Argentinian scientists face a grim new year in the wake of their country's slide into political and economic chaos. With salaries unpaid and grant money effectively impounded by the banks, work in Argentina's labs is grinding to a halt. There are widespread fears that years of effort spent building globally competitive research groups could rapidly unravel.

“I think the economic situation can only worsen,” says Armando Parodi, a biochemist at the National University of General San Martín's Institute for Biotechnology Research in Buenos Aires and a chief investigator for the national council for science and technology (CONICET). “The economic fiasco has brought on a social fiasco and the very cohesion of society has been affected.”

Unfortunately for Parodi and other Argentinian scientists, it is unclear who in the government will shield them from the consequences of the crisis. As Nature went to press, the key post of national secretary of science and technology — which oversees CONICET, employing most of Argentina's leading researchers, and a parallel granting body, the national agency for the promotion of science and technology — remained unfilled.

The previous occupant, Adriana Puiggrós, resigned immediately after President Fernando de la Rúa, whose departure from office on 20 December brought the country's crisis to a head. Adolfo Rodríguez Sáa, the third of Argentina's five presidents since then, appointed a science and technology secretary during his one-week tenure, but the post was vacated when he resigned on 30 December. Science has not been a top priority for President Eduardo Duhalde, who took over on 2 January. “We're in a period of transition and uncertainty,” says Juan Tirao, acting president of CONICET. Tirao suspects that the country's science agencies may be restructured in the wake of the economic and political crisis.

Argentina's scientists have struggled during the country's four years of recession. But their troubles deepened in early December when the government placed a 250-peso (US$250) weekly limit on bank withdrawals, effectively denying access to research grants.

“We need the assistance of politicians and economists to avoid collapse and a waste of resources,” says Osvaldo Sala, an ecologist at the University of Buenos Aires. Sala fears that the chaos will force many scientists to leave Argentina or to quit science altogether.

Monetary-exchange controls, imposed to protect the peso, have exacerbated the situation for scientists, many of whom rely on foreign equipment, reagents and journals. Sala, who heads a major project funded by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, has been directly affected. He cannot transfer funds from an Argentinian bank to his colleagues in other countries.

Argentina's devaluation of the peso, announced on 7 January, pegs the official currency at 1.4 pesos to the US dollar, while allowing it to float on unofficial markets. But the devaluation itself is fraught with difficulty, and it is unclear, for example, whether imported scientific equipment could be bought at the official rate. “Things are changing by the minute,” says Sala.

“A situation like this is so extreme that we can't predict what will happen in the next month,” says biochemist Eduardo Olivero, director of the Southern Centre for Scientific Research in Tierra del Fuego. “Our hope is that the government will quickly clarify the situation for the country's scientific community — something that obviously hasn't been talked about in the past few days because of the gravity of our social and political crisis.”