As the late great international economist Carlos Diaz Alejandro once put it, by now any bright graduate student, by choosing his assumptions .carefully, can produce a consistent model yielding just about any policy recommendation he favored at the start. And that was in the 1970 s!

María Teresa Abreu and Rocio Diaz Benjumea Benavides, both from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, were recipients in 2004 and 2003, respectively, of the UNESCO L'Oréal fellowships, awarded as part of the For women in science programme, for women working in doctoral and post doctoral research in the life sciences.