8 - Science and society in twentieth-century Latin America

Summary

Introduction

The development of science as an organized activity in Latin America has rarely been smooth or lineal. Rather it has been replete with false starts, with periods of consolidation followed by periods of fragmentation and reverse, often for political reasons. Moreover, the considerable national variation both in the organization of science and the level of achievement of different disciplines makes any homogeneous synthesis problematical at best. This chapter treats the history of selected scientific disciplines — biology, biomedicine, psychoanalysis, physical and exact sciences, and geology — in Latin America in the twentieth century. Because of substantial gaps in the secondary literature coverage must necessarily be incomplete. The chapter focusses on the formative years of these sciences, primarily before the Second World War but with some attention of developments during the two decades after the war. Science in the second half of the twentieth century is then treated in a more general sociological mode, reflecting the bias of the secondary literature, which is supplemented by materials from the author's own collection of internal documentation of scientific institutions. Here we will follow the institutionalization of science, the emergence of a scientific ethos and changing relationships between scientists, government and society. If this leaves us with an imperfect view, we are content at least to advance some working hypotheses and provide an armature for future research.

An important chronological break came in 1939 when Spanish refugee scientists, joining other specific, mainly Jewish, refugees from Nazism, began acting as catalysts of an institutional transformation whose first phase was completed in the 1950s when substantial numbers of young scientists trained mainly in the United States began to make their presence felt.