ZP at the PRBB
It's not every day you get to meet the president... OK, so it was just the president of the Spanish government, and OK, I didn't actually shake his hand (but almost) or speak to him, and OK, he didn't actually speak to us, but still...
Accompanied by the Catalan president, Montilla, the Catalan ministers of industry, Clos, and health, Geli, and the mayor of Barcelona, Hereu, José Luís Rodriguez Zapatero toured our facility and spoke with the heads of the five institutes housed by the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB). He then gave a press conference where he affirmed the commitment of the Spanish government to fund biomedical research (currently about 6 billion euros), and then spent about five minutes with the rest of us, shaking hands and (hopefully) listening to some of the doctoral students' protests about their sub-par working conditions.
In addition to the PRBB visit, he met and dined with the Catalan leadership to discuss the massive power outage last week and the Spanish government's commitment (or lack thereof) to investing in the infrastructure of Catalunya (for example, the El Prat airport.)