Spanish biologist Marta Shahbazi Alonso is among the people reported missing after the collision between two trains in Urda, Toledo, according to her brother, physicist Carlos Shahbazi. The 41-year-old researcher was travelling from Madrid to Seville on an AVE train when it hit an Iryo train that was stopped on the same track.
Shahbazi was seated in the front carriage. Her family reported her disappearance on the day of the accident and provided DNA samples in case they were needed, but her brother said they had received no information from the authorities. “We know nothing about her,” he said, while acknowledging that the chances were low but that the family was holding on to hope.
The scientist, who was born in León and has two children, was travelling to El Rompido, Huelva, for a conference organised by the Spanish Society for Developmental Biology. She was due to receive the society’s award for scientific excellence. Another scientist travelling to the same event, Tamara González Costa, was also reported missing, according to the Spanish National Cardiovascular Research Centre.
Shahbazi leads a research group at the Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge. Her team studies the earliest stages of human development, including the period when a fertilised egg begins dividing and developing into an organism.
In 2014, she moved to Cambridge, where she led work that cultured human embryos outside the womb for 13 days—twice the previous record. The research offered scientists an opportunity to study developmental stages that had previously remained largely inaccessible.
Her team works with embryos donated to science by fertility clinics that would otherwise have been destroyed. Shahbazi had defended the international 14-day limit for embryo research, describing it as an important boundary in both scientific and philosophical terms.
She established her own group in Cambridge in 2020. Its main focus is understanding how cells in an early embryo acquire different destinies, such as becoming part of the brain, skin, lungs or heart. The laboratory has concentrated on implantation, a critical stage of pregnancy during which around 30% of human pregnancies fail.
Shahbazi also spoke publicly about combining scientific research with family life. After the birth of her first child, she described herself as a “scientist mother” and supported the possibility of being both a full-time mother and a full-time scientist.
Sources: El País Ciencia.