo.

The death information was confirmed by the advice of the Butantan Institute, to which the doctor was associated.

Known for his academic career, Raw graduated in medicine from the Faculty of Medicine of USP (University of São Paulo) in 1950, with a master’s and doctorate in biochemistry at the same university in 1954. He was a professor in 1957 and, later, full professor in the department of biochemistry at the same faculty.

During the years of the military dictatorship (1964-1985), he was revoked by the AI-5 and had to leave Brazil, during which time he was a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in Israel, and at the universities MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology ), Harvard and the Center for Biomedical Education at City College (New York).

Back in the country, in the late 1980s, he dedicated himself to the scientific and technological development of vaccines at the Butantan Institute, helping to build the capacity to produce 200 million doses delivered to the national immunization plan at the institute.

He was director of the Brazilian Institute of Education, Science and Culture (Ibecc, 1952), which was part of Unesco, and also of the Butantan Institute (1991-1997). He chaired the Butantan Foundation, a private entity that manages the resources of the institute of the same name, from 2005 to 2009.

Raw was a full member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) since 1987. In his more than 70 years of academic life, he has worked on extremely important scientific research, such as the discovery of enzymes that act in the trypanosome cycle, the causative agent of Chagas disease, and in the presence of messenger RNA fragments in organelles in the cell nucleus.

In addition, he created the “O Cientista” kits, with tasks to do at home, founded the Publishing House of the Universities of São Paulo and Brasília, was director of the Brazilian Foundation for the Development of Science Teaching (Fundeb) and unified the medical entrance exams of São Paulo (with Walter Leser).

For the advancement of science in the state of São Paulo, he also created, in 1964, the Carlos Chagas Foundation to encourage the training and selection of professionals in the areas of biomedical sciences, and the USP Experimental Medicine Course.

For his outstanding scientific merit and great contribution to the advancement of science teaching, he received the National Order of Scientific Merit in 1994, the title of Commander of the National Order of Scientific Merit in 1995 and was considered a Grand Cross of the same order in 2001, the highest scientific award in the country.

He also received the José Pelúcio Ferreira prize, in 2006, the Fundação Conrado Wessel Prize for Science and Culture, in 2004, and for General Science, in 2005, and the prize in Public Health and Preventive Medicine from the Bunge Foundation, in 2010.

In recent years, as an emeritus professor of medicine at USP, he was away from teaching, but continued to work on vaccine research at Butantan, including dengue vaccine.

During his presidency at the Butantan Foundation, denouncements of embezzlement exercised by employees within the foundation from 2005 to 2008, which totaled R$ 35 million, led to his removal from the board in 2009. According to the State Public Prosecutor’s Office, which investigated the denunciations, however, there were no indications that Raw would have benefited from the diversions.