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‘A perfect scientist, a perfect mum’: researchers mourn two biologists’ deaths in Spanish train crash
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Marta Shahbazi Alonso (left), a rising star in embryology, and Tamara González Costa, who studied heart development, were killed in one of the worst train disasters in Europe in recent times.Credit: MRC LMB/Michael Thornton (L), IMBA Graphics Dept./Hannes Tkadletz (R)
Scientists are mourning the tragic deaths of two developmental biologists who were killed in a train crash in Spain on 28 October.
Marta Shahbazi Alonso, a 41-year-old stem-cell and developmental biologist at the prestigious MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK, and Tamara González Costa, a 31-year-old postdoc at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) in Vienna, died in a high-speed train collision near the town of Urda in central Spain. The crash, which killed 69 people and injured more than 100 others, is one of the worst rail disasters in Europe’s modern history.
The scientists, who were both originally from Spain, were heading to the 19th meeting of the Spanish Society for Developmental Biology (SEBD) in El Rompido. Shahbazi Alonso, a celebrated embryologist, was travelling to the conference to receive an award recognizing her contributions to the study of human embryo development.
Shahbazi Alonso and González Costa were “two brilliant scientists, with so much talent and so much road ahead, who dedicated their lives to expanding the frontiers of knowledge”, wrote Eva Ortega-Paino, secretary-general for research at Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation, on LinkedIn in Spanish. “The grief and emptiness I feel are immeasurable, and nothing comparable to the pain their families suffer today.”
Researchers describe Shahbazi Alonso as an outstanding scientist who made pioneering contributions to extending the time that human embryo models can grow in lab cultures — a notoriously difficult task.
Shahbazi Alonso joined the University of Cambridge in 2014 as a postdoc in the laboratory of leading stem-cell and developmental biologist Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz. “One of the things that I will never forget, and will always stay with me, is her enthusiasm,” says Żernicka-Goetz, who also runs a lab at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “She loved science for the sake of science.”
In 2016, Shahbazi Alonso, working in Żernicka-Goetz’s team, developed1 a method to grow human embryos in the lab up to 14 days post-fertilization, up from seven days after fertilization in previous efforts. The work allowed scientists to study this crucial stage of human development in unprecedented detail, and provided an alternative to mouse models.
“For the very first time, we can identify features of human embryo life at the time when these many pregnancies fail, and be able to understand what has to happen … for the embryo to survive,” says Żernicka-Goetz.