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The board covered with mathematical formulas and the UnderArmour backpack on the table show that a person is a sum of things and not just a stereotype.

He is a scientist by training, but he seeks in radical sports the point of balance to reach something that is near the perfect point, a point that he almost always looks for, although stating that he prefers to come in second or third place in the physical tests because "it is necessary to always feel the sacrifice in order to be the best".

I wait in the room where the research team works with him, as I realize that he exchanges the latest opinions with a team member on the behaviour of the mice regarding something they've experimented.

His name is Pedro Simas, if we talk to the scientist who leads a Portuguese research group at the Institute of Molecular Medicine (IMM) and, in coordination with Harvard, analyses the chimera virus as the passport to cure some cancer derivations; but he is João Pedro if we talk to the man who may one day return to his father's homeland in the Azores.

At first a man of few words, he hands me some articles already written on his herpes viruses’ research project, which may affect 90% of the world-wide population but never manifest themselves, and degenerate into a "persistent viral infection that can be associated with the existence of a cancer".

From these articles, I learn that this working group has discovered that humans and mice have the same virus, the Kaposi virus, and that they both have a common protein, LANA, which, although living differently in the host, behaves similarly. However, the protein in these animals allows research to "extrapolate to what happens in human infection". This led to the finding of the chimera virus (mouse virus with the human virus LANA gene), which, when manipulated with small molecules, enables inhibiting the LANA, thus blocking viral infection and, consequently, the disease.

Later, the step may be even greater, by applying the same experimental strategy of creating chimera viruses to other viruses that use proteins equivalent to LANA, and thus curb herpes viruses that degenerate into other cancers.

He is sitting by the computer, peering through some of the newsletter's links, and asks me in which section the text will be published. Maybe it made sense for the text to be in the Science Area, but I explain that what has always interested me was to know who the people behind the projects are. Perhaps that justification caught his attention a little in the conversation that would follow, but not enough. Believing that our interview was already doomed from the onset, I ask how someone who devotes himself to discovering how to extend the lives of others spends time testing his own life. I realized then that it is also a stereotype to consider that anyone who surfs or does underwater fishing without using a diving cylinder wants to put his life to the test. And I also realized that the temptation is precisely this, the constant search for immortality, as if, from the onset, we want to forget that there is an end.

Pedro Simas experienced the end of immortality when he had a bad downhill fall and a doctor diagnosed him with a serious neck injury. He spent a few days reviewing life as if it were a movie and it was the lack of perspective on what the future would be that made him seek out his friend surgeon João Lobo Antunes, who assured him that there was nothing serious with him. He realized, later on, that immortality disappears when we stop projecting what we have been and lived on a further path, as he explained when he spoke of Churchill: “If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future”.

The man who likes science as much as sports, not being able to choose only a single love, ultimately wants to be as immortal as the patients who one day will have their illnesses cured thanks to the advances of Science.

Nowadays he teaches Microbiology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon. He explains daily to his students all about viruses, viruses that are particularly difficult agents to fight, always requiring more study and new methods of combat, which means that the goal of a scientist in the discovery of cancer is never met.

Therefore, he continues his research project with Harvard and the IMM, where he works now, thanks to the new funding that the FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) approved after the first funds run out in 2013.

Before getting here, he was in Cambridge, where he took his PhD and lived for 10 years. He says that what he learned was mainly how to listen, because the genius of others could only make him look.

His contact with the exterior also took him to Italy, where he again gained new knowledge. This time the skill with Science led Pedro Simas to become an ice cream master. He opened Sorbettino in Chiado and created a unique taste dedicated to the IMM, cream with mint beads.

When I asked him, at the end of the conversation, if immortality could taste like ice cream, he replied that maybe it could be orange flavoured, a flavour he would choose if he could only eat one fruit for the rest of his life.

The rest of life is what scientists are studying, every day, so that life is, just one more day, immortal.

Whether the chimera virus or other viruses yet to be discovered, the path of Science is endless, but every day it moves on towards healing.



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Joana Sousa
Equipa Editorial