Sir
Your Editorial about Venezuela seems very optimistic (Nature 450, 922; 2007). You point out that the present government created the Ministry of Science and Technology, claiming that this "distributes grant money on a competitive basis".
In fact, the ministry was set up to replace CONICIT, the national council for scientific and technological research: an autonomous institution of almost 30 years' standing that did indeed use peer review and scientific excellence as criteria for distributing grants. The present ministry, however, emphasizes political criteria when assigning grants.
Venezuela's share of scientific publications, as measured by PubMed, fell from 0.054% in 1998 (the year before Chávez became president) to 0.04% in 2006.
