Science

The European encounter with the New World begun in 1492 stimulated a rush of new information about the natural environment without parallel in human history, kindling the fire of scientific empiricism in Europe. The Spanish Empire thus became a source of scientific information diffused through the new print technology and evaluated by Europeans in the context of the received view of the natural world, highly colored by the works of classical antiquity. Thus Columbus's discovery stimulated the comparative study of Old World and New World nature. Works such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés's Historia general de las Indias (1535), itself conceptually dependent on ancient authors such as Pliny, made available data that eventually led to the overthrow of classical authority. The reflection of exploration in cartography, for example, had by the end of the sixteenth century destroyed the standard geometrized Ptolemaic view of the Earth's surface.

COLONIAL ERA

The Spanish crown, eager to learn of economically useful minerals and plants, dispatched an expedition led by Francisco Hernández in 1570–1577, mainly to investigate the flora of New Spain. Hernández was a typical Renaissance figure both steeped in ancient science and endowed with an empirical cast of mind. He sought both to describe and codify Aztec materia medica and also to test their properties in colonial hospitals. The avalanche of new medicinal and other species from the Americas overwhelmed the cramped little garden of classical natural history, ultimately creating a demand for a viable system of classification.

The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was observed, if not accepted, in the Spanish Empire. Galileo's astronomical writings were read and appreciated by Diego Rodríguez and Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora in New Spain, although the two failed to push Galileo's critique of classical cosmology to its ultimate limits. New World naturalists of Galileo's generation and later shared Europe's passion for observing comets; indeed, the Spanish crown stimulated such research by collecting observational data from various sites in its empire.

The eighteenth century saw a fully developed colonial science system characterized by militarization and centralization. Like their French cousins, the Spanish Bourbons believed that investment in science was both a way of associating the crown with a prestigious activity and a utilitarian pursuit that promised economic benefits to the entire empire. As early as the 1750s, the crown was devoting around 0.5 percent of its annual budget to scientific activities, a very large investment in science among European nations of the day. The real science budget was even larger because numerous scientific activities were hidden in the military budget. The Spanish navy accommodated officers attracted to the new Newtonian science and gave them commissions that exploited their interest in cosmology while carrying out strategically important "hydrographical" activities, such as the mapping of the coastlines of Latin America and service on numerous boundary commissions. The navy procured the best scientific instruments produced in London and Paris and made them available to colonial men of science, in contrast to the restrictive practices of the British in their American colonies. The problem with the militarization of science was that its net effect was to delay the emergence of science as a profession and to discourage the open discussion or publication of scientific results, which were frequently viewed as state secrets. Thus a concomitant of militarization was a scientific system that was highly centralized. All results were communicated to the relevant officials in Madrid rather than published directly by the scientist. This meant that the independent-minded botanist José Celestino Mutis (1732–1808), for example, incurred the wrath of his superiors in Madrid when he corresponded directly with Carl Linnaeus.

The two areas that most attracted those who wished to associate themselves with modern science were Newtonian physics and Linnaean taxonomy. In an intellectual world that had officially rejected the views of Copernicus, heliocentrism was diffused and accepted through the circulation of books popularizing Newtonian physics. In Lima, Cosme Bueno disseminated Newtonian ideas from his chair of Galenic medicine (which he used as a platform to attack outmoded medical concepts), and theses on Newtonian subjects were produced at the University of San Marcos. In Bogotá, Mutis lectured on Newton at the Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario and prepared a partial translation of the Principia, the first in Spanish. In these capitals and in Mexico City roughly the same proportion of Newtonian works circulated in relation to population as in any European center. The notion of the empire as a scientific backwater must be rejected, or at least carefully qualified.

The broad acceptance of Linnaean taxonomy permitted the numerous botanists working in colonial Latin America to participate in a vast international network of botanical information gathered by disciples dispatched to various parts of the world by Linnaeus himself or by institutions that adopted his system. Linnaeus's man in South America was to have been Pehr Loefling, whom he sent in 1751 to Madrid and in 1754 to New Granada, where he died. Mutis, who began to correspond with Linnaeus in 1764, believed he had inherited Loefling's mantle. All botanists who were subjects of the crown worked as dependents of the Madrid Botanical Garden, which had become a Linnaean stronghold in the 1770s. Because of this tight centralization, budding nationalists in New Spain, led by José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, rejected the Linnaean system while attempting to revive Aztec taxonomy, mainly for nationalistic reasons. When the Linnaeans of the Malaspina expedition arrived in New Spain in 1791, they became embroiled in a dispute over taxonomy with botanists influenced by Alzate. At this time there were so many naturalists working in New Spain in official capacities that one of them complained to the crown that botanists were tripping over each other in the jungle.

The two most characteristic forms of centralized scientific institutions in the eighteenth century were botanical expeditions and boundary commissions. The first important expedition of the century, the La Condamine expedition (1735–1745), was a geophysical enterprise, although botanists were included. Although the expedition was French-led, two Spanish military officers, Jorge Juan y Santacilia and Antonio de Ulloa, were attached to it. The purposes of the expedition were to establish a value for an arc of the meridian in equatorial South America and to corroborate Newton's prediction regarding the flattening of the Earth's poles and consequent shortening of the degree of longitude near the equator. Thus Spain entered Enlightenment science in Newtonian guise. For their efforts, Ulloa was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and Juan a member of the French Academy of Sciences, whereas in Spain their careers were wholly military.

Botany, focused on the search for economically useful plants, was something like a national craze. The crown both dispatched expeditions and undertook to gather information indirectly by surveys directed through the colonial bureaucracy. The three great botanical expeditions (among nearly forty) were to New Granada, Peru, and New Spain. Only the first, conducted in 1782–1810, was established in the colonies rather than by Madrid directly; it also became, under Mutis's direction, a full-fledged scientific institution, establishing an astronomical observatory (1803) and conducting research in zoology and mineralogy as well as botany. The Peruvian expedition (1777–1788), led by Hipólito Ruiz and José Antonio Pavón, was more narrowly botanical, its major focus being the species of quinine-producing cinchona. The expedition to New Spain (1787–1804), led by the Spaniard Martín de Sessé and the Creole José Mociño, made a systematic study of Mexican flora and established a botanical garden in Mexico City. The greatest and most productive expedition of the period was that led by the Italian Alejandro Malaspina (1789–1794). The Malaspina expedition, inspired by Captain James Cook's second voyage, collected data and natural history specimens from Uruguay up the Pacific coast of South and North America as far as Alaska, as well as from the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia. The last great expedition of the colonial period, the royal vaccination expedition (1803–1806), led by Francisco Balmis, was a public health venture designed to inoculate as many subjects of the empire as possible with the Jenner smallpox vaccine.

Europeans such as the French naturalist Georges Buffon held that the environment and biota of the New World were degenerate and inferior with respect to their European counterparts, and Enlightenment naturalists in the Americas rigorously countered such claims. In this "dispute of the New World," José Hipólito Unanue in Peru and Alzate in Mexico (and Thomas Jefferson in the United States) presented data to demonstrate the falsity of the original proposition. This polemic provided scientific input to a Creole ideology already building justifications for independence. In Bogotá, Francisco José de Caldas, in whose work resentment of Creole dependence on European science was a constant theme, asserted that America was not in need of any second discovery by foreign expeditions.

In the area of technology and technical education, two first-class institutions emerged in eighteenth-century Mexico City. One was the Colegio de Minería, where mining engineers were trained by a gifted staff using the advanced European science and technology. The mineralogy professor, Andrés del Río, who had studied with Antoine Lavoisier in Paris, discovered vanadium, while the chemist and botanist Vicente Cervantes produced the first translation of Lavoisier's Elements of Chemistry in the New World. The other institution was the mint (Casa de Moneda), which became an important center for technological, particularly mechanical, innovation. Thus, by the end of the colonial period a foundation had been laid for scientific as well as political independence, a promise that the dislocation of the wars of independence completely frustrated.

The fate of science in colonial Brazil was largely determined by the absence of universities there. There were a few individual naturalists of high quality, such as the botanist José Mariano de Conceição Vellozo, a Linnaean whose Florae fluminensis, a description of the flora of Rio de Janeiro province completed in 1790 (published in 1825), is considered the best representative of Enlightenment science in Brazil. An attempt to found a Brazilian university is associated with José Bonifácio Andrada e Silva, a native of Santos who studied chemistry and mineralogy in Paris and Freiburg in the 1790s. His conception of science was highly utilitarian, for its core was the study of the mineral wealth of the vast nation.

INDEPENDENCE PERIOD

In the former countries of the Spanish Empire, science had been integrated into a tightly centralized institutional and economic system in which scientific communication within the empire was not encouraged and all information flowed to and from Madrid. This meant that when Madrid's patronage and tutelage were removed, the infrastructure that had supported scientific achievement in Mexico, Colombia, and Peru disappeared. So did many of the practitioners of Enlightenment science—either killed in the revolutionary upheaval (as in Colombia) or co-opted by the new state bureaucracies (as in Peru). Brazilian science was spared such an upheaval but had started from a lower level. Then too, Creole elites, which before independence had seen science as a symbol of intellectual and political freedom, set their sights on the more pressing problem of maintaining and consolidating power in the new nations. If the military was the surest road to success, then parents would not encourage their children to take up scholarly careers. Medicine, military engineering, surveying, and a few other fields for which there was constant demand constituted exceptions. Science, therefore, may be pictured as having taken refuge in the most proximate fields available in these years of severe deinstitutionalization: During the first half of the nineteenth century, biology was cultivated by medical doctors; mathematics and physics by military engineers.

The fate of colonial scientific institutions is exemplified by the Royal College of Mining in Mexico City and the Astronomical Observatory of Bogotá: Both lingered on in impoverished conditions after independence. The former was officially abolished in 1833 and reorganized as a general science faculty; the latter suffered long periods of inactivity, notably between 1851 and 1858, after the death of the director, F. J. Matiz, the last survivor of Mutis's expedition. Brazil fared better than the Spanish viceroyalties during the first half of the nineteenth century owing to the foundation in 1810 of a central technical institution, the Royal Military Academy, which had a rigorous four-year course of mathematics that preceded military training.

LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY

The second half of the century was marked by the introduction of positivist philosophy and a general movement of institutionalization, particularly of applied sciences. Positivism describes the followers of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, who developed philosophies of "positive" (that is, objective) knowledge, which was supposed to replace outmoded forms of human thought, notably religion. In Europe, positivism was developed as a kind of philosophical synthesis of scientific method, based on secure knowledge and appreciation of the success of the scientific revolution. Inasmuch as Latin American science was stagnant, positivism there tended to be programmatic. Positivists founded almost all the important scientific institutions of the second half of the century: In Brazil the Polytechnic School was founded in 1874 in open imitation of the French engineering school of the same name; the following year the Mining School of Ouro Preto was established to train technicians to develop the country's ample mineral resources. Toward the end of the century the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture became a center of practical positivist programs in technology and applied sciences, including the Geological and Mineralogical Service; it even ran the old Imperial Observatory (created in 1827, active from 1845), which had an important meteorological section.

In Mexico a number of important institutions were organized under the banner of positivism, including the National Preparatory School (1868), the Mexican Society of Natural History (1868), the Geographical and Exploration Commission (established in 1877 by the Darwinian industry minister, Vicente Riva Palacio), the Geological Commission, and the National Medical Institute (both in 1888). In Uruguay, under the regime of the positivist Lorenzo Latorre, the entire educational system was controlled by positivists who overhauled the educational establishment from the primary grades through university, promoting positivist norms of science education.

Latin American science was noted for highly visible participation of foreigners, particularly Americans, in scientific enterprises, especially in geology. Thus in Brazil, the Imperial Geological Commission (1875–1877) was headed by Charles F. Hartt. His disciple Orville A. Derby was director of the Geographical and Geological Commission of the state of São Paulo from 1886 to 1906, when he resigned to head the making of the geological map of the state of Bahia. Derby was head of the Brazilian Geological and Mineralogical Service in from 1907 to 1915, and trained a generation of Brazilian geologists. In Brazil, Peru, Chile, and elsewhere, the U.S. Geological Service provided a model for professional geology from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth, particularly in the design and execution of geological maps and surveys of mineral resources.

As the practice of science revived, Latin Americans sought training abroad, with different disciplinary groups showing partiality for distinctive European traditions. Thus, Brazilian engineers preferred to study in Belgium, Mexican chemists in Germany, Argentine mathematicians in Italy, and Mexicans in the United States.

Besides positivism, a number of important European scientific ideas had powerful repercussions in Latin America. Darwinism was widely debated in all Latin American countries except for Paraguay. In general, Comtean positivists opposed Darwinism, occasionally forming tenuous alliances with Catholics to defeat evolutionary ideas, whereas Spencerians supported it. However, in those countries where Comteans were strong (Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela), later generations of Spencerians introduced Darwin's ideas once the Comteans had left the educational stage. Thus in Brazil, the Polytechnic School, which had been a Comtean stronghold, became a focus of Darwinian debate in the 1880s. In Mexico, Gabino Barreda, the Comtean founder of the Preparatory School, was anti-Darwinian, whereas the next generation of positivists, led by Porfirio Parra, was evolutionist.

In some countries Darwinism became elevated to the rank of national ideology. In Brazil, a Darwinian stronghold, Republican medical doctors elaborated a Darwinian worldview mixed with polygenism, the notion that humankind emerged from several ancestral racial lines, a doctrine designed to support racial stratification. Brazil's Museo Nacional, under the directorship of Ladislao Neto, became a node of Darwinian research. Neto employed the German evolutionary zoologist Fritz Müller as a roving naturalist. In Uruguay, even cattlemen discussed Darwinism in the 1870s and 1880s. They divided into two factions that debated whether and how to improve the herds of creole cattle (the descendants of cattle brought by the Spanish in the sixteenth century). One group, comprising the wealthier cattlemen, wanted to cross creole cows with expensive Durham bulls imported from England. The other group, citing Darwin, claimed that natural selection had already acted on the creole herd, adapting it admirably to the local pastures. Argentine governments, for nationalist reasons, supported the paleontologist Florentino Ameghino's claim that Homo sapiens had emerged in Argentina, making it the cradle of the human race.

Another European scientific idea with tremendous transcendence in late-nineteenth-century Latin America was the germ theory of Louis Pasteur. In Paris, Pasteur had founded an institute where he imparted his views of epidemiology as well as the techniques according to which preventive serum could be produced. Numerous Latin Americans studied there, including the Brazilian Oswaldo Cruz, who later founded a Pasteur-type institute at Manguinhos, near Rio de Janeiro, that developed into the premier biomedical research institute in Latin America during the first half of the twentieth century (Oswaldo Cruz Institute). There Carlos Chagas solved the riddle of American sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), now called Chagas disease, and made it one of the most studied pathologies in the history of medicine. Other Pasteur-style institutes were founded in São Paulo, Caracas, Maracaibo, and Asunción, all before 1900.

TWENTIETH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT

Around 1900, yellow fever was the most urgent medical problem. As early as 1881 a Cuban, Carlos Finlay, had identified the vector of disease, the mosquito Aedes aegypti, but his hypothesis was not confirmed until after the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the U.S. Public Health Service effectively wiped out the disease both in Cuba and in Panama. When the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) was established in 1913, it made the eradication of yellow fever a high priority, going so far as to have the Peruvian government name an RF doctor as director of public health in 1919–1922.

Almost from its inception, the RF assumed an active role in the promotion of science in Latin America. It was opposed to what it called "didactic science"—that is, university science instruction that was limited to classroom lectures and textbooks and lacked a laboratory component. The RF also favored full-time teaching or research positions rather than the part-time positions standard in all Latin American universities, which had the effect of forcing scientists to support themselves with multiple jobs. Finally, the RF, seeking to "make the peaks higher," tried to identify the best scientific minds in the region and to support those individuals. With these objectives in mind, the RF surveyed medical education in virtually all Latin American countries between 1916 and the late 1920s. Out of these reports emerged a roster of biomedical scientists that the RF supported over the next several decades, including the Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay, who won the Nobel Prize in 1947 for research on the role of the pituitary gland in the metabolism of carbohydrates. Latin America's second Nobel Prize was won in 1970 by a disciple of Houssay, Luis Leloir, for work on the biochemistry of carbohydrates. Thus the region's first two Nobel Prizes were in part the result of the RF's support for research. In Peru, another group of physiologists, led by Carlos Monge, built a successful research program that concentrated on problems related to the high altitudes of the Andean region.

Classical genetics had an early start in Argentina, where the rediscovery of Mendel's theories was recognized as early as 1908 by the biologist Angel Gallardo. At the University of La Plata, German-trained Miguel Hernández began teaching Mendelian genetics in 1915. Hernández trained Salomón Horovitz and Francisco Alberto Sáez, whose research centered on plant genetics and cytogenetics, respectively. Sáez was coauthor of a general cytology textbook that was widely adopted in the English-speaking world. Population genetics was introduced in Brazil by Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Russian-born biologist trained in the United States by Thomas Hunt Morgan. Dobzhansky had studied wild populations of the fruit fly Drosophila in temperate climates and came to Brazil to study a tropical population. In the fifteen years that Dobzhansky pursued Brazilian research (intermittently from 1943 to 1958), he trained a generation of geneticists in seminars held at the University of São Paulo (USP). This research was not only backed in large part by the RF; USP had been founded in part to meet RF specifications regarding full-time research and teaching appointments. Dobzhansky's group discovered that tropical populations of Drosophila display considerably more variation and genetic plasticity than their temperate cousins do, in response to the greater variety of ecological niches available in the tropics. The second generation of Dobzhansky's Brazilian students founded a strong group in human genetics that worked mainly with models derived from population genetics.

The third major scientific discipline in Latin America was physics. In the nineteenth century Latin America was as much as a century behind Europe in mathematics and physics. In order to raise the level of discipline quickly, the Argentine government contracted with a number of German professors to found a modern Institute of Physics at the University of La Plata in 1909. The institute's longtime director, Richard Gans, trained the first generations of Argentine physicists, including a group of relativists who welcomed Albert Einstein during his Latin American visit in 1925. In Latin America, Einstein was viewed as a symbol of modernization, or rather the will to modernize, because—it was said—a country could not hope to modernize if its mathematicians and physicists could not master the theory of relativity. Inasmuch as Maxwellian physics had been scantily diffused in Argentina (and the other countries of the region), there was no entrenched scientific resistance to Einstein anywhere, except for a small group of Comtean mathematicians in Brazil. In the three countries he visited (Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil), Einstein's trip stimulated an outpouring of books on relativity and a general public debate on the role of science in modern society. In Argentina two physicists trained at La Plata, Ramón Enrique Gaviola and Enrique Loedel, published papers on relativity in the 1920s. In Brazil Einstein's visit caused a debate in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. A younger generation led by the mathematician Manoel Amoroso Costa and the engineer Roberto Marinho, with relativity as their battle cry, won control of the Academy, ousting the positivists led by the Comtean mathematician Vicente Licínio Cardoso.

Brazil became a leader in experimental physics after the arrival, in the 1930s, of the German Jewish refugee Bernard Gross and the Italo-Russian Gleb Wataghin. Gross's group, in Rio de Janeiro, and Wataghin's, in São Paulo, performed research on cosmic rays. Gross measured the intensity of cosmic rays in an ionization chamber, and his student Joaquim Costa Ribeiro discovered the thermodielectric effect in 1944. Wataghin's group studied cosmic ray showers, and two of his disciples, Marcello Damy de Souza and Paulus Aulus Pompéia, discovered the penetrating or "hard" component of cosmic radiation. A third disciple, Mário Shenberg, collaborated with George Gamow on the neutrino theory of stellar collapse, and a fourth, Cesar Lattes was part of an international team that discovered the pi-meson (pion) at the Bolivian astrophysical laboratory at Chacaltaya in 1947.

Nuclear physics was introduced after World War II. In Brazil the American Richard Feynman collaborated with José Leite Lopes on weak particle interactions, and the São Paulo group under Damy de Souza acquired a particle accelerator and worked on elementary particles. Argentine physics had a parallel history: first came cosmic radiation studies and then atomic physics. In 1949 Juan Perón hired a German physical chemist named Ronald Richter to perform experiments on nuclear fusion. Richter proved to be a charlatan who was able to fool Perón's generals by exploding hydrogen in a voltaic arc, but even though he was exposed, his laboratory at Bariloche became the center of advanced nuclear physics research, and cyclotrons purchased to support his group were used to train a new generation of physicists.

In Mexico, MIT-trained Manuel Sandoval Vallarta (one of Feynman's professors, incidentally) introduced cosmic radiation studies, especially the effect of the Earth's magnetic field on the rays. Sandoval and some of his students also did research in theoretical physics and were especially interested in George Birkhoff's notion of gravitation in flat space-time, a relativistic model that avoided certain difficulties related to the curvilinear nature of Einstein's general theory.

By the 1940s there was sufficient scientific activity in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay, and a few other nations to stimulate scientists to organize themselves into self-consciously national scientific communities. Thus in 1948 the Brazilian Association for the Progress of Science was organized, in 1950 a similar association in Venezuela, and so forth. These societies viewed their roles as both professional and political. They wanted to stimulate a positive climate of public and governmental interest in science and pressed for the formation of national research councils, which were established in most Latin American countries between 1958 and 1979. These institutions all had similar objectives and helped channel government money into scientific projects. In spite of these efforts the scientifically advanced countries experienced severe "brain drains" from the 1950s through the 1970s. The 1966 coup led by Juan Carlos Onganía in Argentina decimated the Faculty of Exact Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, which lost 215 members. Entire research groups emigrated at the same time, mainly to Chile, Venezuela, and the United States. Mexico was one of the few Latin American countries that did not lose scientists in the 1960s because of the capacity of the National Autonomous University (UNAM) to absorb them.

The period between the late 1960s and mid-1980s witnessed a general debate over the role of science in Latin American society. Of particular concern has been the issue of whether a developing country can afford to invest money in "pure" (that is, basic) science when it is desperately in need of utilitarian, practical projects that will aid in the country's modernization and improve its standard of living. According to dependency theory, national science communities should concentrate on the specific social and economic needs of their country. Applied scientists soon discovered, however, that they were unable to pursue complex projects without the aid of basic science.

Since the time of Perón, science and scientists have repeatedly fallen victim to the whims of authoritarian repressive regimens. In Brazil, soon after the military regime came to power in 1964, threats were directed at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute. Finally, in 1970, ten researchers were fired by the government and the Institute's research program was severely compromised. In Argentina in 1978, a provincial governor attempted to outlaw the "new math," finding set theory to be subversive of Western values, at the same time that the generals in Buenos Aires were denouncing Freud and Einstein, along with Marx.

Toward the end of the century, the pace of integration of Latin American science into the international science system accelerated, with increased investment in research and development and a growing pool of national scientists. The number of articles on science and engineering published by Latin American authors rose by nearly 200 percent between 1988 and 2001. The increase was concentrated in four countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, where the output quadrupled. These countries, together with three in the next tier (Costa Rica, Colombia, and Venezuela) accounted for 95 percent of the region's scientific articles in 2001. Growth was most marked in biomedicine and physics. In the same period, the number of citations to Latin American science literature tripled.

See alsoAlzate y Ramírez, José Antonio de; Ameghino, Florentino; Astronomy; Barreda, Gabino; Cruz, Oswaldo Gonçalves; Diseases; Hernández (Fernández) de Córdoba, Francisco; Malaspina, Alejandro; Mutis, José Celestino; Positivism; Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de; Technology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Colonial Science

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Nineteenth Century

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Twentieth Century

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                                         Thomas F. Glick