Debates on the History of Science in Brazil

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Translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Holloway. — eds. This is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented by Gilberto Hochman in the session ...
From the Beginnings: Debates on the History of Science in Brazil Simone Petraglia Kropf and Gilberto Hochman

Nancy Stepan’s book Beginnings of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo Cruz, Medical

Research and Policy, 1890 – 1920, published in 1976, has influenced debates on science and the history of science in Brazil.1 Discussions prompted by Stepan’s book have been directly linked to the emergence since the early 1980s of a new historiography of science in this country as a professionalized and institutionalized scholarly field. This process has been associated in turn with a broader policy debate in Brazil and Spanish America on the particular features of science and the history of science in the so-­called developing countries. Some of the questions posed in Beginnings of Brazilian Science are still richly relevant to academic and political consideration of the complex and specific historical and social process of institutionalization of science. Here we will focus on the main areas of historiographic debate, basing our discussion on the more representative works and authors, especially from the 1980s and 1990s.

Translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Holloway.  — eds. This is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented by Gilberto Hochman in the session on “Nature, Science and the State in Latin America: Reflections on the Work of Nancy Stepan,” at the 27th International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Montreal, Canada, 5 – 8 September 2007. Research for this article was funded by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) and by the Strategic Research Program (PAPES) of Fundação Oswaldo Cruz. We would like to thank the two anonymous referees and Dominichi Miranda de Sá for their criticisms and suggestions and the HAHR editors for the support of the translation of the article.  — aus. 1. The book was published in the same year in Portuguese, in an edition that unfortunately omitted the notes and bibliography of the original: Nancy Stepan, Gênese e evolução da ciência brasileira: Oswaldo Cruz e a política de investigação científica e médica (Rio de Janeiro: Artenova / Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, 1976). In this article we cite the English edition of 1981: Nancy Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo Cruz, Medical Research and Policy, 1890 – 1920 (New York: Science History Publications, 1981). Hispanic American Historical Review 91:3 doi 10.1215/00182168-1300128 Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press

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The History of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute as a Model for Science and Technology Policy

Stepan analyzed the early decades of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz (IOC), founded in 1900 at Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro, which was the original nucleus of what would become the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz).2 She saw it as an emblematic example of the circumstances that made possible in Brazil the implantation of science as an institutionalized activity, publicly recognized and capable of surviving the difficulties typical of a “developing” or “peripheral” country, and of “late” and “dependent” industrialization. These were categories that shaped the wider debates in Latin America during the 1970s surrounding dependency theory, and Beginnings of Brazilian Science (hereafter cited as Beginnings) was influenced by those debates. The time of the writing and publication of Beginnings was an important milestone in the political discussions of these issues. At that moment, as the government of General Ernesto Geisel (1974 – 79) took the first steps toward the “easing” (distensão) of the dictatorship imposed in 1964, it was also organizing a national policy for scientific and technological development, which was understood to be crucial for the acceleration of Brazilian industrial development.3 Among the important and innovative characteristics of that era of state planning was the role given to scientists in formulating and implementing policies and funding for this field, in line with the new models and challenges stemming from the professionalization of international science in the postwar period. The reflections of Derek de Solla Price on the changes that accompanied the emergence of “big science” after World War II were among Stepan’s points of theoretical reference, providing orientation for the questions she raised regarding the possibility of following these new tendencies in countries such as Brazil. 2. The Instituto Soroterápico Federal or Instituto de Manguinhos (called Instituto Oswaldo Cruz beginning in 1908) was created in 1900 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital city at the time, to produce the serums and vaccines to counter an epidemic of bubonic plague. Under the direction of the young bacteriologist Oswaldo Cruz (1872 – 1917), who had been trained at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and had distinguished himself in combating yellow fever in Rio de Janeiro between 1903 and 1909, the institute expanded its activities and became a renowned center for the production of immunobiological materials, research, and teaching in the field of bacteriology and tropical medicine. In 1970, Fiocruz was created, combining the IOC and other institutes. See Jaime L. Benchimol, ed., Manguinhos, do sonho à vida: A ciência na Belle Époque (Rio de Janeiro: Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, 1990); Jaime Larry Benchimol and Luiz Antonio Teixeira, Cobras, lagartos & outros bichos: Uma história comparada dos institutos Oswaldo Cruz e Butantan (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 1993). 3. On the military government in Brazil, see Boris Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press: 1999).

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Fiocruz was part of this process in the same period. In the introduction to the Brazilian edition of Beginnings, Vinicius da Fonseca, the president of Fiocruz at the time and an economist with experience in the federal Secretariat of Planning, made use of Stepan’s thesis to support his own administration, which he saw as intended to promote the “scientific rehabilitation” of Manguinhos after several decades of what he considered to be “lamentable decadence.”4 Fonseca summarized the scientific project of Oswaldo Cruz that he wished to recover as follows: “This disposition for applied science allowed him, at the same time, to create conditions for establishing a center for basic research, which achieved international recognition.”5 Aside from the significance that Fonseca and other administrators of national science and technology policy gave to the issues and interpretations posed by Beginnings, their relevance for the era of the book’s publication stemmed from the sociological perspective through which the author studied the earlier historical period of an institution that had become a key reference within Brazilian science. Stepan uses the case of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz to lay out guidelines for the policy makers and scientists of the 1970s, who faced challenges similar to those she saw as underlying the Manguinhos project at the beginning of the twentieth century. A New History of the Sciences in Latin America

In 1979 – 80, in an important collection of essays providing an overview of the history of the sciences in Brazil, Maria Amélia Mascarenhas Dantes analyzed the main scientific institutions that preceded the creation of Brazilian universities.6 That essay called into question a thesis common at the time, present 4. Beginning in the 1950s, various IOC scientists argued that the institute had lost the prestige that it had achieved under Oswaldo Cruz and Carlos Chagas. The dictatorship’s suspension in the late 1960s of several scientists’ political rights further aggravated a situation described by many as one of “decadence.” 5. Vinicius da Fonseca, “Apresentação,” in Stepan, Gênese e evolução da ciência brasileira, 3 – 4. 6. This collection of essays was edited with the support of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), which indicates that a group of policy makers were interested in “lessons from history” to push science and technology development. Maria Amélia Mascarenhas Dantes, “Institutos de pesquisa científica no Brasil,” in História das ciências no Brasil, ed. Mário Guimarães Ferri and Shozo Motoyama (São Paulo: EPU / EDUSP, CNPq, 1979/80), vol. 2, 343 – 80. After an undergraduate degree in physics, Dantes earned a doctorate in Social History at the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1973. Her work was decisive for the institutionalization of the history of science in the postgraduate program of the department of history at USP, where many researchers in this

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especially in the work of Fernando de Azevedo, according to which the effective establishment of science in Brazil began with the organization of universities in the 1930s, particularly with the creation of the University of São Paulo in 1934.7 Dantes sought to show that long before the emergence of universities, taken as the location par excellence of institutionalized science, Brazilian scientific activity had flourished since the beginning of the nineteenth ­century in other settings, including museums, botanical gardens, and institutes dedicated to biological and agronomical research. In contrast to an earlier tradition of hagiographic descriptive memoirs written by the scientists themselves, Dantes made extensive use of original primary sources and placed the scientific institutions in their historical and social contexts, thus opening new analytical perspectives based on the methods of social history. Her essay is considered a turning point in the historiography on the institutionalization of the sciences in Brazil and in the renovation of the field of the history of science in that country.8 Dantes’s essay cited Stepan’s Beginnings in reference to the history of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. Both authors affirmed that, before the universities, the research institutes were spaces where the “modern concept of experimental research” was introduced in Brazil.9 Regarding the bacteriological institutes that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in the context of fighting epidemic diseases, Dantes pointed to the same issues addressed by Stepan concerning the route by which the IOC surpassed the limited purposes for which it had been created (the fight against bubonic plague) and became a “high level research center, in which several generations of biologists were trained.”10 For both authors, this process was made possible by the personal efforts of Oswaldo Cruz, by the political visibility achieved in the yellow fever campaign, by the focus on the training of new researchers, and by scientific expeditions to several parts of the country that broadened scientists’ perspectives and their research themes. Furthermore, by placing her analysis in the context of the formulation and implementation of a national science and technology policy in the 1970s, Dantes also focused on the particular features of science in a developing country. field have been trained under her supervision. These researchers would play an important role in creating new spaces for the history of science in other institutions. 7. Fernando de Azevedo, As ciências no Brasil, 2 vols. (São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1955). 8. See for example Silvia Fernanda de Mendonça Figueirôa, “Mundialização da ciência e respostas locais: Sobre a institucionalização das ciências naturais no Brasil,” Asclepio 50, no. 2 (1998): 110. 9. Dantes, “Institutos de pesquisa científica no Brasil,” 343. 10. Ibid., 351.

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In the same volume in which Dantes’s essay appeared, an article on the history of science in Brazil celebrated the process of “the institutionalization of the discipline” and the search for research questions “linked to Brazilian reality and its peculiarities.”11 As indicators of that tendency, the authors cited the first doctoral theses at the Universidade de São Paulo in history of science, including those of Shozo Motoyama (1971) and Dantes (1973). Along with other works, they also cited Beginnings. “Despite having been written by a foreign historian,” the authors affirmed, Stepan’s book was an example of discussions of “the creation of local scientific capacity.”12 Twenty years after this 1979 – 80 collection of essays, in taking stock of the historiographic trend that made the study of scientific institutions the preferred route to reflect on the social dimensions of science and its contextual nature, Dantes explicitly affirmed the importance of Beginnings as “a milestone of the institutional history of the sciences in Brazil.”13 The approach sketched by Dantes in 1980, reinforced by those who saw in it the beginnings of a new historiography, meshed at the time with a more general movement for the theoretical and methodological renovation of the history of science in Latin America. This trend was expressed institutionally by the creation of the Sociedad Latinoamericana de Historia de las Ciencias y la Tecnología (SLAHCT, Latin American Society for the History of Sciences and Technology) in 1982, and the establishment of the Sociedade Brasileira de História da Ciência in the following year. According to Silvia Figueirôa, a member of the second generation consolidating this historiographic renewal in the 1990s, several fundamental principles brought together this regional “cross­fertilization.”14 11. J. Carlos V. Garcia, J. Carlos de Oliveira, and Shozo Motoyama, “O desenvolvimento da história da ciência no Brasil,” in História das ciências no Brasil, ed. Mário Guimarães Ferri and Shozo Motoyama (São Paulo: EPU / EDUSP, CNPq, 1979/80), vol. 2, 406 – 7. 12. Ibid., 408. In 1980 José Murilo de Carvalho published a book on the Escola de Minas de Ouro Preto, a center of engineering and geology education established in 1876, which like the IOC remains active until the present day. Carvalho also cites Stepan’s Beginnings of Brazilian Science as an important reference for historical studies on the institutionalization of science in Brazil. This book was also published with the support of a science and technology federal funding agency. José Murilo de Carvalho, A Escola de Minas de Ouro Preto: O peso da glória (Rio de Janeiro: Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1978). 13. Maria Amélia M. Dantes, “Introdução: Uma história institucional das ciências no Brasil,” in Espaços da ciência no Brasil (1800 – 1930), ed. Maria Amélia M. Dantes (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2001), 17. 14. Figueirôa, “Mundialização da ciência e respostas locais,” 110.

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The first point was a focus on the contextual nature of science, or the study of “the history of concrete scientific practices, which found a place to develop in local scientific institutions.”15 Associated with this approach, and giving it a clearly political and nationalistic dimension, was the effort to demonstrate that vigorous scientific research did take place in “peripheral” locations that traditionally had been seen as inappropriate or even incompatible with the flourishing of science. As summarized by the first director of SLAHCT, the Mexican Juan José Saldaña, “to think about our science” became the watchword of those who sought to analyze the specificities and particular contexts of scientific activity in Latin America.16 One of the principal targets of this critique was the work of Fernando de Azevedo, according to which the Catholic Iberian tradition imposed on the colonies an obscurantist cultural policy, creating strong obstacles to scientific enterprise. For Azevedo, science in Brazil was marked by backwardness and was only effectively institutionalized with the establishment of universities. Saldaña, like Dantes, praised Stepan’s efforts to bring to light concrete examples of the institutionalization of the sciences in Latin America and to understand the specific mechanisms that led to the production of “scientific excellence in the periphery,” to use the title of the work by the Peruvian historian Marcos Cueto, which well synthesizes this focus in Latin American historiography.17 Stepan made that orientation explicit in the introduction to Beginnings: “We still know

15. Ibid. Methodological advances and the constitution of the history of science as a specific field within history in Brazil formed part of a larger international tendency toward the renovation and renewal of the historiography of science. Starting in the 1970s, especially under the influence of the so-­called Strong Program of the sociology of scientific knowledge, new approaches were proposed for the social study of science, which should be seen as a socio-­cognitive activity produced by concrete collectivities under specific historical circumstances. See Steven Shapin, “History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions,” History of Science 20 (1982): 157 – 211. 16. Juan José Saldaña, “Ciência e identidade cultural: História da ciência na América Latina,” in Um olhar sobre o passado: História das ciências na América Latina, ed. Silvia Figueirôa (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp / São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial, 2001), 18 – 19. One of the founding works of this new historiography of the sciences in Latin America is the collection edited by Juan José Saldaña, El perfil de la ciencia en América: XI Congreso Interamericano de Filosofía (Mexico City: Sociedad Latinoamericana de Historia de las Ciencias y la Tecnología, 1986). The journal Quipu, edited by Saldaña, was a main vehicle for scholarly production in this new historiographical vein. 17. Saldaña, “Ciência e identidade cultural,” 21. Marcos Cueto, Excelencia científica en la periferia: Actividades científicas y investigación biomédica en el Perú, 1890 – 1950 (Lima: Grade­Concytec, 1989).

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little about which factors are essential for the growth of science in countries that historically did not participate in the scientific or industrial revolutions.”18 Saldaña and other Spanish American and Brazilian historians emphasized the need for a methodological renovation in an effort to overcome what he called “historiographical mimesis,” that is, the tendency to adopt analytical models which, with their point of reference in the “core” countries, failed to consider conditions specific to Latin American science.19 In addition to challenging Azevedo, who took a Weberian approach with regard to the socio­ cultural conditions that made possible the success of science in countries like the United States, this criticism was directed especially against the model proposed by George Basalla in 1967 on the diffusion and reception of scientific ideas in different regions and countries.20 As a corollary to the Eurocentric point of view identified in his model, Basalla was severely challenged for suggesting that peripheral countries were merely receivers and repeaters of exogenous theories and practices. The Latin American scholars called for a new approach that emphasizes the processes of mediation and reinterpretation between the original theoretical systems and the particular contexts that absorbed and re-created those ideas, in a bidirectional movement that involves negotiations and accommodations in center-­periphery relations.21 In the specific case of Bra18. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 3. 19. Some representative works focusing on this issue are Lewis Pyenson, “In partibus infidelium: Imperialist Rivalries and Exact Sciences in Early Twentieth-­Century Argentina,” Quipu 1 (1984): 253 – 303; Antonio Lafuente and José Sala Catalá, “Ciencia colonial y roles profesionales en la América española del siglo XVIII,” Quipu 6 (1989): 387 – 403; Luis Carlos Arboleda, “Acerca del problema de la difusión científica en la periferia: El caso de la física newtoniana en la Nueva Granada,” Quipu 4 (1987): 7 – 30. 20. George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156 (1967): 611 – 22. 21. The idea proposed by Xavier Polanco of “world-­science [science-­monde],” which sees a system of spaces connected by networks, the borders and hierarchies of which are contingent and changeable, has been seen by many as a good alternative to the fixed linearity of the diffusionist model, and a way to think about the mechanisms for universalizing European science while allowing for the construction of local scientific traditions outside of those centers: Xavier Polanco, “Une science-­monde: La mondialization de la science européenne et la création de traditions scientifiques locales,” in Naissance et développement de la science-­monde: Production et reproduction des communautés scientifiques en Europe et Amérique latine, ed. Xavier Polanco (Paris: Éditions La découverte / Conseil de L’Europe / UNESCO, 1990). Roy MacLeod’s concept of the “moving-­metropolis,” an effort to reflect on the complexities of scientific exchange in imperial settings, was equally well received by Latin American historians as an alternative to Basalla’s model. Roy MacLeod, “On Visiting the Moving Metropolis: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,” Historical Records of Australian Science 5 (1982): 1 – 14.

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zilian historiography, several authors, by analyzing scientific experiences in the nineteenth century, have shown how Brazilian scientists used the theoretical tools of European science, not with a time lag or in a passive way, but selectively and creatively to develop original solutions to understand and deal with problems specific to Brazil.22 Dantes recognizes that the study by Basalla, despite being much criticized, had the positive effect of stimulating “studies of the mechanisms of scientific diffusion and the establishment of scientific activities in the various national contexts.”23 An important result of this movement was to emphasize the theme of national science and the relationship between nationalism and science, which has become an important aspect of the larger discussion of the specificity of science in different historical contexts. In this regard, the intense debate surrounding the quincentennial of the discovery of America is worth noting. As José M. López Piñero has pointed out, that event gave rise to important reflections on the idea of colonization and, consequently, on the delineation of identities and the flow of ideas, including scientific ideas, between the metropoles and colonies.24 The theme of the globalization of science and the shaping of a national science is central to the work of Nancy Stepan. She dealt with it in her historical analysis of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, which according to her was constituted as a national school of science precisely because in the field of tropical medicine it established a fundamental balance between Brazilian political circumstances 22. See for example the essays in the collection edited by Dantes, Espaços da ciência no Brasil (1800 – 1930). In the field of the history of medicine, these studies stand out: Luiz Otávio Ferreira, “O nascimento de uma instituição científica: Os periódicos médicos brasileiros da primeira metade do século XIX” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 1996); Luiz Otávio Ferreira, “Os periódicos médicos e a invenção de uma agenda sanitária para o Brasil (1827 – 1843),” História, Ciências, Saúde  –  Manguinhos 6, no. 2 (1999): 331 – 51; Julyan Peard, Race, Place and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-­Century Brazilian Medicine (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1999); Flavio Edler, “A constituição da medicina tropical no Brasil oitocentista: Da climatologia à parasitologia médica” (PhD diss., Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 1999); Jaime Larry Benchimol, Dos micróbios aos mosquitos: Febre amarela e a revolução pasteuriana no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz / Editora UFRJ, 1999). 23. Dantes, “Introdução: Uma história institucional das ciência no Brasil,” 16. 24. José M. López Piñero, “La tradición de la historiografia de la ciencia y su coyuntura actual: Los condicionantes de um congreso,” in Mundialización de la ciencia y la cultura nacional: Actas del Congreso Internacional Ciencia, Descubrimiento y Mundo Colonial, ed. Antonio Lafuente, Alberto Elena, and Maria Luiza Ortega (Madrid: Editorial Doce Calles, 1993), 23 – 52.

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and problems, on the one hand, and the horizons of international science, on the other. Furthermore, Stepan’s work brought the theme to the fore because of its political importance for state planning in the area of science and technology in the 1970s. Stepan’s use of Basalla’s diffusionist model was, and continues to be, one of the main targets of the criticisms directed toward Beginnings of Brazilian Science.25 Despite the importance it assumes in her analysis, it is interesting to note that Stepan herself pointed to the model’s limitations in not taking into consideration the particular conditions of the developing world, such as the effect that structural dependency and late industrialization in the Latin American countries might have on the possibility of establishing autonomy in the fields of science and technology.26 Dantes commented on Stepan’s focus on the specific social conditions of the institutionalization of scientific activity in Brazil, noting its “proximity to studies from the 1970s of the social history of science.”27 Was It Really the Beginning? Science before and after 1900

In addition to critiques of her adoption of the diffusionist model, Stepan’s book was strongly disputed by those who thought that, beginning with the title, it would reinforce the traditional interpretation that the period preceding the universities, or at least the institutes of biomedical research such as the IOC, had been a “prehistory” of science in Brazil, characterized either by the absence of science, or at most by initiatives that were infrequent, precarious, and carried out mostly by foreigners and without continuity over time. In this regard, Dantes’s essay is seen as marking a changing perspective. In addition to her discussion of the centers of biological science of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Dantes discussed institutions dating from as far back as the early nineteenth century. During the 1990s several doctoral dissertations emerged from this new history of science. The proliferation of research topics and a strong emphasis on empirical research based on the standards of academic history gave increased prominence to this historiographic trend dedicated to “demonstrating the existence of scientific activity in Brazil since colonial times.”28 Studies based pri-

25. See for example Figueirôa, “Mundialização da ciência e respostas locais,” 109. 26. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 15. 27. Dantes, “Introdução: Uma história institucional das ciências no Brasil,” 19. 28. Silvia Fernanda de Mendonça Figueirôa, As ciências geológicas no Brasil: Uma história social e institucional, 1875 – 1934 (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1997), 16.

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marily on nineteenth-­century institutions such as museums, botanical gardens, official commissions, scientific societies, periodical publications, and the like brought into question some of the ideas accepted up to that time. One example is the idea that the Portuguese state and mentality had been obstacles to the development of science. Taking as an important reference the work of Maria Odila da Silva Dias on the pragmatism of the Luso-­Brazilian enlightenment, scholars sought to show, as Figueirôa has argued, “how, in the transition from the old colonial system, the modernizing socio-­economic reforms carried out by Portugal, based on enlightenment ideas, adopted a policy of state-­sponsored development, and the promotion of natural sciences became an explicit concern of the Portuguese government.”29 The idea that science was absent or precarious before the beginning of the twentieth century, which some scholars questioned in Stepan’s book, was also attributed to another often-­cited work by Simon Schwartzman, published not long after Beginnings.30 Both authors, writing during an important moment in the formulation and implementation of a Brazilian science and technology policy, dealt with the same list of themes: How to plan science in a developing country? How to guarantee the institutionalization of a “national” science as a basis for social and economic development? How to overcome the obstacles or resistance stemming from the dependent nature of economic development in Brazil? How to prevent expectations that science should have social utility, especially in a country with few resources for scientific activity, from hindering 29. Maria Odila da Silva Dias, “Aspectos da ilustração no Brasil,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 278 (1968): 105 – 70. Quote, Figueirôa, “Mundialização da ciência e respostas locais,” 112. In addition to the work of Silvia Figueirôa on the geological sciences in Brazil, see also Maria Amélia M. Dantes, “Fases da implantação da ciência no Brasil,” Quipu 5, no. 22 (1988): 265 – 75; Heloisa Maria Bertol Domingues, “Ciência: Um caso de política. As relações entre as ciências naturais e a agricultura no Brasil-­Império” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 1995); Heloisa Maria Bertol Domingues, “As ciências naturais e contrução da nação brasileira,” Revista de História (USP) 135, no. 2 (1996): 41 – 59; Maria Rachel Fróes da Fonseca, “ ‘A única ciência é a Pátria’: O discurso científico na construção do Brasil e do México (1770 – 1815)” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 1996); Maria Rachel Fróes da Fonseca, “La construcción de la patria por el discurso científico: México y Brasil (1770 – 1830),” Secuencia, Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales 45 (Sep. – Dec. 1999): 5 – 26; Maria Margareth Lopes, O Brasil descobre a pesquisa científica: Os museus e as ciências naturais no século XIX (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1997). 30. Simon Schwartzman, Formação da comunidade científica no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional / Rio de Janeiro: FINEP, 1979). A revised edition was published in English in 1991: A Space for Science: The Development of the Scientific Community in Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1991).

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the survival and development of science as a producer of knowledge beyond the applied sphere? How to ensure the appropriate balance between basic or pure science, and applied science or technology? Both Stepan and Schwartzman were challenged by some practitioners of the new historiography of the sciences for the periodization that placed the beginnings of institutionalized science in Brazil in the first years of the twentieth century (with Schwartzman placing greater emphasis on the foundation of universities). According to Schwartzman, the criteria that differentiate between the “pioneers” and the “founders” of Brazilian science were the consistency of their contribution to the advancement of knowledge and ability to train students, which in turn guaranteed continuity through time of a research tradition.31 Despite advocating a broadening of the historical study of the sciences beyond the countries that have been at the center of industrial and scientific development, Schwartzman emphasized the fragility of science in the periphery with regard to original contributions and real social and economic impact, at least before it was professionalized in the universities.32 In this sense he reinforced the periodization already put forth by Stepan. Science in Brazil, for Schwartzman, at least in the earlier period, was a labor of Sisyphus, the metaphor with which he begins his book: “The successes were few, and in general, ephemeral.” Thus Schwartzman agreed with Fernando de Azevedo regarding the sociocultural obstacles to the implantation of science in Brazil, affirming that “time would show that these difficulties were greater than had been supposed, in Brazil as in almost all the countries which after World War II sought to enter the world of modern science, as the specter of stagnation and involution began to appear.”33 In the preface to Beginnings, Stepan dealt explicitly with the problem of periodization between the successive stages of the institutionalization of Brazil-

31. Schwartzman, Formação da comunidade científica no Brasil, 3 – 4. 32. In his words: “The idea is to understand science not in its most spectacular and visible aspects, but in its permanence and continuity. In this sense the history of science in the periphery necessarily becomes social history. This is because there is probably little to know and narrate in relation to the history of original ideas or of really significant impacts of science on society and economy, in contexts in which scientific activity has always had a relatively marginal importance and priority. But there is certainly much to tell about and to understand regarding efforts to establish a “normal” science, a modern university system, and a capacity to participate effectively, even if not centrally, in the contemporary frontiers of knowledge. It is the history of this effort, with its successes and failures, that needs to be told and understood.” Schwartzman, Formação da comunidade científica no Brasil, 7 – 8. 33. Ibid., 1, 9.

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ian science, explaining how she came to adopt the term “beginnings” to situate the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz as a milestone in that process. Pointing out that her interest in the case of the Manguinhos Institute came from her broader scholarly interest in studying the founding and maintenance of scientific institutions, she made this clear: “Concerning the title of the book, it is obvious from my long discussion of the history of the sciences in Brazil before 1900 that there was much science in Brazil before Oswaldo Cruz and the institute he created. However, my emphasis is on research science as an organized, institutional endeavor, and in this respect the Oswaldo Cruz Institute represents the beginnings of Brazilian science.”34 Through the rest of the book, going back to science before 1900 in order to then analyze the first two decades of Manguinhos in more detail, Stepan laid out the basic criteria by which she characterized the “success” of the IOC as the “beginnings” of science in Brazil. It is important to keep in mind that, despite the historical purpose of the study, her arguments are sociological in nature, guided by the questions posed by Joseph Ben-­David: What institutional conditions ensure the organization of science as a social subsystem which, while it is recognized and legitimized by its interdependence with society as a whole, also has the autonomy to function according to the particular mechanisms and logics of science, recognized and guaranteed in such a way that applied social needs do not hinder the continuity of science as a knowledge-­producing activity? In other words, what are the institutional conditions for the scientist to be recognized in his social role?35 The reply we find in Beginnings is that, under the leadership of Oswaldo Cruz from 1900 to 1917 and Carlos Chagas from 1917 to 1934, the IOC gradually built up its legitimacy as a space for national science with international prestige, that is, as a research institute closely oriented toward Brazilian public health problems (such as tropical diseases) in such a way that these issues would be of interest to medical scientists outside the country. In Stepan’s words, “A concentration on Brazilian problems did not rule out the possibility of making discoveries that shed light on disease mechanisms in general, or on similar diseases in other countries.” Beyond the pragmatic interests of the social sectors that supported it, the IOC became a center of experimental medicine capable of producing innovations, in tune with the movement to broaden the frontiers of knowledge. The exemplary case in this process was the study of American try34. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, unpaginated preface. 35. Joseph Ben-­David, The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1971).

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panosomiasis, or Chagas disease, discovered by Carlos Chagas in 1909, which became one of the great showcases and bases of support for the institutional project of Manguinhos and established a tradition of research in Brazil lasting up to the present.36 According to Stepan, the possibility of an institutionalized science of the type exemplified by the IOC, that is, the ability of an institution to survive not only through time but in the sense of institutional reproduction, depends fundamentally on its ability to go beyond the applied dimension, even though that might have been the grounds for its original creation. In her words, it had to evolve “from a semi-­autonomous organization of applied science into a recognized institution of basic and applied science.”37 This was the case with the IOC, which was created as a result of an epidemic crisis and then broadened its social, cognitive, and administrative scope, thanks to the success of Oswaldo Cruz in the campaign against yellow fever in the nation’s capital.38 Stepan argues that this institution-­building process was based on three pillars that constituted the model followed by the Pasteur Institute in Paris and adopted in Manguinhos: the ability to recruit and train research scientists; the establishment of a client relationship with the government and other agencies that could be expected to use the scientific knowledge produced by the institute; and “the development of a research program that would be feasible, would meet Brazilian needs, and yet not be too closely tied to local concerns.”39

36. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 122. A study by Simone Kropf refers to the arguments of Stepan and other authors regarding the centrality of Chagas disease research at Manguinhos in analyzing the process of construction and validation of this disease as a question involving science, health, and debates on the nation. Simone Kropf, Doença de Chagas, doença do Brasil: Ciência, saúde e nação (1909 – 1962) (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2009). 37. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 105. 38. Several of the studies in the new historiography of science argued that, far from preventing the institutionalization of science in Brazil, the pragmatic and applied nature of scientific activity was actually the most direct route toward that end. See Figueirôa, “Mundialização da ciência e respostas locais,” 117. 39. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 105 – 6. The idea of the Pasteur Institute as the model for these three elements goes far beyond the configuration of three areas of activity (teaching, production of medical and biological materials, and research). It is a specific model of organization that creates a balance between applied science (which assures support and social legitimacy), and science intended to advance the frontiers of knowledge (thus assuring scientific legitimacy). A key notion used by Stepan to understand the interdependence between these different types of science is the idea of the “scientific system of research” proposed by Jean-­Jacques Salomon in Science and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973).

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Regarding the research program, Stepan also listed the factors she considered responsible for the successful program that distinguished Manguinhos as a renowned research center: concentration on specific areas of knowledge (in this case, protozoology), in order to strengthen the capacity to attract scientists; little separation between the basic and applied aspects of research, which was facilitated by the fact that the institution focused on microbiology, typically a problem-­oriented field; and the ability to focus on issues directly related to Brazilian problems but which, at the same time, were related to the inter­ national field of science, so that the Brazilian scientists could become “exporters of ideas.”40 This was the basis for the IOC, while establishing itself as a center of “national” science, to become an institute of tropical medicine similar to the European institutions established in that era. It is interesting to note that, in addition to the influence of the Pasteur Institute, several other factors analyzed by Stepan shaped the interpretive framework that was then fleshed out by Brazilian historians who dedicated themselves to further research on the trajectory of the IOC. These were factors such as the importance of crises of epidemic diseases for the institutionalization of medical science in Brazil, the role of the state as a source of promotion and funding in this area, the close association with themes and problems of public health, and the importance of research expeditions for the broadening of the geographic and social frontiers of the institution. This research on the IOC’s history began in earnest in 1986 with the creation of the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, a unit within Fiocruz dedicated to the history of science. Furthermore, we see in many of Stepan’s interpretive conclusions the basic underpinnings of the institution’s vision of itself, not only in the “heroic era” of its first decades but as a tradition that has been maintained in the present and serves as a guide for the future.41 Another criticism is directed at Stepan for the division she makes between science before 1900 and the success of the IOC as a model of a new institutional 40. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 122. Also exemplary in this regard is the case of the studies of American trypanosomiasis, widely recognized as one of the endemic scourges of the nation, and at the same time a research subject capable of resulting in new knowledge in the field of tropical medicine. 41. Regarding Stepan’s pioneering work in the historiography of the IOC, it is important to mention the great number of primary sources she used at a time when the archives of the institution had not yet been systematically organized. Among the main authors who have done research on the institutional history of Manguinhos, the following stand out: Benchimol, Manguinhos, do sonho à vida; Benchimol and Teixeira, Cobras, lagartos & outros bichos; Nara Britto, Oswaldo Cruz: A construção de um mito na ciência brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 1995).

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pattern for Brazilian science. It stems from the reaction of the new historiography of the sciences in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, against a tradition based on the narrative of great achievements or great figures of science. That tradition was generally celebratory, hagiographic, and merely descriptive, and rejection of it was due to the professionalization of the field of history of science itself and to the increasing importance of theoretical and methodological tools specific to the field of social history. It was also part of a project to recover the scientific experience on the periphery which, because of its marginal position in relation to the center, had not been included in the great narratives of “universal” science. As Lewis Pyenson affirmed, researchers located in the first-­rank universities “forget . . . that the history of science in the United States is strewn with the cadavers of colleges, observatories, atheneums, and academies of various types, now extinct. . . . It is time to construct a clear and complete description of modern science in Latin America. . . . The results of such a study would reveal thousands of individuals flourishing in centers of teaching and research.”42 Figueirôa cites this passage in order to justify investment in the study of scientific institutions that have not been crowned with the same visibility and achievements as the great research institutes or universities: “The methodologies usually employed by the historiography of the sciences, carried out in the so-­called ‘centers,’ focus attention on the ‘great theories’ and ‘great figures,’ or on ‘institutional successes.’ Thus they have produced analytical categories for a ‘history of the winners,’ leaving aside the day-­to-­day history of the sciences which in reality makes up most of the process.”43 The central question posed by Stepan is, in our view, much closer to the program of this new historiography. By seeking to analyze the conditions for “scientific excellence on the periphery,” Stepan took up the category of “success” in its sociological sense, as comprising certain conditions that lead to recognition, visibility, and institutional replicability. From this perspective, the same model that explains the survivors permits one to understand the “cadavers.” According to Stepan, there are several criteria for measuring success: the creation of stable and productive institutions of fundamental and applied sciences; the ability to survive over time and to diversify its staff and range of activities; the continued ability to recruit and train scientists; the ability to increase support for science; the ability to influence other institutions of science within the country; the ability to choose research topics related to local problems and needs (such as tropi42. Cited in Figueirôa, As ciências geológicas no Brasil, 17. 43. Ibid.

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cal diseases), and to use those themes to connect to the international scientific agenda and thus contribute to the general growth of knowledge.44 Finally, some authors criticize Stepan’s argument regarding the beginnings of Brazilian science as reinforcing a vast commemorative tradition defending the notion that before Oswaldo Cruz, medical science was in a “pre-­scientific” phase, that is, that the successes of experimental medicine at Manguinhos represented the beginning of a scientific, laboratory-­based medicine, cognitively superior to the clinical medicine practiced in the nineteenth century.45 It is true that some parts of Stepan’s work could support such an interpretation, which has been called into question by historians showing how the so-­called Pasteurian revolution, both internationally and in Brazil, in reality did not involve a sharp break with earlier paradigms and practices. Those scholars have pointed out that, on the contrary, it was a long and complex process involving back and forth interactions at both the conceptual and social levels.46 We must emphasize, however, that when Stepan laid out the periodization contained in the idea of “beginnings,” she was mainly referring to different processes of institutional development, rather than cognitive logics related to the theory and practice of medicine.47 By privileging microbiology as an espe44. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 8 – 9. 45. See for example the comments on Stepan by Flavio Edler, “O debate em torno da medicina experimental no Segundo Reinado,” História, Ciências, Saúde  –  Manguinhos 3, no. 2 (1996): 290. 46. Some clear examples of this perspective are the works cited above by Peard and Edler on the medical science (more specifically tropical medicine) in the nineteenth century, and by Jaime Benchimol on the generation of Pasteurians who preceded the career of Oswaldo Cruz (Dos micróbios aos mosquitos). It relies on extensive empirical work and has followed the international tendency to develop a more nuanced view of historical processes that were traditionally seen as points of rupture. These approaches have also tried to avoid anachronism and the teleology of traditional narratives, analyzing scientific activity according to the patterns of such activity in the periods in which it takes place. Despite differences among these authors, there is a common denominator in their work. They make an effort to analyze the particular circumstances and characteristics of medical science in Brazil at different points during the nineteenth century; and they try to show that certain themes and practices traditionally seen as specific to medicine after Oswaldo Cruz and other Pasteurians were widespread and influential before the emergence of so-­called experimental medicine, even if under other cognitive, social, and institutional conditions. 47. Stepan refers to a possible argument that the success of the IOC might be put in the context of a wider international movement involving changes in the medical sciences based on new theories of microbiology and tropical medicine, or “a shift away from purely clinical medicine to laboratory medicine.” While recognizing “a certain truth” in this view, in which one can detect the idea of the superiority of so-­called laboratory medicine, she immediately shifts the question to focus on her central thesis: “A major argument of this

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cially favorable path to the institutionalization of science in the model of success established by the IOC, Stepan is not proposing the supposed cognitive superiority of Pasteurian science. Rather, she is interested in highlighting the particularities of microbiology as contributing to the articulation between basic and applied science, balancing utilitarian aspects with innovations in medical knowledge. The critiques of narratives or scientific origin myths that heap praise on the “founding fathers” of microbiology and tropical medicine (such as Oswaldo Cruz) certainly brought important reflections and new paths of research. However, we should not downplay the sense of discontinuity and the importance of that sense of break, especially for the actors who carried it out and benefited from it. Such scientists were, in fact, expressions of something new, to the extent that they saw themselves and were recognized as such.48 What is important is to characterize the senses in which such novelty was established at that time, the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, a period of so many transformations, especially in the federal capital of the recently proclaimed Brazilian republic. In this way, the ruptures and discontinuities that those scientists identified with a “new” medicine must be treated as categories to be understood in their own context. It is certainly very fruitful to recover personages and experiences prior to the appearance of the Manguinhos Institute. But it is also the historian’s task to understand just what were the historical meanings and the consequences of the conviction, proclaimed by the contemporaries and followers of Oswaldo Cruz, that he (and his colleagues) inaugurated scientific medicine in Brazil. The historian Roy MacLeod, in commenting on the work of his professor and friend George Basalla, pointed out that the model Basalla proposed in 1967 has had consequences far beyond original expectations, opening a vast range of empirical research on the idea of colonial science. According to MacLeod, “the more we learn about the processes by which knowledge is diffused across cultural frontiers, the more problematic those processes become.”49 This obserstudy has been that, in a developing country, the success of a given institution of science depends upon the solving of a series of political, administrative, educational and research problems peculiar to countries with limited resources and supports for science.” Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 134. 48. On this point see Dominichi Miranda de Sá, A ciência como profissão: Médicos, bacharéis e cientistas no Brasil (1895 – 1935) (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2006). 49. Roy MacLeod, “The Spread of Western Science Revisited,” in Mundialización de la ciência y cultura nacional, ed. Antonio Lafuente, Alberto Elena, and Maria Luiza Ortega (Madrid: Editorial Doce Calles, 1993), 736.

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vation directs us to the similarly well-­worn path of the broadening and institutionalization of the history of science in Latin America, and Brazil in particular, since the 1980s. The proliferation of studies and approaches, especially the identification of new sources for research and the development of new interpretations of sources that had already been explored, has substantially broadened and made more complex some of the issues and arguments set forth by Nancy Stepan. The multiple readings of her book, including the critiques directed at it, have been fundamental in this process. Beginnings of Brazilian Science is a work to be revisited by those who seek to reflect on a theme as fundamental and complex as the institutionalization of science in specific historical contexts. At the same time, Latin Americanists who wish to reflect on this and other themes in the history of science must consult and enter in dialogue with the vast and diverse academic literature produced by Latin American scholars in this field.