Bioinformatician Raúl Rabadán has resigned from being the director of the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO), as reported by eldiario.es and confirmed by this newspaper from sources close to the center.
Rabadán has submitted his irrevocable resignation as the new scientific head of the organization, the largest of its kind in Spain, for personal reasons, according to the same sources. The researcher, who was going to leave his position at Columbia University in the United States to take the helm of the CNIO, has resigned because he did not want to face the center’s management due to the crisis it has been immersed in for almost two years.
Sources close to the center indicate that Rabadán was terrified at the possibility of leading the center, where a possible corruption scheme has been uncovered that may be the most serious in Spanish science, and which is currently being investigated by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office.
Rabadán, 52, was announced last year by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities as a star signing who was supposed to give a new direction to the research center. The scientist had developed a strategic plan together with former manager José Manuel Bernabé. But before putting it into practice, the scientist decided to leave, plunging the center into a new crisis that seems endless.
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Bernabé was dismissed as manager following an inconclusive harassment complaint by a former employee of the center. Bernabé was responsible for analyzing the center’s accounts and reporting an alleged corrupt scheme to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office that could have defrauded up to 30 million euros and whose ringleader would be former manager Juan Arroyo, as Bernabé himself revealed to EL PAÍS. After the complaint, made by a person close to Arroyo, the Ministry could not support him and was forced to dismiss him.
The CNIO had managed to hire a new manager, Cristina Navarro Enterría, who is initially still in the position.