A Space for Science, Simon Schwartzman, 1991, chapter 1

A Space for Science - The Development of the Scientific Community in Brazil

Simon Schwartzman

The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991

1. INTRODUCTION: A SPACE FOR SCIENCE

Sisyphus

The Construction of a Scientific Community

The Quest for Science

Science, Technology, and the Professions

An Outline

Notes

Sisyphus

Cursed by the gods, Sisyphus was condemned to carry a large stone uphill, only to watch it roll back down, and start all over again. The legend of Sisyphus is a proper metaphor for the history of modern science in Brazil, where successes have been few and ephemeral but persistence and enthusiasm have always been present. During hundreds of hours of interviews, the individuals who make up this scientific community revealed themselves to be an extremely lucid and critical group, aware of their limitations but proud of their achievements and optimistic about their role. The persistence of Sisyphus stems not from a rosy view of the future but from the conviction that one is on the right path, might someday reach the boundaries of knowledge and make a meaningful contribution to society, or is at least setting the foundation for the work of future generations. When such a conviction exists failures and frustrations caused by forces and events outside one's control do not seem so important and do not shake the willingness to start again if needed, if only to reach the same end.

This is one reason why the present study on the development of modern science in Brazil generated so much interest among Brazilian scientists when it was started in the mid-1970s. In a sense, to contribute to such a study was to retrace the paths taken, to relive successful experiences, to enjoy again the feeling of creative work, to lift the stone back on one's shoulders knowing that one had the strength to carry it. Between 1976 and 1978, dozens of Brazilian scientists from many generations (graduates from 1910 through the 1920s, graduates prior to World War II, and those who began to appear during the 1950s) dedicated an average of four to six hours of their time to recounting their experiences. The interviews focused on the scientists' professional lives, on family environment, secondary and university education, initiation into the sciences, educational experience abroad, professional accomplishments, experience within institutions, personal relationships, their successes and failures.⁽¹⁾

Naturally, the interviews wandered into more general themes: the nature of scientific activity; the Brazilian scientific environment; the meaning, importance, and problems of scientific work within Brazil and in the rest of the world. These statements-taped, transcribed, and edited-constitute an extraordinary chronicle of the experience of bringing modern science to a social and cultural environment as yet unaccustomed to it.

Rich in detail, the testimonies are invaluable. They offer us a picture of the different motivations, values, attitudes, and perceptions these scientists share, a picture of what they have found encouraging and what they have found frustrating. Nothing else could provide this sort of information. Scientific knowledge is usually thought of as a collection of concepts, information, and data having an intrinsic value that does not depend on the individuals responsible for producing it. But perhaps the most important conclusion of the present study is precisely the reaffirmation that science is above all a community of well-educated individuals who enthusiastically bring the best of their intelligence and creativity to their task. The results of their work-articles, scientific data, technological applications-are nothing but the tip of an iceberg that cannot sustain itself without its hidden base, the individuals that produce it.

Oral testimonies also have limitations. Memory is selective. The interpretations each individual constructs about his or her life and experiences are inevitably influenced by such human attitudes as wariness, favoritism, timidity, or pride. These limitations can be reduced when various testimonies concerning the same facts are available and when other sources of information can be checked. To a certain extent, the coexistence of contradictory versions of the same facts does not mean that some scientists are honest while others are not; rather, within this kaleidoscope, each perception is valid from the personal and psychological perspective of the narrator.

The project was received with interest - sometimes mixed with suspicion - for another, more concrete reason. This was a study carried on with the support of a Brazilian governmental agency, and its intention - to listen to the scientists, to seek their point of view and the value of their contribution, not to exclude anyone for ideological or political reasons - was in stark contrast to the hostility and repression manifested by the military authorities against several of Brazil's best-known scientists only a few years before.

The early 1970s are known in Brazil as the years of "the miracle," the quotation marks suggesting the paradox of high economic growth and national euphoria owing to the renewed conquest of the World Soccer Cup in 1972, but also what were probably the highest levels of political repression that Brazil has ever experienced. In 1964 the military had seized power after a period of political instability and had started a thorough reorganization of the country's economic and political institutions, with the promise (to be postponed for twenty years) of a quick return to civilian rule. Recessive economic policies in the late 1960s had brought inflation down, and the modernization of the state apparatus, combined with the modernization of the domestic market and an influx of foreign capital, brought yearly growth rates of 10 percent and a sense of national confidence that led to the project of raising Brazil to the status of a world power in one or two decades. Given Brazil's population of more than 100 million,⁽²⁾ a territory of more than eight million square kilometers, and the largest industrial park in Latin America (concentrated in the São Paulo region), this ambitious project did not seem too absurd.

The dark side of the miracle was not only poverty and social inequality, but also political repression. Economic growth was carried out mostly through income concentration at the top of the social pyramid, and studies done a few years later showed that while income had improved for all social groups during the years of the "miracle," inequality had also increased to an extreme degree.⁽³⁾ The military regime was an uneasy alliance of enlightened technocrats, professional soldiers, and militant anticommunists, and by 1968 the balance had tipped from the former to the latter. At the end of that year, all political activity was prohibited and all forms of political freedom were suspended. In the following years, thousands lost their political rights and public jobs-many of the victims were university professors or researchers in government-controlled institutes-while the military crushed attempts at armed insurrection led mostly by students in Brazil's main urban centers.

Given the conservative ideological bent of the military regime, large sectors of Brazil's educated elites assumed that such a regime could only lead the country to economic backwardness and intellectual obscurantism. This was the prevalent view among Brazil's best-known scientists, who had raised their voices against the country's social, economic, and political inequities in the past and who were among the first to lose their jobs and to be forced into exile by the military after 1964. Already in 1968, however, some agencies in the federal government started to provide resources for projects of scientific and technological development; by the mid-1970s it was already clear that, alongside its authoritarian face, the military regime was opening new spaces for science, technology, and higher education.⁽⁴⁾ After 1975, under the presidency of Ernesto Geisel, the balance had tipped again toward enlightened authoritarianism. Economic liberalism began to lose ground to a renewed belief in economic planning and state intervention, and a long-term plan for political liberalization was announced.⁽⁵⁾ This was the context in which we began our interviews.

The Construction of a Scientific Community

An earlier proposal for this study, which for circumstantial reasons was never carried out, was put forward by a well-known Brazilian economist and intended to show the historical role played by technology in Brazil's economic development. Besides its eventual academic relevance, that project was meant to provide legitimacy for building up the country's scientific and technological capabilities and, by implication, to bolster the project's sponsor, the Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, or FINEP (Financing Agency for Studies and Projects), an outgrowth of the Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico (National Bank for Economic Development), Brazil's main investment bank. We were able, instead, to move beyond the economist's frame of mind and to try to demonstrate that there was in Brazil a scientific community that predated the rediscovery of economic rationality by the new government agencies, a community that could not be placed under the narrow limits and controls of economic planning and that required freedom of research, permanent public support, and self-regulation as conditions of survival, reproduction, and growth. Against the prevailing economicist mood, we stressed the tensions between science and technology, rather than their complementarity; the links between science and culture and higher education, rather than links with the economy; and the reliance of science on self-regulated groups and institutions, instead of its dependency on the state.⁽⁶⁾ The words "scientific community" in the title of the 1979 book (see Preface above) was the last stage in the construction of our research object.⁽⁷⁾ As the project developed, FINEP also moved gradually from support of technology to support of science, technology, and graduate education in general.

This choice of subject and approach was based on the belief that science, if understood in very broad terms as a quest for the development of intellectual competence and the enlargement of the pool of knowledge, could play a central role in a country like Brazil, which still faces the problem of how to participate fully in the modern world. Our concern was less with scientific knowledge as such, or with practical applications, than with its role in the broader process of societal rationalization.⁽⁸⁾ How can this kind of knowledge penetrate societies that have not participated in or that have remained at the margins of Europe's scientific revolution since the Renaissance? How does it relate to local values, institutions, and social groups? How is it appropriated by different sectors? How does it take root or remain rootless? Does it really play the role it is supposed to?

Questions like these are broader and hazier than those that hold the attention of most sociologists and historians of science in Western Europe and the United States. In those regions, science is usually thought of as taking place in dynamic scientific centers where great works are written, great discoveries are made, and great theories proposed. The broader context is usually taken for granted. One could argue, following Thomas Kuhn, that such spectacular achievements are only the more visible aspects of everyday scientific activity. A study limited to the great feats of science would suffer the same deficiencies as traditional historiography, starring only kings, popes, and battles. Remarkable people and events do not bring us in touch with everyday reality, and without the latter the very existence of such people and events is not comprehensible. That is what makes modern historiography more social-, economic-, and institution-minded than before. It is for this reason too that one can study the historical and social dimensions of scientific work in regions that are peripheral to the more dynamic scientific centers. This is a study of "normal" science - in fact, the only science Brazilians could have.

Yet this sociology of "normal" science, however needed, could probably be carried out better in other places. The justification for the present study rests on other grounds. First, there was the short-term political motivation of stressing the role and importance of the scientific community in opposition to the technocratic mood that was replacing the obscurantism of the previous years. Less circumstantial is the fact that Brazil is one of only a few countries "south of the equator" that have been able to develop resilient and fairly significant scientific groups and institutions in the twentieth century (the main example, much better analyzed, being India).

To be "south of the equator" means not to have participated fully in the Western intellectual and cultural tradition to which modern science and its related institutions, such as modern universities and entrepreneurial capitalism, belong. And yet to be peripheral to the Western tradition can mean very different things for different societies. Brazil is a product of a special brand of European civilization, that of the Iberian Peninsula, which did not find in its newly discovered territories a suitable native population and culture upon which to establish its domination.⁽⁹⁾ Brazil's colonization was carried out by Portuguese settlers of many different kinds (nobles and courtiers endowed with royal privileges and monopolies, bandits, adventurers and gold seekers, Jesuit missionaries, escaped navy conscripts, new Christians escaping the Inquisition), at first with the help of enslaved Indians, later with African slave labor, and since the late nineteenth century with waves of immigrants from Italy, Germany, various Central European countries, and Japan. The result was one of the largest and more heterogeneous countries in the world, with a current population of about 150 million, a highly industrialized region around São Paulo, areas of intense poverty in the Northeast, European-like regions in Paraná and Santa Catarina, some universities of fairly good quality, and a large number of illiterates.

How does modern science take root and flourish outside its traditional cradle? How does it relate to other intellectual traditions, other institutional settings, other values, other ways of thinking? The growing literature on "peripheral science," which I do not attempt to review here, has gone from diffusionist to imperialist explanations, from analyses of cultural incompatibilities to the search for functional equivalencies, from theories and proposals for scientific and technological modernization to the proclamation of alternative, unique, and supposedly more promising scientific traditions.⁽¹⁰⁾

Let us deal with these and other questions from what I hope is a more illuminating point of view. Let us take scientific work as one among many human undertakings, as an instance of human agency that builds and changes social structures in its interactions with other social agents within the boundaries of their time-space constraints.⁽¹¹⁾ What may be unique in the social study of science in peripheral or semi peripheral societies such as Brazil is the effort to understand how the carriers of modern scientific Institutions and culture have had to thread a difficult path between two polar ways of conceiving, organizing, and interpreting what they were trying to accomplish. On one hand are the pragmatists, able to understand, justify, and explain science only through its economic and technological effects; on the other are those for whom science is equated with the free pursuit of knowledge, a noble activity of cultured people.⁽¹²⁾ In tracing this path, there will be much to be said and pondered concerning the efforts to establish a space for "normal" science, a modern university system, and an effective way of participating (even if not centrally) on the front lines of scientific activity.

To understand better how the Brazilian scientific community was formed and why it never reached the numerical and qualitative levels attained in other Western countries, we decided to combine the testimonies yielded by our interviews with a survey of numerous, hitherto scattered sources and to draw a broad picture of the social and institutional history of Brazil's main scientific traditions. Whenever possible, we concentrated on science rather than on technology, and on scientific institutions rather than on educational or industrial institutions. Nonetheless, we could not ignore the early medical, engineering, and agricultural schools, the applied research institutes, or the more recently established universities, in which most of Brazil's basic science emerged and developed. The testimonies are confined to natural science, that is, to the so-called hard sciences - physics, chemistry, biology, the earth sciences - with little emphasis on any others.⁽¹³⁾ The social sciences were excluded because of the need to limit the project somewhere and because they present a very different reality-not only with respect to the intellectual production involved hut also because in Brazil, with few exceptions, the social sciences have never been institutionalized as the natural sciences have.⁽¹⁴⁾

The Quest for Science

Scientific activity cannot develop and be maintained as a sustained endeavor if it does not have a strong component of self-regulation and self-reference. This contention will be tested repeatedly as we follow the rise and fall of scientific and technological institutions in Brazil since the nineteenth century. At least two conditions are necessary for scientists to maintain their peers as their main reference group. First, society must associate science with progress or in some way recognize the value of the scientist's work. It is this recognition that permits scientists to attain social prestige and attract financial support. Second, and paradoxically, the products of the scientists' labors should not be so profitable as to sidetrack them from the task at hand. When scientists assume positions of responsibility for technological undertakings of ample socioeconomic interest or when they assume the hedonistic stance of maximum yield/ minimum labor, it means that their concern with personal intellectual development has been pushed into the background, that other reference groups and other values have taken root, and the quality of their scientific work may be in jeopardy.

Our concern with science as the activity of a self-regulated community, rather than as part of a broader process of social and economic change or an attribute of a special professional education, did not necessarily correspond to what Brazilian scientists themselves thought about this matter. The development of a "scientific role" as a distinctive professional niche has been a peculiar part of the West European tradition since the Renaissance.⁽¹⁵⁾ But as we shall see, it was never obvious for Brazilian medical doctors and engineers involved in research that their identity as scientists should be stressed and differentiated from their professional roles. Brazilian scientists have, more often than not, stressed the usefulness of their work for the state and for their fellow citizens, rather than the distinctiveness of their role.

The amalgamation of professional and scientific roles was part of a broader view prevailing among Brazilian scientists since the nineteenth century which linked science, progress, modernization, and the establishment of science-based professions. In the early 1950s, European migration, the development of industry and commerce, urban growth-all those transformations that had been gaining speed in Brazil since the 1930s - seemed to converge. Fernando de Azevedo, a leading personality in the establishment of educational institutions in the previous years,⁽¹⁶⁾ expressed the prevailing thinking in Brazil's intellectual circles at that time:

Inasmuch as the development of industry and the discoveries of physics, chemistry, and experimental sciences tend to further the refinement of the moral and political sciences, it would not be too much to hope that such developments would also add to the wealth of knowledge accumulated by the humanities through observation and through experience with the growing use of modern methods. It is thus certain that we have resolutely' entered a stage of cultural renewal, which is expanding and diversifying.⁽¹⁷⁾

Azevedo was well aware of potential difficulties, of the "reservations and wariness - despite our amazement at the fantastic applications of these discoveries - with which we behold the anxiety-provoking problems posed by profound technical and economic transformations occurring in our world because of the breathtaking acceleration of scientific progress."⁽¹⁸⁾ It was not at all clear just how science could spontaneously accompany and contribute to economic development and modernization. Because of its Iberian cultural past and scholastic tradition, Brazilian society could be expected to resist the influx of the new scientific spirit. "The progress we have made and upon which we need to reflect," says Azevedo, "should not lead us to harbor illusions about the possible occurrence of pauses, whether shorter or longer, or regressions, however transitory, in one sector or another of the vast domain of scientific studies and research. We are all aware of the origins and ramifications of the old concept of culture and the attitudes that have taken root among us (...) that have left behind strong residues and habits which remain despite the deep transformations that have taken place in society."⁽¹⁹⁾ Dilettantism, a lack of team spirit and cooperation, traditionalism in education, excessive concern with short-term gains-all these posed a threat to the steady progress of the scientific spirit, somehow to be overcome.

The new scientific spirit would have to be introduced, therefore, by political mobilization and propaganda. The scientistic ideology,⁽²⁰⁾ in Brazil as in other Latin American countries, moved gradually from a few isolated research centers and tiny intellectual circles into the educational system and eventually led to tensions between the research-oriented professors and other sectors of society, including the traditional higher education institutions. One may divide the years of scientistic activism into three general phases or periods. The first, which for Brazil occurred in the y 'ears prior to World War II, was related to attempts to build new university institutions that could be established around advanced scientific and cultural centers or institutes. The second, typical of the postwar years, included more ambitious attempts to change completely the traditional university structure and to give scientific and technological research a central role in socioeconomic planning. The third, more typical of the late 1960s and 1970s, is characterized by attempts to create isolated and protected niches for scientific research, supported by a renewed belief in the redeeming value of modern science and technology'. A fourth period is probably emerging now, marked by an increased awareness of the distinctiveness of scientific work and of its complex interactions with higher education, technology, and the professions. Such awareness will impose itself through the sheer force of human reflection on experience and through the weight of current predicaments.

Science, Technology, and the Professions

To make the development of a scientific community the central focus of our study does not require the assumption that science should be organized according to some idealized model, such as the one put forward by Robert K. Merton some years ago.⁽²¹⁾ The concept of scientific community should be understood as an "ideal type," in the Weberian sense. It is an intellectual construct that makes explicit existing social values and actions and that helps us understand their consequences, implications, and tensions with other forms of social action. We can follow the emergence of this ideal type, and some of its implications, from at least three different but converging perspectives: one stemming from the sociology of scientific knowledge, another from an analysis of the interplay between science and technology in contemporary societies, and a third from the sociology of professions.

Sociologists of science tell us that "science" is not an unequivocal concept, that it can mean different things for different people. It can be thought of as a pool of knowledge that is developed, accumulated, transformed, and restructured according to the unique dynamics of each field. It can mean not just any knowledge but a special kind of knowledge, with its own rules (generally explicit ones) on how to incorporate new information and new criteria for validating results. It can refer to a special attitude assumed by scientists, which is called "scientific," meaning that one must incorporate new data and be open to new concepts whenever they appear, following the canons considered appropriate in each field.

A "scientific community," in a broad sense,⁽²²⁾ can be seen as a group of individuals who share "scientific" attitudes and values and who relate to one another through their scientific institutions. Individuals sharing a common background of skills, knowledge, and tacit assumptions about a specific field of knowledge are also said to form a scientific community. In such a community, each individual understands his or her specific area of knowledge and something of the adjacent areas. A certain overlap of work and specializations occurs, but no one has an exhaustive and systematic understanding of the entire field. Another element in the characterization of science as a social system is the existence of an authority system that defends the criteria of probity, plausibility, and acceptability of results-criteria that are generally not an explicit feature of scientific method but that are nevertheless an integral and fundamental part of its workings.⁽²³⁾ Some authors go to the extreme of suggesting that these implicit criteria are what "being scientific" is all about.⁽²⁴⁾

This scientific community functions ideally, in the words of Michael Polanyi, as a great and complex republic: "The Republic of Science is a Society of Explorers. Such a society strives toward an unknown future, which it believes to be accessible and worth achieving. The scientist explorer strives toward a hidden reality, for the sake of intellectual satisfaction. As they satisfy themselves, they enlighten all men and are thus helping society to fulfill its obligation toward intellectual self-improvement."⁽²⁵⁾ Allowing each explorer a maximum of freedom is seen as the best way to promote this exploration, for it would not be possible to use external, extra scientific criteria to decide what is more or less important for science. The scientific community, then, would operate like a broad market that naturally encourages what is more important and leaves aside what is less significant; it would be up to society as a whole to fund the scientific community without trying to influence how the funds are used.

One criticism addressed to this idealized view is that it derives, at best, from an old-fashioned notion of "little science" which separates science and technology completely. But, starting with (or dramatized by) the Manhattan Project, science seems to have taken a leap toward "big science," characterized by large budgets and highly' complex research activities involving the coordinated efforts of hundreds or even thousands of individuals. Whenever research attains this level of cost and complexity, the boundaries of science and technology seem to disappear and the scientific "market" as conceived of by Polanyi is replaced by the logic of the true economic market on the one hand and by that of national policies related to large-scale technological projects on the other.⁽²⁶⁾

Jean-Jacques Salomon believes that the roots go back further. He argues that modern science has always sought practical results and that the idea of a distinction between pure and applied knowledge is no more than the vestige of an elitist attitude of Aristotelian-scholastic origin, an attitude that serves as a roadblock to the emergence of modern science. Referring to seventeenth-century Europe, Salomon states that no era better illustrates how science is linked to a complete representation of the world; science viewed as contemplation is part and parcel of the development of a liberal social order, where "technique" belongs to the artisans who carry out "servile" tasks. Technique is perceived as inferior to science, as the artisan is perceived as inferior to the free individual, the scholar.⁽²⁷⁾

With the Renaissance, praxis begins to merit greater esteem; experimental research attains greater dignity and scientific knowledge is assigned a role in the achievement of worldly goals. Descartes, advising Cardinal Richelieu, expressed the meaning that science was to assume from then on: "It would be wise for Your Eminence to grant two or three of your millions in order to undertake all experiments needed to discover the specific nature of each body. I have no doubt but that we could thus attain great knowledge, knowledge that would be much more useful to the public than all the victories that might be won at war."⁽²⁸⁾

Nonetheless, Descartes' belief in the usefulness of science did not imply' that science and technique were seen as the same thing. His recognition of the value of experimental activity may have meant either that speculative knowledge had become more practice-oriented or that the experimental posture had achieved "dignity" and had been incorporated into academic activity.

We know today that even scientific research that is more academic in nature is guided by strategies that are much more complex than an unbiased quest for knowledge.⁽²⁹⁾ Polanyi's "Republic of Science" describes part of this reality and much of its ideology, as can be seen by the very acceptance that his proposal for the organization of scientific activity has encountered. The tight bonds linking science, practice, and politics correspond to the other part of reality, which is in turn evident in criticisms of and resistance to the market model.

From a narrow point of view, the passage from "little science" to "big science" can be seen as simply a case of the market of the Republic of Science having been restricted by the ceilings imposed on its historical pattern of exponential growth. The ideal of the Republic of Science has a great deal to do with this spirit of wide horizons, of a never-ending incorporation of new people and new ideas, of the stimulation of experimentation within an ever-expanding system. "Big science" seems to correspond to the point at which this growth begins to go too far, laying the ground for the very planning activities that could restrict the market's free operation.⁽³⁰⁾

Added to the exponential growth of science and its costs is the no less spectacular growth of its practical results. Research on new materials, electronics, and biology have tremendous social, cultural, and economic impact. Within such a context, it is inevitable that society should demand more of scientists and that scientists in turn should feel greater responsibility for the broader implications of the knowledge they develop. This situation puts the scientist in a dilemma. The more general characteristics of the Republic of Science, focused on developing people's talents to the maximum and linked to a reward system based on intellectual merit, are disturbed when criteria of cost, practical applicability, and social utility begin to intervene. This is a particularly acute problem in scientific communities that lie outside the more important centers: alienation from the scientist's broader social context, or even emigration, may be the price for placing maximum priority on the values of the Republic of Science.

It is not surprising to find that, when questioned, Brazilian scientists and researchers claim that their research decisions are based essentially on their academic interest in the subject matter; in fact, though, the decisions they make are strongly influenced by some combination of practical considerations, material and organizational incentives, and the prevailing lines of research within the institutions where they work.⁽³¹⁾ This contradiction reflects the scientists' efforts to see that those values which maximize intellectual merit and scientific recognition prevail with respect to the distribution of rewards, prestige, and resources throughout the educational and scientific system in which they live and work. It is also an indication that they are attuned to the practicalities of the "real world."

The tension that exists between what scientists do and what they believe they should do is only one factor (and not the most important one) hampering the operation of a pure "market" logic. Proponents of the market model for science avail themselves of the classic arguments used by economists to criticize monopoly economies: a tendency to inefficiency, the indefinite maintenance of obsolete institutions and organizations, the creation of increasingly complex and cumbersome planning organizations. On the other hand, there are good reasons to justify the quest for precedence, for preferential allocation of funds, and for the maintenance of protectionist schemes: namely, the need to avert a spontaneous concentration of resources and talent; the need to protect still-fragile initiatives that could be absorbed or wiped out by non differentiated competition; inevitably high social costs; and distortions that arise from allowing a laissez-faire attitude to prevail within an activity that becomes increasingly expensive and dominated by well-organized professional interest groups.

This dilemma is also apparent in the various policies and philosophies of social groups and government bodies connected either directly or indirectly with science, technology; and higher education. It is at the point where these tendencies meet (not always harmoniously) that science develops or is stalled.

The contrasts between science and technology cannot simply be set aside, for they reflect the deeper question of how scientists define their role in society, how they perceive themselves, and how they hope society will treat them. This fact has been clearly' perceived by many of those who were interviewed. The biologist Paulo Emílio Vanzolini,⁽³²⁾ for example, stated that "basic and applied zoology' vary only in terms of economic interests; if I study the reproductive strategies of a lizard, for example, this is not applied science. If I do the same thing with a fish that has a certain economic importance, it becomes applied science because it will be important in judging how intensively this species of fish can be exploited." He added: "The difference between pure and applied science does not lie merely in the merit of each, nor in the concept itself, but in the type of animal to which it is applied. This, I think, is the basic part." Vanzolini considers himself a basic researcher who sees as one of his tasks the training of applied researchers, arming them with the methodology appropriate for their work.

Among chemists there seems to be a consensus that physical chemistry is the most theoretical specialization in the discipline. Chemists dedicated to studying the characteristics and components of natural products nonetheless also define themselves as basic researchers, inasmuch as they do not seek immediate economic application: "Our work is to identify substances with different chemical structures. Our interest ends here. There need to be pharmacologists, ecologists, agronomists, veterinarians, etc., who care about this work and try' to see to what extent the analysis of Brazilian plants is important in explaining each one of their own phenomena (Otto Gottlieb, interview). Where one draws the line between "basic," "fundamental," "applied," or "theoretical" research depends less on epistemological notions than on the role that scientists aspire to in their society.

One can see the same dilemmas through the prism of the sociology of professions. It was never obvious to Brazilian medical doctors and engineers that their identity as scientists should be stressed and differentiated from their professional roles. This, by itself, is not peculiar to Brazil. Medicine, with law, has always been a high-status profession, and engineering in Brazil has followed suit in the French tradition. To herald their professions as "scientific," and therefore endowed with an aura of high competence, was one thing; to renounce the prestige (and often high income) of traditional professions was a different matter. In Brazil, as elsewhere, where the biomedical and physical "science" ends and where the medical and engineering "professions" start is more an organizational matter of academic disciplines and professional institutionalization than it is a matter of well-defined epistemological or functional frontiers. Where this frontier lies, however, is important, for there is little doubt that scientific research cannot advance far if it does not become recognized as an independent professional activity endowed with a degree of self-regulation and freedom from short-term pressures and demands that the liberal professions, autonomous as they may be, never enjoy.

Modern science, technology, and the professions tend to develop in parallel (with large areas of intersection) in societies with strong, endogenous industrial growth. The distinction between pure and applied knowledge is often mostly institutional-academic institutions versus centers for technological research, universities versus technical institutes-but the wealth of resources within more-advanced economies and the experience of cross-fertilization between scientific and technological activities make it appear as if the two have a separate but harmonious development. One paradox of underdeveloped countries is that their scientific activities tend to follow international patterns (since it is the developed nations that provide the education and training for their most qualified scientists), while technology lags behind. The better the scientific work done under these conditions, the more it will tend to contribute toward the central body of knowledge being accumulated in each field. And it is in the more-developed nations that there are greater opportunities for practical application of this knowledge. This explains why science as developed on the periphery is sometimes thought of as "alienated," disconnected from each particular nation's practical needs. Because of this perceived "alienation," scientific institutions often find it difficult to justify their work and to obtain from society the resources and freedom of action needed for their work.

An Outline

The foregoing notions provide a useful lead to the way the present book is organized. Part One deals with the historical foundations of the scientific community through the end of World War II. Part Two is more analytical, discussing specific growth patterns and covering the 1930s to the present day. This distinction is not absolute (there are historical as well as analytical materials in both parts), but it does correspond to a clear change in approach, explained in part by the impossibility of following developments in the second half of the twentieth century with the same kind of detailed attention that one could adopt for some fields up to that point.

I shall devote little space to the early explorers who came to Brazil, for although they often left a significant legacy of observations and studies, they had little contact with Brazilian society and left no disciples or institutions.⁽³³⁾ Brazil was then the largest colony of the Portuguese Empire, and in the next chapter I shall examine how Portugal related to the European scientific revolution in the eighteenth century and what sort of intellectual heritage it left to Brazil. For the Portuguese, Brazil was less a colonization project than a large plantation to be explored. During the first two centuries, sugarcane was paramount in the northeastern states; in the eighteenth century, as sugar prices fell drastically on the world market, gold began to be removed in quantity from Minas Gerais.⁽³⁴⁾

Chapter 3 deals with the nineteenth century, which saw the end of the gold boom, the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in Rio d Janeiro in 1808, the demise of slavery in 1889, the exile of Brazil's second emperor and member of the Portuguese royal household (Pedro II), and the beginning of the republican period. Around the second half of the nineteenth century, a new agricultural staple - coffee - began to dominate first the central states of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro and then São Paulo, which started its long ascent as the country's economic and demographic hub. This is when the first professional schools are established, the first scientific groups are formed, and imperial sponsorship for these activities is decisive for their success or failure.

Chapter 4 addresses the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and the first decades of the republican period. The republican regime was in large part a recognition of São Paulo's new economic and political role, and it coincided with a large influx of European and Japanese migrants who were to alter dramatically Brazil's ethnic composition from São Paulo southward. This was also a period of transition from the old imperial science to a new concern with applied and practical results, and 1 shall review the apex and crisis of that process. In Brazilian historiography the year 1930 is usually taken as the point at which Brazil entered the modern world. A new, centralized regime comes to power, industrialization becomes a national concern, the first universities are established, and changes in art and literature, which had begun in the 1920s, increase their presence and influence.⁽³⁵⁾

Chapter 5 deals with the impact of these changes on Brazil's scientific and educational institutions, with special emphasis on the creation of the first universities. Chapter 6 brings Part One to a close, surveying the roots of the main scientific traditions that were laid down in those years and that still shape a large part of what the Brazilian scientific community is today.

The pace quickens in Part Two. Chapter 7 provides an overview of the different generations of Brazilian scientists in the twentieth century', their professionalization, and the introduction of ingredients of what might be called a modern scientific "ethos," the definition of a "scientific role." Chapter 8 covers the period of the so-called Second Republic, from 1945 to 1964, and the last two chapters bring us up to the present day, surveying the important scientific and technological buildup of the 1970s and the predicaments of the 1980s.

Notes

1. An absolute rnajority of the older generation of Brazilian scientists, and all but one of our interviewees, were men. Women began to appear in more significant numbers in Brazilian science with the creation of the Universidade de São Paulo in 1934 (though mostly in the social sciences, which are not covered in the present book).

2. The 1970 census counted 93.1 million inhabitants; the 1980 census, 119 million. The projection for 1990 is about 150 million. See FIBGE 1987: 52.

3. Schwartzman 1980.

4. Despite some ideological similarities, the military regime in Brazil during these years was very different from what was experienced at about the same time in Chile, Uruguay. and Argentina. The latter countries had fairly large and educated middle sectors, most of them directly or in directly dependent on public employment, which were especially hard-hit by their regimes' programs of political authoritarianism and economic liberalism; they lost jobs and opportunities and were thrown in jail or forced into exile in large numbers. In Brazil, the middle sectors were proportionally much smaller, less politicized, and less dependent on public jobs than their counterparts in neighboring countries; in fact, they were among the chief beneficiaries of the state-induced economic boom in the 1970s. In 1972 a comparative survey showed that while Argentina was a large exporter of university-educated people to other Latin American countries, to Europe, and to the United States, Brazil had one of the highest raters of return, despite the political exile forced on many of its best-known scientists and intellectuals. Only in the later 1980s was Brazil showing signs of approaching the patterns of middle-class displacement typical of its Southern ("one neighbors. See Glaser 1978.

5. For an insider's view of the Geisel periods, see Velloso 1986.

6. This concern was not foreign to the one that moved Robert K. Merton to stress the prerequisites of autonomy and self-regulation in his early reflections on science in Nazi Germany, See Merton 1938.

7. This is a post factum reconstruction of a much more erratic and tentative process. The convincing power of the entire enterprise depends very much on the reader. On the construction of research objects, see Latour and Woolgar 1979 and Knorr-Cetina 1981.

8. This concern with rationalization, inspired by the sociology of Max Weber, should not be mistaken for naive rationalism or for the evolutionist belief that societies are destined to mover from lesser to greater rationalization in a process of continuous replacement of all the old, "traditional" forms of knowledge and social organization by "modern" ones. For a contemporary discussion, see Bendix 1984.

9. The Portuguese colonizers found the new territories inhabited by native populations that did not have the same degree of social organization and demographic density the Spanish conquistadores met in Mexico and in the Pacific. As in the United States and Australia, the native peoples were gradually decimated or expelled from the coastal areas to the interior and have remained marginal to the dominant society. The only significant effort to colonize the South Atlantic Indians was carried out by the Jesuits in southern Brazil and was later confined to Paraguay, the only country where Guarani is still widely spoken and whose population descends predominantly from South Atlantic Indians.

10. For a broad view of the social-scientific literature on higher education and science in Latin America, see Vessuri 1986 and 1987. See also Basalla 1967 for diffusionism; McLeod 1975 and Pyenson 1982 and 1984 for imperialism; Herrera 1971 and Sábato (ed.) 1975 for dependency; Sagasti 1983 for modernization; and Bella 1971 for functional equivalents. The literature on alternative cultural traditions is quite poor in Latin America but very extensive in other Third World regions.

11. For an expended elaboration of this approach and its implications, see Giddens 1979, chap. I; and Giddens 1987: 220-21.

12. In his influential Science in History, J. D. Bernal warned that the history of science should taker us beyond a lifeless view of the evolution of human knowledge. one that would treat history as if it were a simple and progressive construction of the "ideal edifice of truth." "Such history," says Bernal, "can only be written by neglecting the whole social and material components of science and thus reducing it to) inspired nonsense." Such "nonsense" also) occurs when one takes the opposite point of view and assumes there is a tight o)ne-to)-o)ne relationship between certain characteristics of the productive system and scientific activity. Bernal himself was somewhat responsible for the propagation of this idea when be stated, for instance, that "it is these [productive relations], depending as they do on the technical means of production, that provider the need for changes in these means and thus give riser to) science" (Bernal 1971,1:50). The contemporary view is best expressed in Kuhn 1977.

13. Including mathematics, which in Brazil. is historically almost indistinguishable from physics. For an overview, see Hönning and Gomide, 1979.

14. The history of social sciences in Brazil is the subject of an ongoing project at the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos de São Paulo) (IDESP) under the direction of Sérgio Miceli. See Miceli 1959.

15. Ben-David, 1971.

16. Fernando de Azevedo, a sociologist. participated in the organization of the Universidade de São Paulo and is the editor of a collection of articles that constitutes the fullest treatment to date of the development of Brazilian science (see F. de Azevedo [ed.], 1955).

17. F. de Azevedo (ed.) 1955:35.

18. F. de Azevedo (ed), 1955:10-11.

19. F.. de Azevedo (ed.) 1955:36.

20. This expression refers to the social movement that appeared in England and other European countries around the seventeenth century and that has been given the name "scientism" by historians and sociologists. In Europe, the early propagandists of science, like their counterparts in Latin America during the twentieth century, were concerned with questions of universal education and with extensive projects for scientific and technological research. which they believed would ensure the conquest of nature and the birth of a new civilization (Ben-David 1971:70).

21. See Merton, 1973. For an extended discussion of the concept, see Mulkay 1977.

22. The different meanings the concept can assume in this perspective is best exemplified by Thomas Kuhn's expansion and diversification of his notion of scientific paradigm in the 1970 post-face to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. See Kuhn, 1970:174-210.

23. Polanyi 1962.

24. E.g.. Barnes 1974; Bloor 1976; Latour and Woolgar 1979: Knorr-Cetina 1981.

25. Polanyi 1968:19.

26. Gibbons and Wittrock (eds.) 1985.

27. Salomon 1970:30.

28. Quoted in Salomon 1970:39. The translation from the French is mine.

29. Knorr-Cetina and Whitley 1981; Latour and Woolgar 1979.

30. Price 1963.

31. N. S. Oliveira 1975:115.

32. Biographical notes on each of the scientists interviewed are presented in the Appendix. For a larger biography and a summary of the interviews, see CPDOC 1984.

33. For an overview, see Oberakcker 1960. See also Albertin and Faria 1984 on the Dutch presence in northern Brazil between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century; Chur. Bertels, Komissarov & Licenko 1981 on the Russian explorer G. I. Langsdorff in the nineteenth century; and Ferri 1979/80 for an extensive bibliography.

34. For a broad view of Brazil's colonial heritage. see Holanda 1960b. On Brazil's colonial economy and society. see Simonsen 1962: C. Prado 1967; Furtado 1968; Lang 1979; and Novais 1981.

35. See, for the period, among others, Wirth 1970 and Skidmore 1967.