Vigo, 18 March 2022. The Efervesciencia team on Radio Galega broadcast, last Wednesday 16 March, a special programme devoted to one of Galicia’s most relevant researchers: the chemical oceanographer and one of the pioneers of the Institute of Marine Research (IIM-CSIC), Fernando Fraga.
The programme was based on an unpublished interview with Fernando Fraga recorded in July 2019, when he was 97, by Luisa Martínez Lorenzo, from the Scientific Culture Unit of the CSIC Delegation in Galicia, and by Santiago Fraga Rivas and Francisco Rodríguez Hernández, researchers at the Vigo Oceanographic Centre of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO, CSIC). It was a production of the Galician Association for the Communication of Scientific Culture for the Council of Galician Culture and became the first addition to that Council’s “Voices of Science” sound archive. The audio edition of the programme, which you can enjoy below, is by Manuel Vicente. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound.
The protagonist
Fernando Fraga’s figure is little known and insufficiently recognised despite his being one of the great names in international chemical oceanography.
Fernando Fraga, who would have turned 100 this year, obtained his PhD in Organic Chemistry in 1949 from the University of Santiago under the supervision of Ignacio Ribas Marqués. In 1953 he joined the Vigo Coastal Laboratory of the CSIC Institute of Fisheries Research (today the CSIC Institute of Marine Research in Vigo), whose headquarters were in Barcelona. Ramón Margalef, the father of ecology in Spain, with whom he would eventually work side by side, catalysed his transformation into an oceanographic researcher. Despite suffering from seasickness on the open sea, Fraga took part in annual oceanographic campaigns until his retirement from the Institute of Marine Research. He died in 2020, only one year after the interview.