José Mariano Gago: the physicist who put science into Portugal's government

At noon on Monday 20 April 2015 a small crowd gathered in front of the central pavilion of the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon's engineering school. Nobody spoke. The silence lasted eight minutes, and it ended in long applause.1 source1 source

The same thing happened, for five minutes, outside research centres, universities, polytechnics and Ciência Viva science centres across Portugal. A group of scientists had called the stoppage as the “public recognition of the national scientific community” for José Mariano Gago, physicist and former minister, who had died three days earlier.3 sources3 sources

Gago died at his home in Lisbon on Friday 17 April 2015, aged 66. He had been ill with cancer for almost two years, and his secretary of 30 years told the Lusa news agency that the end was sudden. His body lay in the Basílica da Estrela that night. The next day it was taken to the Algarve, where his family came from, for burial at Pechão, near Olhão.3 sources3 sources

He had been a particle physicist at CERN, the founder of a laboratory and, for about 12 years in two spells, the minister in charge of science. Lusa reported that no one had served longer as a minister since 1974. Even the prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, whose government Gago had criticised in print a year earlier, called him an “illustrious academic” and a man who had served his country.3 sources3 sources

When the Estado Novo dictatorship fell on 25 April 1974, Portugal's research base was tiny. Small research budgets and conflicting initiatives made the years from 1974 to 1986 a period of impasse, in the words of historians of the FCT archive. Mário Pimenta, a physicist who was Gago's first doctoral student, later described the early 1980s as a time when “there was practically no science in Portugal”.3 sources3 sources

The first comparable statistics show how small the base was. OECD estimates put Portugal's spending on research and development at 0.27% of its GDP in 1982, against 0.45% in Spain. Eurostat counts about 3,960 full-time-equivalent researchers in Portugal that year.2 sources2 sources

Money for training was tied to the old university hierarchy. Gago recalled that when he took over the national research council in 1986, almost all its study grants went to university lecturers to study abroad. Giving a grant to a doctoral student with no job in the state was a novelty.1 source1 source

In his own field the base was one man. According to Pimenta, when Gago came back from Geneva around 1980 he was the only Portuguese with a doctorate in experimental particle physics.2 sources2 sources

José Mariano Rebelo Pires Gago was born in Lisbon on 16 May 1948. His parents were, in his words, completely anti-fascist and on the left. His father had helped the MUD, the opposition's Movement of Democratic Unity, and the presidential campaign of General Norton de Matos, and at home every question was argued over.2 sources2 sources

He entered the Técnico in October 1965, at 17. The turning point, he said, came with the floods of November 1967, which swept away shacks around Lisbon. Students went out to help, against the censors' silence, and he spent several days with a shovel in a village above Vila Franca de Xira, digging dead animals out of the mud.2 sources2 sources

In May 1969 he was elected president of the Técnico students' association, one of the most powerful in the country. It was a tense spring. In Coimbra, on 17 April, the student leader Alberto Martins had been refused the floor in front of President Américo Tomás and arrested that night, and Coimbra's students went on to boycott their exams.3 sources3 sources

He graduated in electrical engineering in 1971 and left for Paris on a grant from the Instituto de Alta Cultura, to do a doctorate in the nuclear and high-energy physics laboratory of the École Polytechnique. In 1972, while home on holiday, he learned that the PIDE, the political police, had a warrant for his arrest. He fled, and organised his life on the assumption that he would never come back.3 sources3 sources

He came home after the revolution of 25 April 1974 only to visit; his work was abroad. He took his doctorate in physics at the University of Paris in 1976 and then worked at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, until 1978. In France and Switzerland he also did voluntary teaching in Portuguese emigrant associations, which produced a book, Homens e Ofícios, published with UNESCO support.3 sources3 sources

From about 1978 Gago tried to move back to Portugal, and for years he lived between Lisbon and Switzerland. In 1981 he and colleagues put on what he called the first hands-on science exhibition for the general public in Portugal, De que São Feitas as Coisas (What things are made of), in the Técnico's central pavilion. It ran alongside a European conference on high-energy physics at the Gulbenkian Foundation, which, he recalled, Richard Feynman attended.1 source1 source

The exhibition was free, open late and open for only a week, and it drew many thousands of visitors. Clowns from the Coliseu worked the metro stations as sandwich men. A cosmic-ray detector running in a shop window of the Palácio Foz, on the Restauradores, earned a front-page headline in an evening paper: “Cósmicos atacam Lisboa” (Cosmic rays attack Lisbon). Some schoolchildren skipped lessons all week to help with the experiments.1 source1 source

That year he also negotiated Portugal's first agreement with CERN. In 1985, working with the foreign minister Jaime Gama, he negotiated full membership, and Portugal joined on 1 January 1986. CERN was the first international scientific organisation the country had ever belonged to.3 sources3 sources

To make use of it, Gago founded LIP, the Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas, in May 1986. It began with about half a dozen researchers in Lisbon, from the Técnico and the Faculty of Sciences, and a Coimbra group of radiation-detector specialists led by Armando Policarpo. Gago himself worked on the CERN experiments NA38, NA50 and NA51 and on the DELPHI detector.2 sources2 sources

Also in 1986, while still living in Geneva, he was invited to preside over the JNICT. In three years he organised a national research congress, the Jornadas Nacionais de Investigação Científica e Tecnológica of May 1987, and launched the Programa Mobilizador de Ciência e Tecnologia, whose projects were judged by evaluators from abroad. He also made applicants present their projects in public, so that young researchers could compete with their elders.2 sources2 sources

He left the JNICT in 1989 and published Manifesto para a Ciência em Portugal in 1990. Out of office, he fought Aníbal Cavaco Silva's government over the first EU-funded science programme, which put money into science parks and tried to drop the social sciences and humanities. He later called that a “troglodyte” idea of which sciences were useful.3 sources3 sources

In 1995 António Guterres, the Socialist prime minister and a friend from the Técnico, asked Gago to create a Ministry of Science and Technology, the country's first. He ran it through Guterres's two governments, until 2002. He chose not to take the universities as well: reforming higher education at the same time, he argued, would have swamped a new science policy. He later allowed that this choice might have delayed university reform by several years, though he was not sure it had.3 sources3 sources

The first new body was Ciência Viva, launched on 1 July 1996 as a government programme to bring science into schools and public life. It paid for experimental science teaching, twinned schools with laboratories and put scientists in front of the public in summer. In 1998 it became an association of research institutions and took the title of national agency for scientific and technological culture. Its co-founder, Rosalia Vargas, led it for the next three decades.3 sources3 sources

Gago said the ministry “would be incomprehensible without Ciência Viva”. In 1997 the JNICT was broken up and the new FCT took over the funding and evaluation of research, judged by international panels. The ministry also connected every school and library to the internet.2 sources2 sources

He kept up the scientific diplomacy he had begun with CERN. At the end of 1998 he applied to join the European Space Agency, and Portugal became its 15th member state on 14 November 2000. On 27 June 2000 he signed the agreement for Portugal's entry into the European Southern Observatory, which runs the La Silla observatory and the Very Large Telescope, and Portugal joined in 2001.3 sources3 sources

In 2000 Portugal held the presidency of the European Union. Gago worked with the European Commission on the parts of the Lisbon Strategy that dealt with a European Research Area and the information society. He later chaired the Initiative for Science in Europe and campaigned for the creation of a European Research Council.2 sources2 sources

When the Socialists left office in 2002, Gago went back to the Técnico and LIP. In 2005 José Sócrates brought him back as Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, and he stayed through both of Sócrates's governments, until 2011.2 sources2 sources

This time he took on the universities. A summary of the Portuguese press in 2009 listed what he had done in four years: he closed three private universities, created the option for public universities to become foundations and consolidated the move to the European Bologna degree system.3 sources3 sources

He also signed partnerships with American universities. The MIT Portugal Program was founded in 2006, alongside programmes with Carnegie Mellon and the University of Texas at Austin. Their stated aims were to internationalise Portuguese universities and research centres and give them access to high-technology research equipment.3 sources3 sources

And he hired. By his own later account, about 1,200 researchers with doctorates, 40% of them foreigners, were taken on through an international competition, on contracts that ran out in 2012 and 2013. Spending rose fast: OECD figures show R&D going from 0.76% of GDP in 2005 to 1.58% in 2009, when Portugal was ahead of Spain (1.36%). The OECD marks a break in Portugal's series in 2008, so part of that year's jump may come from a change of method.2 sources2 sources

Two series show the scale of the change. Both have breaks where the surveys changed, so single-year jumps should be read with care, but the direction is not in doubt.2 sources2 sources

Researchers multiplied faster still. Eurostat counts about 11,600 full-time-equivalent researchers in Portugal in 1995, 21,100 in 2005 and 44,100 in 2011. Gago's own figure, in 2014, was that the number of researchers had grown seventeenfold in 30 years, R&D intensity fivefold and scientific output 32-fold. Eurostat's full-time-equivalent series gives a rise of roughly eleven times between 1982 and 2012. He did not say which series or starting year he used.2 sources2 sources

When the Socialist government left office in 2011, Gago went back to LIP, which a colleague called his home. He still followed its work closely, travelled and gave advice, and he chaired the laboratory until his death.2 sources2 sources

He did not stay quiet. In 2014 he wrote in Análise Social that the government had let the 1,200 researcher contracts lapse and opened only 400 places, cut new postdoctoral grants to 200 a year from the usual 700 and halved new doctoral grants. About 1,000 people with doctorates, he estimated, had probably left research or the country as a result.1 source1 source

He set out the other side too. The government's case, as he summarised it, was that heavy investment had still not brought Portugal level with other countries, that companies were not hiring the doctorates it had produced, and that the system had grown in quantity and now had to concentrate on “excellence”. The protests grew after allegations that FCT panels' scores had been changed administratively.1 source1 source

He ended the piece with a letter of 1780 by the mathematician José Anastácio da Cunha, punished by the Inquisition and expelled from the university, who lamented that Portuguese scholars had once been respected abroad and had since fallen back.1 source1 source

Tributes came from every side. António Guterres spoke of his courage against the dictatorship. Nuno Crato, education and science minister in the government Gago had criticised, called him a brilliant personality who meant a great deal to Portuguese science. António Costa, then leader of the Socialists, said the country owed Gago for putting science at the centre of development policy.3 sources3 sources

Gago had worked to the end on a celebration of 30 years of Portugal in CERN. It was set for Sunday 26 April at the Pavilhão do Conhecimento, the Ciência Viva science centre in Lisbon, and the centre announced that it would name its auditorium after him that day. The room is now the Auditório José Mariano Gago.2 sources2 sources

Portugal still spends less on research than the European average: 1.73% of GDP in 2024, against an estimated 2.26% for the EU, by Eurostat's figures. But the system Gago built kept growing after him. Eurostat counted about 65,300 full-time-equivalent researchers in Portugal in 2024, and the country remains a member of CERN and ESO.4 sources4 sources

Ciência Viva turned 30 on 1 July 2026. It now runs a network of 22 science centres, some in old buildings such as a convent in Estremoz and a former prison in Vila do Conde, and nearly 900 science clubs in schools. The centres have had 13 million visitors since 1998. LIP, now in Lisbon, Coimbra and Braga, still connects Portuguese physicists to CERN.3 sources3 sources