A Cuban brain researcher went viral on Chinese TV. Here’s why
Recruitment of Cuba’s Pedro Antonio Valdés Sosa highlights China’s move to expand foreign ties
When Cuban neuroinformaticist Pedro Antonio Valdés Sosa wrote in October 2023 to Xi Jinping, China’s leader, hailing the two Communist nations’ budding collaboration in brain science, he did not expect a reply. But Valdés Sosa’s paean to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a $1.3 trillion global infrastructure effort and China’s flagship means for projecting soft power that he praised as an “insightful and innovative idea,” struck the right chord in Beijing. The following week, Xi wrote back to his “compañero,” noting that BRI’s “ultimate goal” is “to explore new measures for friendly countries in their search for common development.” Chinese TV presenters read Xi’s letter on air in its entirety, and Valdés Sosa became something of a celebrity in Chengdu, the city in southwestern China where he currently runs a lab.
For China, the public exchange put a positive spin on the 12-year-old BRI, which has bankrolled the construction of roads, railways, power stations, and ports across the globe. But China has also increasingly sought to use the initiative to strengthen science and technology ties with the nearly 150 countries taking part in it. And the December 2024 opening of the China-Cuba Belt and Road Joint Laboratory on Neurotechnology and Brain-Apparatus Communication at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), which Valdés Sosa co-directs, highlights how China is continuing to pursue foreign research alliances even as the United States moves to curtail foreign assistance programs and international science cooperation.
“China is investing in science overseas and our response is to fizzle,” says Johns Hopkins University molecular biologist Peter Agre, a Nobel laureate and practitioner of science diplomacy. He and other observers fear a further U.S. retreat from the global science stage could fuel a rapid expansion of Chinese soft power.
China has recruited a remarkable talent in the 74-year-old scientist, colleagues say. Valdés Sosa and his twin brother, also a neuroscientist, were born in Chicago before their parents moved the family to Havana in 1961 after Fidel Castro took power. “I’m a Communist, and not ashamed of it,” Valdés Sosa says. Racing to develop homegrown talent, the precocious brothers completed high school in 2 years, and at age 16 they started studying medicine at the University of Havana. Math and computer science were a strong suit for both, and in 1978, when he was 28 years old, Valdés Sosa traveled to Riga, Latvia, then part of the Soviet Union, to show off a digital electroencephalogram (EEG) system based on a computer the brothers had developed. “The Cuban computer blew the Russians away,” Valdés Sosa claims. “They were strong in theory but had pretty shitty computers.”
After the Soviet collapse in 1991 set Cuba adrift, the twins put their math skills to peaceful use. They founded the Cuban Neuroscience Center, which earned acclaim for a test for detecting hearing loss in infants. Valdés Sosa specialized in EEGs, an early brain monitoring technology that was ultimately eclipsed by other methods, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). But under the decadeslong embargo of Cuba, the U.S. prohibited the export of fMRI machines and other advanced devices to Cuba. “We wanted to send him an fMRI” that the University of California, Los Angeles offered to donate, but couldn’t get an export license, says Mark Rasenick, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois Chicago. The U.S. Department of the Treasury, he says, “claimed the machines could be weaponized.”
In 1993, Valdés Sosa asked Alan Evans, a prominent brain scientist at McGill University, to share MRI brain mapping data so the Cubans could write algorithms for squeezing more information out of EEGs. “When Pedro came back a year or so later and showed me what they’d done with those data,” Evans says, “it was one of the most shocking moments in my research life.” The Cuban algorithms had allowed researchers to construct sophisticated brain maps from EEG data. “These maps look like PET images,” Evans says. “It was a slap in the face. I thought: ‘These people are really good.’”
Valdés Sosa visited China for the first time in 2011, where he met a kindred spirit, UESTC neuroscientist Yao Dezhong, also an EEG specialist. A few years later, UESTC recruited Valdés Sosa through its Thousand Talents Program. From his perch in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, Valdés Sosa co-founded with Evans the Global Brain Consortium, a network of neuroscientists in 27 countries. “The fundamental premise is the democratization of neuroscience, such that scientists in low- and middle-income countries can get access to data and tools” to address brain health disparities, Evans says.
The new BRI lab, about 100 members strong and co-directed by Yao, will build on the consortium’s work, using artificial intelligence to probe neurodegenerative and other brain diseases and build a global repository of brain health data, Valdés Sosa says. (Other joint BRI labs include one for water conservation in Egypt and one for hydropower in Pakistan.) Status as a BRI lab will allow the Cuban-Chinese team to apply for Chinese grants for projects involving other BRI countries, starting with those in Latin America. Valdés Sosa is also keen to forge alliances with U.S. and European scientists whose international work is foundering in the shifting geopolitical landscape, even though “The Western system for introducing science into society is bankrupt,” Valdés Sosa asserts.
Global tensions may hamper such overtures, says environmental scientist Peng Gong, a vice president at the University of Hong Kong. “But individual scientists who do not have restrictions should be encouraged to join” BRI projects.
Manfred Horvat, a science policy expert at Vienna University of Technology, agrees with that notion. However, says Horvat, who with Gong in 2019 penned an editorial in Science calling on China to involve the global scientific community in implementing the BRI, laying the groundwork for such engagement in the current climate “certainly would be tough.” And Evans says when it comes to superpower science partnerships, “It’s very complex, four-dimensional chess going on right now.”
China-Global South scientific partnership