Munich/Madrid

A top Spanish cell biologist has spurned the chance to lead a huge cardiology centre under construction in Madrid.

Salvador Moncada, director of the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research in London, has been consulting for five years with the National Centre for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC), which is being built by the Spanish health ministry.

Moncada — an expert on the role of nitric oxide in cell signalling — had been planning to take over as the CNIC's scientific director early next year, when about 100 researchers already employed by the centre will move into its new laboratory building.

But immediately after the Spanish elections in March, and just before the newly elected socialist government took power, the health ministry terminated Moncada's consultancy contract. According to sources close to negotiations, officials at the ministry decided that its terms were too generous.

The ministry offered him new terms, but Moncada turned them down and said he would quit the CNIC.

“The rigid Spanish bureaucracy, the excess of authority and, lately, the political defamation have made me take this decision,” he wrote in an e-mail to CNIC staff. By defamation, Moncada is believed to mean information leaked to Spanish newspapers about alleged irregularities with business expenses that he claimed while consulting for the centre in 1999. The source of the leak is not known.

Moncada says the salary he has been offered by the ministry is a quarter of what he gets in Britain. “If the government is serious about calling high-profile scientists to Spain it must offer competitive conditions, as Real Madrid did for David Beckham,” he says. Beckham is a footballer who left Manchester United for Real Madrid in 2003.

Senior researchers at the CNIC fear that Moncada's departure will spell trouble for the laboratory, which is expected to host up to 15 internationally recognized groups, including more than 300 scientists, by 2007.

“The huge respect he enjoys in the community was key to attracting some of the most talented young researchers in the field,” says Santiago Lamas, a group leader at the CNIC who studies diseases of blood-vessel walls, such as arteriosclerosis.

“It's an immense loss,” says Juan Redondo, who leads a group investigating gene expression in blood-vessel walls. “The inspiration and motivation he has given us are not going to be easy to replace.”

Redondo hopes that Elena Salgado, health minister in the new government, might yet persuade Moncada to change his mind. But some observers doubt that the left-leaning minister will go out of her way to up the terms of the deal offered by her predecessor.