A Space for Science, Simon Schwartzman, 1991, chapter 4

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

Simon Schwartzman

The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991

Chapter 4

APEX AND CRISIS OF APPLIED SCIENCE

The "Brazilian Enlightenment"

From Traditional Astronomy to Modern Mathematics

From Sanitary Medicine to Biomedical Research

Geological Research and Economic Nationalism

São Paulo Takes the Leadership

Notes

We can see the developments in Brazilian science, technology, and higher education in the first decades of the twentieth century as the interplay between two polar tendencies, one geared toward applied work and short-term practical results, the other more academic and tuned to the more European notions of scientific roles and academic education. As the old imperial scientific institutions decayed, the first tendency was the easiest to get started and to gain support, leading to the establishment of research centers and institutes in agriculture, applied biology, tropical medicine, geology, and engineering.

The academic component would often emerge as "clandestine" activities within applied research institutions, and it would become institutionalized only with the creation of Brazil's first main universities in the 1930s. The consequence was that scientific work seldom had the climate and space for intellectual stimulation and initiative that is often obtained in contexts endowed with a strong academic component. In this chapter we shall follow the developments and transformation of applied science in bacteriological research and geology and conclude with the beginnings of mathematics and the physical sciences. In the next chapter, we follow the creation of Brazil's first universities. First, however, a broader background on this period is necessary.

From the Old Republic to the 1930 Revolution

In 1889 a bloodless military coup brought to an end the Brazilian imperial regime and the reign of Pedro II, which had lasted for almost fifty years. The Empire was centralized in Rio de Janeiro, supported by the traditional aristocracies in the Northeast, and identified with slave-based agriculture. The Republic proved to be much more decentralized and related to the development of a new agricultural economy based on free labor and European migration to Brazil's southern provinces, now promoted to states. Of those, the state of São Paulo gradually emerged as Brazil's economic hub, thanks to the continuous expansion of coffee plantations, European and Japanese migration, and, later, industries. The republican period inaugurated in 1839 lasted until 1930. These years became known as the "República do Café com Leite" (the Republic of Coffee and Milk), or the years of the "política dos governadores" (the politics of the governors). Both expressions reflect the extraordinary political clout of regional oligarchies of the coffee-growing state of São Paulo and of the cattle-producing state of Minas Gerais. But they under state the political strength of the military, which toppled the imperial regime and elected more than one republican president; the historical links between the military and the positivist oligarchy that controlled political life in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul; and a growing middle class, imbued with urban values and raising aspirations, which existed in the country's largest cities, most significantly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

In 1930 the sectors left out of the "política dos governadores" brought the "República do Café com Leite" to an end and inaugurated the fifteen-year period in which Brazil was to be governed by Getúlio Vargas a direct product of the Rio Grande do Sul oligarchy. From 1930 to 1937 Vargas engaged in a complicated power play with the military, the states' political oligarchies, the Catholic church, the left-wing intellectuals, and the integralistas, the Brazilian fascists. In 1937 Vargas suspended all legal political activities and declared himself dictator under a new constitutional charter that was supposed to inaugurate a new Brazilian state, the "Estado Novo." The Vargas years are a watershed in Brazilian contemporary history.⁽¹⁾ Power was again concentrated at the national government, and there were systematic attempts to modernize the state administration,⁽²⁾ to create a nation wide education system,⁽³⁾ and to stimulate industrialization.⁽⁴⁾

It is impossible to appreciate these developments without a proper understanding of the growing rift between Brazil's central political authorities and the country's main economic pole, São Paulo.⁽⁵⁾ Since the very beginning, the old captaincy of São Vicente (where São Paulo started) developed independently and far from the colonial central ad ministration, which had its seat in Salvador and later Rio de Janeiro Travelers in the seventeenth century used to describe it as a "republic of bandits." São Vicente was the first settlement that moved from the coast to the hinterland, in open contradiction to the general pattern of settlements along the coast. The history of the expansion of São Vicente is symbolized by the "bandeiras," Indian hunting expeditions that penetrated farther and farther south, resulting in miliary clashes with the Spanish Jesuit missions; or expeditions in search of gold and gems, with eventual clashes with other immigrants over mining areas, sponsored and stimulated by the crown; and a conspicuous absence of the province of São Paulo from the forefront of national events until the explosion of coffee plantations in the nineteenth century.

Around 1360 some 30 percent of Brazil's coffee production came from the province of Rio de Janeiro; at the turn of the century São Paulo accounted for more than 60 percent of a much larger production. This dramatic shift is explained in large part by the development of a strong entrepreneurial mentality among São Paulo elites, which included a strong effort to open the region to European migration as a replacement for slave labor and to develop an international policy of price supports that became known as "valorization."⁽⁶⁾ Meanwhile, the old agricultural elites in Rio de Janeiro and other regions turned from economy to poli tics as a way to preserve their traditional positions of status and power. The Paulista elites played a very active role in the downfall of the Empire in 1339 and, for the first time in Brazil's history, shared power with other leading states and the military during the First Republic. In 1930 they found themselves on the losing side against the political oligarchies of Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, the Northeast, and the young military. In 1932 the state was shaken by a frustrated armed attempt to put an end to the interventionist policies of the Vargas regime. In the aftermath, leading members of the Paulista elite were sent to exile in Europe, to return in the conciliatory years of 1933 and 1934, when a new Constitutional Assembly was supposed to bring the country back to political democracy and decentralization. It was precisely in 1934 that the Universidade de São Paulo was created.

The "Brazilian Enlightenment"

Some authors call the final decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth the "Brazilian Enlightenment."⁽⁷⁾ It was a time of intense contact with Europe, especially France, introducing Brazil to the concepts of evolution, biological and social Darwinism, positivism, and philosophical and political materialism. Brazil's political, cultural, and intellectual elites welcomed these ideas, each group adopting the aspect that suited it best. Positivism reigned in military circles, and the emperor himself was an enthusiastic propagator of new technologies.

We can only begin to analyze how and to what extent Europe influenced Brazil's intellectual, institutional, and political development. Brazil transplanted often distorted versions of intellectual and institutional models from France and Germany, frequently with some delay. Brazil's intellectual elite also flocked to study in these two nations, especially France. Many scientists and researchers who were to head Brazil's research institutions came from these countries. The British culture did not have much influence in Brazil, though Great Britain was Brazil's main economic partner. Economics and culture did not go the same ways.⁽⁸⁾

Because of the central role it assigned to science, rejecting a speculative or contemplative vision of reality, positivism encouraged Brazilians to accept the new techniques and knowledge that had dominated the European intellectual scene for so long. At the same time, positivism brought with it a vision that had little to do with Brazil's particular reality and opposed the manner by which scientific activities developed in Europe. In France, positivism was accepted by only some of the evolutionist social philosophers; most natural scientists did not follow it at all. In the social sciences, positivism confronted new tendencies and theories, such as Marxism, Spencerianism, and historicism. Within the physical sciences, positivism conflicted with the theoretical lines followed in physics since Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani revealed the existence of non Newtonian forces after the eighteenth century. Positivism also ran up against a barrier within mathematical sciences, where work had been influenced by the studies on non-Euclidean geometry carried out by Carl Gauss, Nicolay Lobacheysky, and Georg Bernhard Riemann by the end of the nineteenth century. Comte and his followers believed that the concepts derived from non-Euclidean analyses were abstractions originating from the metaphysical stage of human thought and should not be taught in schools. Almost totally shut out from the academic community, Comte began preaching to lay audiences. Thus was born positivism's religious branch, whose spokesman was Emile Littré.

Religious positivism arrived in Brazil at full strength. Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães, a military man and a founding father of the Brazilian Republic, stated:

Positivism is a new religion - the most rational, the most philosophical, and the only one that emanates from the laws of nature. It could not have been the first religion because it requires knowledge of nature's laws and is a spontaneous consequence of this knowledge. Therefore it could not have appeared during the childhood of human reason, or even when the sciences were still embryos; it still would not have appeared now were it not for that remarkable genius Auguste Comte, whose vast intelligence al lowed him to leap centuries into the future, seizing science in its definite form and giving us, through his scientific religion, mankind's definitive religion.⁽⁹⁾

Science is achieved; the world is understood. There can be no more room for questioning, doubts, or experimentation. What remains is the need to move on to action, proselytizing the nonbelievers. Within this framework, where does one fit the notion of a laboratory, a research center, a university concerned with expanding the boundaries of the unknown?

While, in Brazil, science was seen as done and ready to use, in Europe and the United States the excitement was barely beginning. Culturally isolated from the Anglo-Saxon world, Brazilians followed at a distance most of what was happening in engineering but saw little of the developments in physics. As a younger witness recalls:

All of us - including those who studied at the old Escola Politécnica - were strongly influenced by nineteenth- and twentieth century French physics during our formative years. [In France] such important figures as Poincaré and Madame Curie certainly made enormous contributions. But French physics was crystallized in various manuals and treatises such as the Ganon Manouvrier, the Tourpin and other works that dated almost from the beginning of the century and dealt very little with modern physics. Physics as we studied it was meant for engineers: forces, equilibrium, gravity, fluids - in other words, what is known as classical physics and very little of modern physics.⁽¹⁰⁾

The beginning of this period was marked by the creation of various institutions, mostly in São Paulo, some of which survive today: Cam pinas' Instituto Agronômico for agricultural research (1337); the Instituto Vacinogênico, for the development of vaccines (1392); the Instituto Bacteriológico (1393); the Museu Paulista (1393); the Museu Paraense (1394); and the Instituto Butantã, a center for snake venom research and antidote development (1399). In 1900 the Instituto Manguinhos of biomedical research was established in Rio de Janeiro. Except for the Instituto Vacinogênico (which, with the Instituto Bacteriológico, was incorporated to the Instituto Butantã in 1925), these establishments were responsible for much of what was produced scientifically in Brazil until the 1930s.

New higher education institutes also appeared. São Paulo's Escola Politécnica was founded in 1393; the Escola die Engenharia MacKenzie, also located in São Paulo, and Porto Alegre's Escola de Engenharia, were both founded in 1396; São Paulo's Escola Livre de Farmácia and Rio de Janeiro's Escola Superior de Agricultura e Medicina Veterinária both came in 1393; in 1901 the Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz was founded in the São Paulo city of Piracicaba; and Rio de Janeiro's and São Paulo's Escola de Comércio, both business schools, were founded in 1902.

By 1940 Brazil had ten engineering schools, eleven medical schools, fourteen pharmaceutical and dentistry schools, five agronomy and Veterinary science schools - and twenty law schools, including both public and private but government-monitored schools.⁽¹¹⁾ A slight trend toward technical fields was visible in the career choices of Brazilians studying abroad. Among those who went to Belgium, for example, a much larger number chose engineering or medicine than any other profession. Belgium had adopted a system of polytechnic institutes along French lines but without the French military and elitist tendencies and with emphasis on practical learning that would facilitate graduates' access to the professional market. Thus, Belgium provided for Brazilians an attractive alternative to the French grandes écoles which were usually not accessible to foreigners.⁽¹²⁾

The scientific institutions created in the first years of the Republic focused primarily on applying their results to meet what were perceived as Brazil's most pressing needs: exploring the country's natural resources, expanding agriculture, and ridding the nation's main ports and cities of disease. These institutions were stimulated by the industrial growth and development then overtaking Brazil with the opening of new transportation routes (mostly railways).and the expansion of new crops. As the nation's economy grew, unexpected obstacles to further expansion and consolidation appeared - for example, agricultural plagues, cattle disease, and endemic diseases that reduced labor's productive capacity and closed the nation's ports to navigation; the lack of an efficient road, port, and rail network; and energy deficiencies. Bubonic plague at the ports of Rio and Santos, attacks by coffee borers, malaria afflicting workers opening new roads - all these problems demanded a concentrated effort to eliminate them. They were dealt with more efficiently than one might have expected from the precarious public administration inherited from the Empire. Within a five-year period the mortality rate in the city of São Paulo was reduced by half, at a time of intense demo graphic growth.⁽¹³⁾ As we shall see, the Instituto Manguinhos in Rio de Janeiro was getting similar or better results.

It is against this background of political decentralization, cultural borrowing, and practical urgencies that Brazilian science would enter the twentieth century.

From Traditional Astronomy to Modern Mathematics

Organized scientific research in the mathematical and physical sciences began in Brazil within the Observatório Imperial (Imperial Observatory) in Rio de Janeiro, formally created in 1827 but active only since 1845. Throughout the nineteenth century the observatory was headed by French-born or French-trained scientists who usually taught also at the Escola Politécnica.⁽¹⁴⁾ At first, the observatory was dedicated almost exclusively to astronomic calculations, regulation of chronometers, and meteorological observations. In 1858 and 1865 the observatory organized scientific expeditions to observe solar eclipses, which marked the beginning of collaboration with French scientists. One of them, Emmanuel Liais, observed comets in Brazil beginning in 1858 using photographic equipment. In 1874, as director of the observatory, Liais imported new optical equipment from Paris and began working on two major projects: coming up with a precise map of Brazil and studying the orbits of Venus, Mars, and Mercury.⁽¹⁵⁾

Research in astronomy at the observatory had little connection with the teaching going on at the Escola Militar in those years, and for the astronomer and mathematician Lélio Gama part of the blame was to be placed on the literary tone of the lectures. "The teaching of astronomy in those years suffered the charming influence of the works of Camille Flammarion. Flammarion's influence on the astronomy of the nineteenth century brings to mind Auguste Comte's influence over mathematics, but the circumscribing, limiting nature of Comte's work stands in contrast to the highly literary tone of Flammarion's astronomy. They were both fascinating penmen, and a torrent of astronomic amateurism sprang from the pages of Flammarion. The colorful language he used to describe the celestial spectacle in the end encouraged inappropriate didactic directions divorced from scientific reality. The astronomer must not let himself be dazzled by the panorama of outer space but should measure it instead within a physical-mathematical context."⁽¹⁶⁾ The other side of this romanticized view of astronomy was the extremely pragmatic actions of government regarding the observatory. "Astronomy didn't have a place to stay; it fit in nowhere, since it was impossible to define it in terms of public services. For seventy years the observatory fluttered from branch to branch without anybody being able to identify the characteristic by which it could be fitted into any scheme of public activities."⁽¹⁷⁾ Under Morize the situation reached its extreme: the observatory changed its name to Diretoria de Meteorologia e Astronomia (Directory of Meteorology and Astronomy) and was transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce.⁽¹⁸⁾

With all its shortcomings, the observatory provided a significant counterpoint to the intellectual climate then prevailing at the Escola Politécnica. Physicist Costa Ribeiro wrote:

Henrique Morize's published works alone, which are scant, cannot be used to evaluate his important contribution to the history of physics research in Brazil; one must take into account his heavy influence on Brazilian students in awakening their curiosity and their interest in the experimental work that had previously been relegated to second place and in convincing the government of the need to create teaching and research laboratories and to reorganize many official services on more scientific bases.⁽¹⁹⁾

The prevailing style can be gathered from an article written by Licínio Cardoso, who was responsible for the Escola's course of rational mechanics and an outspoken positivist, in the first issue of the Revista da Escola Politécnica, published in 1897. In his Geométrie Analitique he wrote:

Auguste Comte offers as an example worthy of study the double set of curves that the great geometer Descartes discovered can be derived from a circle. With his characteristic, outstanding proficiency; which fortunately has attained world recognition, our incomparable master succinctly provides us with a clear and positive idea of how those curves are generated-in this book that is per haps the most formidable compendium available. But as we have stated above, having offered this as an example he would not carry out studies on it.⁽²⁰⁾

This was the setting against which Otto de Alencar began publishing his work. He was already a well-known mathematician, and publication of his 1898 article against Comte's mathematics⁽²¹⁾ started a protracted debate. According to Amoroso Costa, Alencar's best-known student, "followers of positivism thought his article a sacrilege, and ensuing criticisms were perhaps inspired more by faith than by reasoning, but it was a question of geometry, and his objections were irrefutable."⁽²²⁾ Otto de Alencar became responsible for introducing Rio de Janeiro's Escola Politécnica to the works of Alfred Clebsh, George Salmon, Gabriel Könings, and Gaston Darboux; to the treatises on analysis written by Charles Her mite, Camille Jordan, and Emile Picard; to probability calculus; and to the books of physicist-mathematician Henri Poincaré.

Alencar's main disciple was Manoel Amoroso Costa, who continued his work in mathematics and in leading the movement against positivism.⁽²³⁾ Amoroso Costa was joined in this campaign by Lélio Gama (who would become director of the Observatório Nacional in 1952), Teodoro Ramos (who would play an important part in organizing the Universidade de São Paulo). Roberto Marinho de Azevedo (who would later become director of the Faculdade de Ciências at the Universidade do Distrito Federal), and Felipe dos Santos Reis (later professor at the Politécnica). They attacked positivism not only for its mathematical mistakes but also for its understanding of the role science was to play in society. In 1923 Amoroso Costa wrote against the fascination with material progress that led people to ignore "the existence of a superior scientific ideal that is higher than man's ability to build a thousand cars a day or to perform an appendectomy in ten minutes."⁽²⁴⁾ This clash of views transcended scientific and technical circles and was fought in the newspapers. As late as 1925, in reaction to Roberto Marinho de Azevedo's articles on the theory of relativity on the occasion of Albert Einstein's 6 May 1925 visit to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, where he lectured on the theory of light, Licínio Cardoso wrote an article entitled "Relatividade Imaginária" (Imaginary Relativity), which generated heated discussions in the pages of O Jornal, one of Rio's main newspapers.⁽²⁵⁾

The Escola Politécnica de São Paulo, established in 1893. was never too involved in these debates. As in Rio, the goal of São Paulo's Politécnica was to produce professional engineers. What little academic research was done there was undertaken by a few self-taught professors and did not reflect institutionalized scientific activity. Some applied work did take place, however. From the beginning, efforts at the Escola Politécnica were related to the construction of railways; close ties were maintained with the firms responsible not only for this activity but also for electrical energy generation and the city's trolley system. The Escola's Laboratório de Resistência de Materiais was used to test equipment and material both for the railway and for electrical energy sectors.⁽²⁶⁾

Teodoro Augusto Ramos was the most prominent mathematician of São Paulo's Politécnica.⁽²⁷⁾ Throughout his studies at Rio's Politécnica, he was the leader of his group of colleagues and perhaps the most distinguished of Amoroso Costa's disciples. In 1918 he defended a thesis on the functions of real variables in which he proposed, in the words of Francisco Mendes de Oliveira Castro,

to base the theory of functions of real variables on the simple notion of polynomials... Twentieth-century mathematics reached Brazil through this work... The work begins with an excellent summary of set theory and of the main results so far achieved in the field of functions of real variables, from Cauchy to Cantor, Borel, Baire, and Lebesgue. Written when Brazil had not yet fully grasped the rigors of modern mathematics, his thesis was undoubtedly the most important contribution Brazilian mathematical research could have made before the creation of São Paulo's Faculdade de Filosofia.⁽²⁸⁾

Teodoro Ramos was appointed substitute professor at São Paulo's Escola Politécnica in 1919. According to F. M. de Oliveira Castro, "With the efforts of Teodoro Ramos the Escola Politécnica de São Paulo became Brazil's heart of modern mathematics."⁽²⁹⁾

From Sanitary Medicine to Biomedical Research

During the Second Empire and the first decade of the Republic, Brazilian medicine was mostly clinical and sanitary. Nineteenth-century diagnostic and therapeutic resources were scant. The efforts of hygienists the epidemiologists of their time-were focused on correlating certain diseases with soil, climate, and other environmental conditions. Physicians were consulted and gave opinions about the physical organization of cities, the opening of roads, the landfill of marshes, the construction of sewers, and the basic regulations for private residences, schools, hospitals, and lodgings.⁽³⁰⁾

Modern bacteriological research and sanitary medicine started in São Paulo, in part, because of impetus provided by educational, scientific, and technological initiatives in that state in the first years of the Republic. An additional factor was the poor conditions in the city of Santos. Santos was becoming Brazil's busiest harbor, but foreign ships often shunned it for sanitary reasons. Yellow fever and other diseases were also rampant among the immigrants who came in great numbers through Santos and provided the needed workers for the state's economic expansion.⁽³¹⁾ The first initiative was the creation of São Paulo's Instituto Vacinogênico (Vaccine Institute) in 1892, which was to produce vaccines to protect the nation against repeated epidemics of smallpox. By that time the public health service in the state of São Paulo had been fully reorganized, including the enforcement of mandatory vaccination and booster shot programs and the creation of vaccination posts throughout the state.⁽³²⁾ The law that eventually established the institute also provided for the organization of three different laboratories: one for clinical analyses (which even the private sector did not yet boast), one for bacteriology, and a third for pharmaceutical research. Only the second of these became a reality.⁽³³⁾

The 1893 creation of the Instituto Bacteriológico (Bacteriological Institute) was foreseen in the same legislation that had created the Instituto Vacinogênico Its task was "to be especially concerned with microscopy and bacteriology in general and their application to the study of the epidemic, endemic, and epizootic diseases that appear in our midst and become increasingly serious."⁽³⁴⁾ Given the magnitude of the task and the lack of local experience, it was necessary to take a different route from that of the Instituto Vacinogênico and call on the academic and organizational capabilities of a foreigner. Louis Pasteur himself was consulted, and he suggested Felix Le Dantec.⁽³⁵⁾ Le Dantec remained in Brazil for just four months, returning to France with the materials he had collected for the study of yellow fever. He was replaced by Adolfo Lutz.⁽³⁶⁾ In the end it was Lutz, not Le Dantec, who was responsible for setting up Brazil's and Latin America's first modern bacteriological laboratory and for introducing the most advanced techniques then available. The laboratory not only identified diseases and pursued other applied studies but also provided support for such routine activities as blood and urine analysis and vaccine and serum production.⁽³⁷⁾ As early as August 1893, Lutz demonstrated the practical usefulness of his knowledge, identifying in only one day the unknown epidemic then sweeping a São Paulo immigrant's hostel: Asiatic cholera.

In 1894 and 1895 the institute responded rapidly and efficiently to cholera epidemics. The Instituto Bacteriológico, and Lutz in particular, were to gain special fame with the public health campaigns aimed at wiping out yellow fever and the bubonic plague. These campaigns provided a testing ground for interaction among scientists, the public administration, and the population and served as a rehearsal for the national campaigns to be proposed and executed by Manguinhos a few years later. It was also a chance for the future great names of the biological sciences to meet, collaborate, and exchange experiences.⁽³⁸⁾

In spite of its earlier achievements, the Instituto Bacteriológico's activities and prestige began to decline in the early 1900s. Its budget was not increased significantly, and Lutz had to spend much of his time on bureaucratic chores. In 1908 he accepted an invitation from Oswaldo Cruz to join the team of researchers at the Instituto Manguinhos in Rio de Janeiro Vital Brasil had already left the Instituto Bacteriológico in 1899 to direct work on the production of anti-bubonic serum at the Butantã ranch on the outskirts of São Paulo; once Lutz also was gone, no one was left to continue scientific research. Although Lutz was still its formal director until 1913, the institute gradually lost its raison d'être as a separate body, and in 1925 it was absorbed by the Instituto Butantã. In 1931 it was revived and reorganized as the Instituto Adolfo Lutz.

The new views on tropical medicine would take almost ten years to travel from São Paulo to the capital city of Rio de Janeiro. In 1897 Brazil's director of public health, Nuno de Andrade, addressed a memorandum to the Academia de Medicina inquiring about the advantages of "fostering the establishment of official technical institutes to prepare antitoxic and healing serums." He also asked about the advantages of setting up official institutes to prepare serum and vaccines, about the validity of bacteriological research being done in Brazil, and about the advantages of restricting the institute to Brazilian nationals. In response he got the backing of the academy for his undertaking.⁽³⁹⁾ The project came to life in 1889. Threatened by the bubonic plague from São Paulo and facing problems in importing serum directly from Europe, Rio de Janeiro's Mayor Cesário Alvim founded the city's Instituto Soroterápico Municipal. Technical control was handed over to Oswaldo Cruz, who after three years of specialization at the Pasteur Institute in Paris had helped identify the bubonic plague epidemic in Santos, in association with Adolfo Lutz and Vital Brasil.

Less than one year later, in May 1900, the institute came under federal control, but its administrative and technical staff was retained. By February 1901 the first one hundred vials of serum were ready. This initial task involved more than the simple reproduction of already known formulas, since the technique used to produce them in Europe was not yet in the public domain, unlike the smallpox vaccine. It was up to Oswaldo Cruz to change or standardize various aspects to achieve a product that would be more efficient, stable, and adequate under Brazilian conditions.

In 1902 Oswaldo Cruz replaced Pedro Afonso as the institute's director. From its initial role as a factory of serum and vaccines, the institute rapidly broadened into a center for bacteriological research and personnel training and a gathering place for a new generation of medical doctors in tune with the medical revolution started by Pasteur: Miguel Couto, Carlos Chagas, Eduardo Rabelo, Marques Lisboa, Cardoso Fontes, Ezequiel Dias, and Artur Neiva. Under the guidance of Oswaldo Cruz these scientists produced excellent results in the fields of hematology, malaria, prophylaxis and etiology of plagues, tuberculosis, infectious diseases, microbiology, medical zoology, insect contamination, and verminous diseases.⁽⁴⁰⁾

With the appearance of yellow fever in 1903, Rio de Janeiro faced a new threat, and President Francisco Rodrigues Alves appointed Oswaldo Cruz to substitute for Nuno de Andrade as head of the Diretoria Geral de Saúde Pública. Cruz also remained at his post as head of the Instituto Soroterápico. As a result, sanitary control within Rio de Janeiro and other areas of Brazil could be exercised through the integrated efforts of pure and applied work.

The rise of Oswaldo Cruz to the Diretoria Geral heralded the start of a highly productive period at the institute. The questions then absorbing the energies of scientists in Paris, Berlin, and the United States coincided with Brazil's sanitary needs. After experiments in Cuba had proven Carlos Juan Finlay's theory that only one type of mosquito, the Aedes aegypti, could transmit yellow fever, Brazil became the first important ground for testing this and other modern sanitary theories. As with bubonic plague, techniques developed abroad could not be applied directly without being adapted to the specific conditions in Brazil. Furthermore, a well-prepared team, that was convinced enough of its effectiveness to withstand the active opposition of those who contested the scientific validity of Finlay's claims, would be required to enforce these new methods. Reactions against sanitation campaigns under President Rodrigues Alves were intense and culminated in the 1904 popular revolt against mandatory inoculation against smallpox. These reactions were not merely a consequence of ignorance or prejudice. They were also directed against Mayor Pereira Passos' plans to modernize the city of Rio de Janeiro, "sacrificing and uprooting the population in the poor downtown areas with the intent of transforming the colonial city, cramped narrow streets and to tally lacking in hygiene, into a metropolis with all the characteristics of a modern urban center."⁽⁴¹⁾ The poor suffered most:

Their belongings were thrown out, their houses demolished, rents raised, and they were moved far from their places of work. In other words, their whole way of life was completely disrupted. From this perspective, one cannot view the reactions against mandatory vaccination and against Oswaldo Cruz himself as anti-scientific reactions of the lower classes, who were faced with a cultural element unfamiliar to them, although this may even have been part of it.⁽⁴²⁾

The backlash gained ample space in the press and was carried over to the Congress. In large part it served as a pretext to oppose the presidency of Rodrigues Alves. Positivist intellectuals provided justification for this reaction. They challenged the validity of the scientific theories then being developed and the usefulness of their therapy. They fought against what they called "sanitary despotism" and the growing power of the established medical profession in all its manifestations.

We are not just against mandatory vaccination; we are also against mandatory disinfection, this comedy that forces the citizens to inhale noxious gases and spoil their health; we are against the forced isolation and the way people are violently taken from their families and then allowed to die by the moral actions against their bodies... We are against mandatory notification of illnesses to the sanitary authorities, which breaks the doctor's vows of professional secrecy, offends their dignity, and forces them to accept the official nosography and diagnoses, in a clear attack on their free dom of thinking and professional work.⁽⁴³⁾

In the end Oswaldo Cruz became something of a mythical figure. The population was impressed that a Brazilian sanitarist, heading a team of Brazilians, had succeeded in controlling a disease that was viewed as a major obstacle to the nation's progress. The team earned even greater esteem after receiving first prize at the 1907 International Hygiene Exposition held in Berlin, which established its international recognition. The same year, the Instituto Soroterápico Federal became the Instituto de Patologia Experimental de Manguinhos. Originally entrusted solely with the manufacture of serum and vaccines, the institute assumed the character of a research center. Under its new statutes the institute enjoyed "total autonomy in its technical and scientific investigations" and could ask the government to send any of its staff members to various places to study relevant scientific questions. The institute was also to have its own journal, Memórias, for distribution among national medical, veterinary, and agricultural schools and for exchange with foreign scientific journals.⁽⁴⁴⁾ In appointing staff to lead the newly organized institute, the group that had been working there since 1901 was ratified: besides Oswaldo Cruz and Henrique Figueiredo Vasconcelos, there were Henrique Rocha Lima (chief of staff), Alcides Godói, Antônio Cardoso Fontes, Carlos Chagas, Artur Neiva, Ezequiel Dias, Henrique Aragão, and José Gomes de Faria - medical doctors trained at the institute itself. Brazil boasted a "school" of experimental medicine comparable to any of Europe's better centers. At the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, the French and German traditions blended to add clout to the struggle to discredit the view that Brazil's tropical nature doomed it as a country.

With yellow fever finally under control, Brazil faced a new challenge, malaria. Many public and private works had to be interrupted when health risks affected certain locations. The institute was asked to assess sanitary conditions and to come up with a strategy for implementing sanitation measures. Some researchers were sent out to survey the region's ecology, while others remained at the institute to work on investigations that could not be done in loco. All the specialists were to get experience in every area in order to avoid conflicts between laboratory scientists and field specialists.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Carlos Chagas' observations of living conditions of both mosquitoes and human beings enabled him to formulate his doc trine of household infection, which led to a change in the techniques used to fight this disease. No longer was it considered important to destroy the clouds of mosquitoes that invaded forests and marshlands; efforts were now focused on eradicating the insects immediately after they had bitten infected people - that is, mosquitoes found in homes. In this way the new medicine reestablished its links with the traditional concerns about the environment.

Many in land posts were set up so that sanitary conditions could be surveyed or a specific problem fought. One of these was located in Minas at the end of Brazil's main railway line, where construction on a planned extension had been forced to stop because of the treacherous sanitary conditions. There, in 1907, Carlos Chagas accomplished what is considered a scientific feat even today: through its causal agent he identified a new disease, the American Trypanosomiasis, which later became known as Chagas' disease. This discovery contributed to building the institute's scientific identity because it opened doors to many new areas of study: the morphology and biology of the Trypanosome; its development cycle in vertebrates and in the carrier; the mechanisms of disease transmission; pathogenic processes; the symptoms and the pathological anatomy of the diseased individual; epidemiology; the habitat of the carrier and the conditions for its contamination; and the establishment of preventive and therapeutic norms.⁽⁴⁶⁾

The quality of work being carried out at the institute attracted three German scientists to Brazil - Stanislas von Prowasek, Gustav Giemsa, and Johannes Franz Hartmann - who worked in close collaboration with researchers at the institute during 1908 and 1909. Their arrival certified that Brazilian science had attained a high level, and for some time the institute's mystique was sustained by its excellent production. In 1910 while researching malaria, Artur Neiva demonstrated the existence of a type of plasmodium that was resistant to quinine. In 1911 Gaspar Viana identified the Leishmania brasiliensis, and in the next year he discovered a treatment using emetic tartar. With Henrique Beaurepaire Aragão he published two important works, a description of the disease transmission by hematophagous dipterons (phlebotomus), and a thorough study of the venereal granuloma: clinical description, histopathology, study, and treatment by emetic tartar. The research on protozoology and entomology proceeded intensively. Studies on mycology and helminthology were also carried on, becoming among the most relevant contributions of the institute.

Financial resources for much of this research came not from federal funding of the institute but from what became known as the "verba da manqueira" (manqueira money). In 1908 Alcides Godói and José Gomes de Faria developed a highly efficient vaccine against "manqueira," a disease that afflicted Brazilian cattle. They donated the patent on this vaccine to the institute, and profits from the sale of this product began to equip laboratories, pay new researchers, and finance staff trips around Brazil or to neighboring countries in search of new problems and new solutions.⁽⁴⁷⁾

The donation of this patent tells us something about the climate that prevailed in the institute. Shut away on a farm on what was then at the fringes of Rio de Janeiro, institute scientists saw themselves as a very special group of people dedicating their lives to a cause more noble than most. For this very reason, it was extremely difficult to break into the group. Whoever wished to join the circle first had to be accepted into a very demanding practical course, after completing the first years of medical school. To earn the right to a later internship at the institute, candidates had to have perfect attendance in the two-year course. Students were still on probation during the period of internship, doing unpaid work for the staff researchers who agreed to take them on, until the opportunity arose for the candidate to join the permanent staff. The candidates themselves felt that such tests were necessary to gain admittance to what was then considered the only institution in Brazil where real science existed. Besides providing a stimulating environment, the institute had an excellent library, a good infrastructure, and a fine technical staff, including glass blowers, electricians, and machinists, all trained by the senior researchers themselves. Once admitted, all candidates could expect to have their work not only recognized but also used in many campaigns promoted by the health authorities to which the institute was linked.

Geological Research and Economic Nationalism

The third area of applied research begun at the turn of the century covered geology and mineralogy. A series of short-lived geological and geographical commissions had been established since 1875, headed by American-born geologists and later by graduates from the Escola de Minas de Ouro Preto. The first, the old imperial Comissão Geológica, was reborn in 1907 as the Serviço Geológico e Mineralógico (Geological and Mineralogical Service), a federal agency whose directorship was offered to Orville A. Derby.⁽⁴⁸⁾

As the director, Derby had the cooperation of two former associates, Eugène Hussak and Gonzaga Campos, and tried to build the agency in the same research tradition with which he had graced other institutions. In spite of the scientific achievements of this group, however, the new institution did not fare well, and in 1915 Derby committed suicide, attributed by some authors to the government's disregard for the Serviço Geológico. After his death, applied research received greater and greater emphasis: "In this phase of applied geology, preference is given to economic topics - petroleum, hydraulic energy, iron, coal, and even agricultural soil - in addition to the geographic surveying of the Amazon basin and the publication of many maps of different regions of the nation."⁽⁴⁹⁾ Derby was succeeded by Gonzaga Campos, a graduate of Ouro Preto's Escola de Minas, who held this post until 1924, when he was replaced by another graduate of the Escola de Minas, Eusébio Paulo de Oliveira.⁽⁵⁰⁾

The Serviço Geológico grew under the jurisdiction of the Ministério da Agricultura, Indústria e Comércio (Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Trade). Jesus Soares Pereira, a civil servant who was to play an influential role in Brazil's nationalist economic policies of the following decades, described the place as a very special institution, full of public spirit and dedication.⁽⁵¹⁾ Other observers viewed it much the same way.

When Gonzaga Campos was still head of the Serviço Geológico, daily afternoon meetings in the director's office addressed major problems concerning sea transportation, ports, railroads, highways (the execution of vast public works had already begun in the Northeast), fuels, water energy resources, electrical energy, dams, ores, and manufacturing industries.⁽⁵²⁾ The minister himself, then Hildefonso Simões Lopes, would show up at these gatherings from time to time to join in the discussions.

The two major topics were steel and petroleum. The Brazilian government contracted with American entrepreneur Percival Farquhar and granted him monopoly over the export of ores in exchange for the construction of a steel plant in Brazil. The contract had generated much debate ever since it was signed in 1920, which dramatized a debate that would be present in Brazilian economic life in the decades to follow. The liberals argued for opening up the country to foreign ventures and accepting its role of a supplier of agricultural products and raw materials to the industrialized centers, while the nationalists strived to encourage domestic industrialization through public incentives and the establishment of state control over natural riches.⁽⁵³⁾ There was a clash of ideas but also of regions and groups. Scientists and technologists viewed their roles in Brazil's future economic growth differently. The nationalists, mostly graduates from the Ouro Preto school, tended to see themselves as civil servants responsible for leading the country on the road of progress. The liberals were mostly from the Escola Politécnica in Rio de Janeiro and usually combined their technical role with entrepreneurial activities, either as contractors for the state or in association with large Brazilian or international economic groups.

In 1921 the Ministry of Agriculture created the Estação Experimental de Combustíveis e Minérios in Rio de Janeiro, which was to become Brazil's first technological research institution in the modern sense, with the purpose of continuing and broadening studies of the energy potential of coal deposits in southern Brazil. Soon other fuels and mineral resources were also included.⁽⁵⁴⁾ As the station's first director, Ernesto Luis da Fonseca Costa sought to attract the most qualified personnel to his team, among them Sílvio Froes Abreu, his favorite disciple and successor.⁽⁵⁵⁾ Concern over the nation's energy resources shortly spurred technological research into the use of alcohol in combustion engines. In response to a sugar glut and the lowered competitiveness of this commodity on the international market, the Brazilian government decreed in 1931 that alcohol be mixed with gasoline at the pumps in a concentration of 5 percent.⁽⁵⁶⁾

As time passed, the station broadened its range of activities and thereby attracted a growing number of researchers, mostly from Rio's Escola Politécnica. In 1933 it came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture's short-lived Diretoria Geral de Pesquisas Científicas, headed by Juarez Távora. One year later the station came under the control of the Ministry of Labor, Commerce, and Industry, created at the end of 1930, and received the name it bears today: Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia. The new institute maintained the routine technological work and goals of the original station, and new fields of work were added: metal-making, construction materials, physics and chemistry, electricity, fermentation, and others. Equipped with excellent laboratories for its day, the Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia became for some time Brazil's main center for technological research activities, excluding biomedical sciences. In 1934, while still director of the Instituto, Fonseca Costa brought in a young German researcher and engineer, Bernard Gross, who was to become the institute's leading resident scientist.⁽⁵⁷⁾

Behind the transition from the Ministry of Agriculture to the Ministry of Labor was the institute's leadership opposition to the nationalist orientation that was to prevail under Juarez Távora. Fonseca Costa was strong enough as a personality to keep the institute going and even expand its activities and role during World War Il. This was not true of Sílvio Froes Abreu, who replaced him after his death in 1947.

The old Serviço Geológico was on the other side of the fence. In 1934 it was transformed into a new and refurbished Departamento Nacional da Produção Mineral. The new structure included a waters service, a section for the promotion of mineral production, and a central laboratory besides the geological service, which was responsible for research in geology and paleontology. In addition to its research tasks, the department was to establish norms to execute ore and petroleum policies then taking shape.

The creation of the department was timed with the promulgation of the Mining Code, which for the first time in Brazil's history determined that underground riches belonged to the nation, not to land owners, and that their exploitation would depend on government approval. The new department was created within a tense climate of criticism of the old Serviço Geológico.⁽⁵⁸⁾ It was against this background that the new department was entrusted to the direction of Fleury da Rocha, a graduate of Ouro Preto's Escola de Minas

The tone of the debate can be seen in the role of Monteiro Lobato, best known today as Brazil's leading writer of children's books. Lobato was also a frustrated entrepreneur and indignant about the obstacles the department put in the way of his efforts to find oil through his private company. He was convinced that the department had developed an association with the large American oil companies to prevent Brazil from producing oil, and he looked for German partners to compensate. Jesus Soares Pereira, a long-term supporter of the department's nationalist policies, agreed with Lobato on many counts, but he supported the department's stand as a defense of national resources against predatory foreign exploitation.⁽⁵⁹⁾

The issue had an unavoidable scientific dimension. Did Brazil have any petroleum or not? The department argued that there was no petroleum located within Brazilian territory, based on the opinion of two specialists contracted from the United States, Victor Oppenheim and Mark C. Malamphy.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Petroleum was eventually found, but never in the amounts imagined by Lobato.

The debate was made more difficult because scientific training, as provided by the Escola de Minas did not enable the geologists of the new department to undertake top-quality geological research. When Viktor Leinz arrived from Germany in 1934 to join the department s newly created petrography section at the invitation of Djalma Guimarães, he found a stimulating but not very professional climate. The Escola's library was deficient and exclusively dedicated to French works, ignoring all German and English texts. Leinz characterizes the Escola de Ouro Preto at the time as "polyvalent":

It trained engineers of all kinds. Geology of course represented only one small facet of these teachings, and so the geological part was small. There were civil engineers, mining engineers, metal making engineers. It was evident they had little to offer to the field of geology. Only a few could overcome this problem, amateurishly-that is, through self-teaching. Their colleagues lacked an adequate geological background... They were familiar with Brazil but did not know much about general geological problems. This perhaps is better today.⁽⁶¹⁾

One way to improve the department's scientific level was to hire foreign scientists, among which Viktor Leinz can be considered an outstanding example. The war in Europe provided many others, including world renowned chemist Fritz Feigl and physicist-chemist Hans Zocher. "At one point the laboratory alone had twelve top-rate foreign specialists," recalled Mário da Silva Pinto in an interview. "Men-professors from universities in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Germany-who had many followers and left behind them dozens if not hundreds of contributions, including some with practical utility." But this influx of foreign talent was not enough to transform the department into the basis for an autonomous tradition of scientific work.⁽⁶²⁾

São Paulo Takes the Leadership

To a large extent, success in applied science was a main cause of the crisis that pervaded most Brazilian scientific and technological institutions in the 1920s and 1930s and led first to the progressive concentration of competence in the state of São Paulo and later to the creation of Brazil's first higher education institutions with significant research functions. Applied scientific efforts gained support owing to their spectacular achievements, but the price of this support was an image that was difficult to maintain: that almost everything could be solved through science and that scientists therefore deserved wholehearted support. This kind of image was difficult to reconcile with the maintenance of scientific activities over an extended period - only sporadically producing results with more obvious social and economic applications - or with the idea that only scientists themselves can judge the importance of their work.

The Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, or Manguinhos, is perhaps the best example of what was then occurring to a greater or lesser extent in other institutes. After making its initial impact, the institute managed to maintain its prestigious position thanks to a highly talented staff, its ties to the international scientific community, and the administrative and financial autonomy that were guaranteed in its bylaws and sales of vaccines. But after its initial surge forward, Manguinhos failed to grow or to renew itself; it was equally unsuccessful in preserving its former high standards regarding the scientific work being produced. Salaries were low, financial autonomy was restricted by bureaucratic centralization, and strict criteria of competence for the admittance of personnel began to be abandoned. As the institute lost its high visibility and failed to renew, internal feuds, some of them along doctrinal lines, grew in importance. Cardoso Fontes, an avowed positivist, held divergent views about the nature of transmissible diseases and confronted the group headed by Cruz and Chagas on those grounds.⁽⁶³⁾

The law forbidding civil servants from holding more than one post led several of Manguinhos most important collaborators to resign. Adding to these obstacles was the loss of financial autonomy. In the late 1930s all civil service in Brazil came under the centralized authority of a single agency, the Departamento de Administração do Serviço Público (Department for the Administration of Civil Service) and the institute was treated as a bureaucratic office like all others. In the end, Manguinhos failed to keep step with changes in the handling of epidemics introduced by chemotherapy in the 1930s. It soon lost its status as Brazil's most brilliant center for sanitary medicine.

São Paulo, fast becoming Brazil's main economic hub, succeeded in attracting many talented individuals that Rio - Manguinhos in particular - failed to retain. Three institutions in São Paulo-the Instituto Biológico, the Instituto Butantã, and the Faculdade de Medicina supplemented this brain drain with their policies of actively hiring talent from abroad and other forms of international cooperation.

Otto Bier, José Reis, Martins Penha, and others who started in Manguinhos were recruited to the Instituto Biológico in São Paulo by Artur Neiva and Rocha Lima, also natives of Rio. They were later joined by Maurício Rocha e Silva.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Otto Bier confirms that

the Instituto Biológico recruited bacteriologists and immunologists through consultations with the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, which in the end was the source of scientists... who came to fill the first posts at São Paulo's sister institute. The Instituto Oswaldo Cruz told São Paulo's Instituto Biológico who were the best students in its training course in the last three years. This is how Adolfo Martins Penha, José Reis, and I were appointed to posts as bacteriologists and immunologists at São Paulo's Instituto Biológico.⁽⁶⁵⁾

The same pattern was followed by another institution in São Paulo, the Instituto Butantã, which grew out of a laboratory that Adolfo Lutz organized to produce a vaccine against the bubonic plague. Under Vital Brasil since 1901, Butantã began to take on the nature of a center for advanced research into such little-known areas as diphtheria, tetanus, and snake and scorpion antidotes.⁽⁶⁶⁾ Afrânio do Amaral, a young scientist trained in Bahia with Pirajá da Silva, was nominated as the new director and in that capacity in 1921 left for a long period in the United States. Amaral worked in the organization of the Antivenom Institute of America in the United States, and before his return in 1927 he was replaced at the Butantã by Rudolph Klauss (former director of Buenos Aires' Bacteriological Institute) and Vital Brasil again.

Upon his return to the Instituto Butantã, Afrânio do Amaral set up a new area of specialization: the biochemistry of venom His second term (1927-38) was marked by his efforts to transplant American academic organization and the German scientific tradition.⁽⁶⁷⁾ The institute opened up several new sections during this period, including those of experimental physico-chemistry; experimental chemistry; experimental genetics with cyto-embryology; experimental physiopathology with endocrinology and pharmacobiology; experimental immunology with serum therapy; virus and virus therapy; medical botany with pharmacognosies (aimed at the cultivation and study of Brazilian medicinal plants); and the traditional departments of ophidiology and medical zoology', bacteriology, and bacteriotherapy; immunology; and serum therapy, protozoology, and parasitology.⁽⁶⁸⁾ Besides the Germans, other scientists were brought to Butantã. Some, such as Tales Martins and Lemos Monteiro, came directly from Manguinhos or had spent time there. When the Universidade de São Paulo was created in 1934, the Instituto Butantã was appended as an associated institute.⁽⁶⁹⁾

Since its founding in 1913, São Paulo's Faculdade de Medicina relied heavily on the help of foreign professors, including parasitologist Emílio Brumpt and Italian anatomist Alfonso Bovero. Arnaldo Vieira de Carvalho, founder of this Faculdade and its first director until his death in 1920, was the instigator of this reliance on foreign professors, a preference that was to be felt even more sharply when the Universidade de São Paulo was being established.⁽⁷⁰⁾ Ribeiro do Vale recalls that in the 1920s he "chose the Faculdade of São Paulo, then relatively young and not very much preferred . . . Future doctors usually chose to attend the university in Rio, even students from São Paulo. Students from Minas Gerais, for example, also tended to enroll at Rio . . . because they wanted a chance to study under the illustrious Miguel Couto and other great names in Brazilian medicine."⁽⁷¹⁾

Brazilian science thus found itself facing a paradox. Rio de Janeiro offered a limited but prestigious scientific environment, with places where the large philosophical, economic, and political questions were aired and disputed. São Paulo, in contrast, was much more provincial, a place where things were just getting started and with little visibility and recognition. But the region's wealth meant that the best job offers for researchers were at its institutes. Rio was also witnessing the birth of an ideology that placed a high value on scientific endeavors, on the university, and on twentieth-century rationality, which developed independently and without any direct relation to professional scientific work in the strict sense. The Manguinhos group had an important role to play in this new climate, but even more important was the Escola Politécnica, the starting point and motivating force behind Brazil's cultural and intellectual scene during the 1920s and 1930s. Combined, they had a crucial role in the broad movement for a true university in Brazil - a project that surprisingly would become a reality only in São Paulo.

The concentration of institutional and financial resources in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro inhibited similar projects in other regions. The best students in Bahia, the Northeast, Minas Gerais, and Rio Grande do Sul and those who could afford it-would seek Rio and São Paulo for their studies and usually not return to their states of origin. This concentration, however, was never absolute, and an exception occurred in one significant regional pole: Minas Gerais.

The intellectual tradition of Minas Gerais goes back to the state's eighteenth-century gold period, when affluent families sent their children to Europe to study.⁽⁷²⁾ Even with the end of the gold era, Minas was to remain an important center in terms of Brazilian population, culture, and politics. Up to the end of that century, the state's leadership role was eclipsed only by the presence of the court itself in Rio de Janeiro.

Although the decline of gold-mining activities and the imposition of an economy of subsistence forced a movement toward rural areas, the state's population was from its beginnings largely urban, and the urban elite did its best to foster the development of culture. The Escola de Minas in Ouro Preto was originally established to train miners, but during the republican period under the protection and in the interest of the state government, it slowly became a professional engineering school. The coming of the Republic also saw the creation of a law school (1892) and the medical and engineering schools (1911). Some prestigious high schools were also founded, both Catholic (such as the Colégio Arnaldo) and public (such as the Liceu de Ouro Preto and later the Ginásio Mineiro, which followed the model of the prestigious Colégio Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro).

Besides, Belo Horizonte attracted people from Rio de Janeiro for an unlikely reason: relief from tuberculosis. Marques Lisboa, Borges da Costa, Almeida Cunha, Hugo Werneck, Ezequiel Dias-all physicians and Manguinhos graduates-suffered from tuberculosis and traded the humid and unhealthy Rio for the mountains of Minas, taking with them their educational backgrounds, their work experience, and their contacts. Ezequiel Dias, for example, was a close relative of Oswaldo Cruz by marriage, and the opening of a Manguinhos branch in Minas seems to have been chiefly a way to prolong his life without interrupting his research career. Belo Horizonte's Faculdade de Medicina was to benefit from the experience brought from Rio by this group.⁽⁷³⁾ The Rio group of scientists kept it running, joined by J. Baeta Viana, who is recognized for his goiter studies and founder of a local research line in the field of physiological chemistry.⁽⁷⁴⁾

Besides its notable work in developing and producing antidotes for scorpion and snake bites, the Instituto Ezequiel Dias was a veritable intellectual center for Belo Horizonte's academic life. The institute's researchers kept in close contact with Manguinhos, sending many graduates to the Rio organization.⁽⁷⁵⁾ The institute had a well-stocked library, and every Thursday major articles were presented and discussed with the participation of Faculdade de Medicina professors not directly linked to the Instituto Ezequiel Dias. At the end of the 1930s the Instituto Ezequiel Dias was taken over by the state government. The idea was to place increased emphasis on industrial aspects of the institute to help finance research activities. A few years later, with the state government under federal intervention by the Getúlio Vargas regime, the appointed governor, Benedito Valadares, decided to turn the institute into a purely industrial establishment to produce antidotes and vaccines, and research activities were prohibited.⁽⁷⁶⁾

Another significant institution was the Instituto de Química that existed within Minas Gerais' Escola de Engenharia.⁽⁷⁷⁾ The institute served as a base for the activities of the state and federal government's mineralogical services within Minas.⁽⁷⁸⁾

Alumni of the Escola de Minas were also responsible for the birth of other significant teaching institutions, such as the Escola de Engenharia de Itajuba and today's Universidade Federal de Viçosa, an important center for agricultural studies and research. The schools of law, engineering, and medicine laid the foundations for the 1927 creation of the Universidade de Minas Gerais.

After that, Minas Gerais remained a place where students could begin their education and even get in touch with people and institutions trying to uphold the standards of scientific work that were being developed in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Most of these students came from a small elite of landed families, and the intermingling of family, intellectual, and scientific ties is impossible to disentangle. Young students would be sent to study medicine or engineering in Belo Horizonte and would often continue their careers in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Minas Gerais' ability to keep these students in their region or to bring new talent from other places was very limited, and the same can be said of other regional centers like Rio Grande do Sul or Recife. More often than not, their academic and research institutions worked mostly as a selecting and breeding ground for the country's central cities.

Notes

1. Skidmore 1967; Schwartzman 1982.

2. Schwartzman (ed.) 1983.

3. Schwartzman, Bomeny & Costa 1984.

4. Wirth 1970.

5. Schwartzman 1975 and 1982.

6. Delfim Neto 1959; E. P. Reis 1979.

7. Barros 1959.

8. Manchester 1933; R. Graham 1968; Needell 1987.

9. Letter sent to his wife from the theater of operations of the Paraguayan war in the 1870s. as quoted by Lins 1967:39.

10. Danon interview.

11. F. de Azevedo 1963:288. For Fernando de Azevedo. the republican regime "neither contemplated nor opted for radically changing the educational system to promote the intellectual renewal of the cultural and political elites needed within the new democratic institutions. Maintaining its almost purely professional character, higher education in Brazil was not enhanced by the establishment of cultural institutes such as schools of philosophy and letters or of science. which could link theoretical research to teaching. Nor were any efforts made to foster a scientific spirit by establishing new bases for the reorganization and reorientation of secondary education, the foundation on which the superstructure of higher education - whether applied or not, professional or not usually rests" (Azevedo 1963:626). Written in 1940, these statements reflect the author's participation in the movements for educational reform and the creation of the Universidade de São Paulo in the 1930s.

12. A survey lists 217 Brazilian students at the Université de l'État de Gand between 1817 and 1914, of which 183 were majoring in engineering. The total of Brazilian students in Belgium during that period was 613, most of whom were majoring in technical fields (Stols 1974:657).

13. Stepan 1976:140.

14. As of 1845 the observatory was headed by a lecturer of the Escola Militar, Soulier de Sauvre, and from 1850 through 1870 by members of the military (Antônio Manuel de Melo, former minister of war and general artillery commander during the Paraguayan war, and Curvelo d'Ávila, former navy commander). Emmanuel Liais, a member of the French expedition that came to observe a solar eclipse in 1858, was appointed director in 1870. In 1881 he was succeeded by Louis Cruls. Born in Belgium and a student of civil engineering at the University of Gand until 1868 and later of the military school, Cruls became friends with Brazilian students there. finally coming to Brazil, where he participated in the Brazilian map commission from 1874 until 1876. Following Cruls, the observatory's next head was Henrique Morize. Although French-born, Morize had graduated from Rio's Escola Politécnica in industrial engineering, where he then played an important role as physics professor until 1925 (Ribeiro 1955).

15. Morais 1955.

16. Lélio Gama worked at the Observatório Nacional from 1917 until his retirement in 1977 and was its director between 1951 and 1967. The quotation above is taken from a written statement prepared for this study in 1977. For broader biographical references and other primary sources, see Museu de Astronomia e Ciências Afins 1988.

17. Lélio Gama, written statement for the author.

18. In 1933 the observatory got its old name back, and its headquarters were moved to a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, São Cristóvão. The observatory, however, did not keep up with new developments. In both Europe and the United States during the 1920s traditional descriptive and positional astronomy were being replaced by astrophysics. In 1937 Domingos Costa was chosen to oversee construction of a regional astrophysical station in the mountainous area of the state of Rio de Janeiro but the impending outbreak of World War II kept the Brazilian branch of the German Zeiss Corporation from assuming commercial responsibility for the maintenance of this station, and the project was shelved. Morais 1955: 126-42.

19. Ribeiro 1955:171.

20. Quoted in Paim 1974:111-12.

21. "Alguns Erros de Matemática na Síntese Subjetiva de Augusto Comte" (Some Errors in the Mathematics and Subjective Synthesis of Auguste Comte) in the Revista da Escola Politécnica reprinted in 1903 by the French journal L'Enseignement Mathématique as "Quelques Erreurs de Comte."

22. Costa 1971:71.

23. In 1900. Amoroso Costa at the age of fifteen having completed his humanities studies at the Instituto Henrique Kopke, at the time one of Rio's best high schools, entered the Escola Politécnica. In 1919 he presented a dissertation on binary stars. and in the same year he took over teaching Escola's topography and astronomy section. In 1924 he was appointed head professor of the class of spherical trigonometry, theoretical astronomy and geodesy. Between 1920 and 1925 Amoroso Costa took three courses at the Faculté de Lettres in Paris: introduction to the philosophy of sciences. given by Abel Rey; theory of knowledge, given by Leon Brunschvig; and the theory of the movement of the moon. given by H. Andoyer. Influenced by the first two, Amoroso Costa began to dedicate himself to the philosophy of mathematics and problems of cosmogony. In 1928, at the age of forty three, he was killed in a plane crash when participating in a commemoration of Santos Dumont's return from Europe to Rio de Janeiro Several other leading figures of Rio de Janeiro's scientific community also died on that flight.

24. "Pela Ciência Pura." included in Costa 1971:150-52. Lélio Gama, in his introduction to Costa's book, writes: "Amoroso Costa had the privilege of making us aware that just as there is beauty in art, there is beauty in the philosophy of pure sciences. In short,. he made us understand that feelings and intelligence are the two secret lyres from which man extracts the melodies he dedicates to nature" Gama 1971:29-30).

25. The reason for this visit has been of great interest, since it could mean that Einstein had colleagues in Rio whom he could recognize and with whom he could talk. In reality, however, his visit to Brazil was just a stopover on a trip to Buenos Aires. For physics in Argentina at the time, see Pyenson 1984.

26. The first significant research work at São Paulo's Politécnica was carried on by Francisco Ferreira Ramos, who as professor of physics was already taking X-rays in 1896, only one year after their discovery by Roentgen. He was succeeded in 1897 by the indus trial engineer Constantino Rondelli, a graduate of the University of Torino. In 1911 Afonso d'Escragnole Taunay succeeded Rondelli. In 1912 Luis Adolfo Vanderley was appointed professor of physics and began some investigations in applied physics. Working with Geraldo H. de Paula Souza (who had been responsible for the creation of the school's Laboratório de Ensaios Materiais, which became the Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas in 1925), Adolfo Vanderley established the energy value of dozens of different kinds of food, did experiments with vegetal fuels, and carried out some studies on the radioactivity of mineral water springs. See D'Alessandro 1943; Meiller and Silva 1949.

27. Born in São Paulo in 1896, Teodoro Ramos took his final exams at the Ginásio Petrópolis high school in 1911. The following year he entered Rio de Janeiro's Escola Politécnica, and he graduated in civil engineering in 1916. In 1933 he was made responsible for hiring faculty at the Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, at the Universidade de São Paulo. He died in 1936 at the age of forty.

28. F. M. de O. Castro 1955;68.

29. F. M. de O. Castro 1955:69.

30. The main source of information concerning this era is the Anais da Academia Imperial de Medicina, 1870-90, later retitled the Anais da Academia de Medicina. For a comprehensive study of medical research in Brazil at the turn of the century; see Stepan 1976. See also Machado, Loureiro, Luz & Muricy 1978.

31. In the early years of the Republic a private group, the Companhia Docas de Santos, received a one-hundred-year lease to operate the Santos harbor. Its owners, Cãndido Gaffrée and Eduardo Guinle, established a foundation, the Fundação Gaffrée-Guinle, which strongly supported most initiatives related to medical research in Brazil in the following decades.

32. There was no secret about the method for preparing Jenner's smallpox vaccine, whose technology had remained unchanged (though somewhat perfected) since its invention at the end of the eighteenth century, but Brazil had nevertheless relied on imports before the establishment of the Instituto Vacinogênico.

33. Blount 1971.

34. Amaral 1958:381

35. Gabriel Pisa, then Brazil's embassador to France and entrusted with making contact with Pasteur, reported: "In answer to my letter, the illustrious scholar Pasteur has recommended his disciple Felix Le Dantec to head the Instituto Bacteriológico, considering that Mr. Le Dantec is from all aspects worthy of this post, alumnus of the École Normale Supérieur, Doctor of Natural Sciences and laboratory assistant at the Pasteur Institute" (Campos l954:5l8).

36. Born in Rio de Janeiro of Swiss parents, Lutz studied medicine at the University of Bern, from which he graduated in 1877 Afterward he visited several medical centers in Europe, , making contact with J. Lister in London and Pasteur in France and working in dermatology with J. Unna in Hamburg. He came back to Brazil in 1881, had his degree validated in Rio de Janeiro's Escola de Medicina and began to work as a physician. He worked with leprosy patients in a small town in São's Paulo's countryside, Limeira, and published several articles on the subject in the Zeitschrift für Dermatologie. He is supposed to have been the firs's researcher to provide the full description of the leprosy bacillus, a primacy that was later obscured by better known authors. In 1889 he was invited by J. Unna to work in a leprosy hospital in Hawaii. Having returned to Brazil in 1893, he was invited to become the vice-director of the Instituto Bacteriológico, replacing Le Dantec; and he became its formal director in 1895 (Campos 1954:518; Martins 1955:222; Stepan 1976:139-140).

37. Stepan 1976:140.

38. When Lutz identified the fever afflicting São Paulo in 1895 as typhoid, he had to contend with the opposition of the newly created Sociedade Médica e Cirúrgica de São Paulo. which refused to accept a diagnostic methodology based on the identification of causal organisms. They insisted on the traditional view that epidemics were caused by environmental conditions such as the weather, a notion that led to the very concept of "tropical diseases." The impasse was broken democratically by a vote. which Lutz lost. According to him, doctors at that time "systematically oppose all progress. basing their ideas on the works of authors who are either not competent or out of date" (quoted in Stepan 1976:141).

39. Nuno de Andrade was a founder of the Policlínica Geral, then the most important general hospital in Rio de Janeiro, and a pioneer in bacteriology in Brazil. He needed the backing of the Academia de Medicina, which had a tradition of providing advice on controversial questions regarding public or private health. The academy expressed its support by making a favorable judgment concerning the quality of the studies and the bacteriologists themselves, some of whom had already accumulated a significant amount of experience; Francisco Fajardo, Adolfo Lutz, Chapot-Prevost, Virgílio Otoni, Oswaldo Cruz, Batista Lacerda, Ismael da Rocha, Pinto Portela, and Clemente Ferreira (Anais da Academia de Medicina 1897;71, 77).

40. Guerra 1940:70; Neiva 1941:70.

41. Carone 1971:197.

42. Pena 1977.

43. From a letter to O País, Rio de Janeiro as quoted by Porto 1987:57. See also Nachman 1977; J. M. Carvalho 1987.

44. According to the new bylaws established m a decree of 12 December 1907, the reformed institute was to study parasitic and infectious diseases that attack humans, animals. and plants, as well as questions concerning hygiene and zoology; it would also pre pare therapeutic serum and similar products that could be used in the treatment and prevention of disease. If the scientific work produced there permitted, the institute would become also a veterinary school, covering the fields of animal pathology, hygiene, and therapy. See Barbosa and Barbosa 1909:155-56.

45. The need to attain a greater understanding of the mosquito. a carrier of malaria, furnished Brazil with its first entomologists; Carlos Chagas, Artur Neiva, Costa Lima, César Pinto. Gomes de Faria. and Antônio Peryassa.

46. Fonseca Filho 1974:46.

47. Neiva 1941:64.

48. The Comissão Geológica do Império (Imperial Geological Commission) lasted from 1875 to 1877. It was headed by Charles F. Hartt, who had been to Brazil with the 1865-66 Thayer expedition, under the direction of Louis Agassiz and who in 1871 headed Cornell University's Morgan expedition. In 1870 Hartt published Geology and Physical Geography of Brazil, a book based on his earlier travels. Members of the commission included Americans Orville A. Derby, John Caspar Branner, and Richard Rathburn and Brazilians Pacheco Jordão and Francisco J. de Freitas. Derby was invited to organize São Paulo's Comissão Geográfica e Geológica in 1886, where he worked with E. Hussak and two graduates of Ouro Preto, Luis Felipe Gonzaga Campos and Francisco P. Oliveira. He was the first director of the Serviço Geológico e Mineralógico do Brasil, from 1906 until his suicide in 1915. Two other short-lived institutions were established in 1891 - the Comissão de Exploração Geográfica e Geológica de Minas Gerais and the Comissão Especial do Planalto Central do Brazil (Special Commission for the Brazilian Central Highlands) - which did the first studies to determine the location of Brazil's future capital, Brasilia. This period was also marked by coal research efforts carried out by the Comissão dos Estudos do Carvão (Commission for Coal Studies). Headed by American geologist I. C. White, that commission made stratigraphic surveys of southern Brazil during 1904-5 (Leonardos 1955; Leinz 1955; Pereira 1955).

49. Pereira 1955:369.

50. From then on, alumni of the Escola de Minas de Ouro Preto dominated the earth sciences: statesman Pandiá Calógeras, author of the classic As Minas do Brasil na Legislação (1905); Miguel Arrojado Lisboa, considered the most important geologist of his time; and a long list of researchers for the Serviço Geológico including Fleury da Rocha, Alberto Betim Pais Leme, Avelino Inácio de Oliveira, Paulino Franco de Carvalho, José Ferreira de Andrade Jr., Pedro de Moura, Glycon de Paiva Teixeira, Irnack Carvalho do Amaral, Álvaro die Paiva Abreu, and many others. Alumni of Rio de Janeiro's Escola Politécnica also made significant contributions to the geosciences; Othon Leonardos, Ferdinand Laboriau Filho. Sílvio Froes Abreu, and Mário da Silva Pinto, among others. Biographies of these geologists can be found in Leonardos 1955:270-86. From 1927, when he was still an engineering student, Mário da Silva Pinto remembers Eusébio de Oliveira as the man who trained many of Brazil's earth scientists. Under his guidance, Silva Pinto served in all sections of the Serviço (chemistry, physico-chemistry, topography, drilling, geology), acquiring a vast general background (Pinto interview).

51. "Within the Ministry of Agriculture - especially in Brazil's former Serviço Geológico e Mineralógico, later transformed into the Departamento Nacional da Produção Mineral - there was a highly enlightened and active core of nationalists. I worked alongside men like Adosindo Magalhães de Oliveira, an engineer who you do not hear much about but a man of high moral stature, the grandson of Benjamin Constant, and one of the pioneers in applying nationalist ideas of natural resources and electrical energy. Many years later he became a director of the Companhia Hidroelétrica de São Francisco." Another key figure was Mário Barbosa Carneiro; "considered Brazil's top civil servant at his time. He was a man of finest moral conduct and extremely dedicated. He left the Ministry of the Navy to organize the Ministry of Agriculture." It was thanks to Barbosa Carneiro that Jesus Soares Pereira entered the ministry and later became part of the Departamento Nacional da Produção Mineral at the time of its 1934 creation. Both Carneiro and Magalhães de Oliveira were avowed positivists (Pereira 1975:38, 58).

52. Rosa 1974:2.

53. Wirth 1970; part 2.

54. Schwartzman 1983; Schwartzman and NI. H. M. Castro 1984.

55. Other staff members included engineers Paulo Accioly de Sá; Anibal Pinto de Souza; Britain's Thomas Legall, a specialist in ovens and coal combustion; and Heraldo de Souza Matos, who supervised research on the use of ethanol in spontaneous combustion engines and was later put m charge of the division of thermic fuels and engines. Industrial chemists Joaquim Correia de Seixas and Rubem de Carvalho Roquete were also part of the team.

56. This was made possible through the successful research results. To show the possibilities, an alcohol-fueled car made experimental trips between Rio and São Paulo and between Rio and the neighboring mountain city of Petrópolis, and in 1925 a team from the station participated successfully in a car competition to demonstrate the technical feasibility of its proposals. In the 1970s, as a response to the oil crisis, Brazil engaged in a full-scale program of replacing gasoline with alcohol, a project that counted on the technical participation of the same institution, now called the Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia.

57. Gross had arrived in Rio a year earlier without any firm professional goals. As a newly trained researcher in Germany, he had participated in the measurement of cosmic rays. During his first year in Brazil he presented papers at conferences and published articles on this topic, including an article for the Politécnica's engineering journal. In spite of the quality of Gross' work, the institute entered a period of profound deterioration after World War II, from which it would never fully recover.

58. Sílvio Froes Abreu described the situation: "Private enterprise interested in the mineral industry-especially private foreign entrepreneurs-did not think kindly of this federal body; researchers were leery of the service and, thanks to the ideas planted by Clodomiro de Oliveira, a certain xenophobia among official geologists could be discerned; dissatisfaction with the director, Eusébio de Oliveira, spread as a consequence of the campaign launched by São Paulo and Alagoas petroleum companies" (Abreu 1975:27). Froes himself was far from a neutral observer; while working in association with the Guinle group, he had been surveying the existence of oil in the state of Bahia and planned to create his own oil company, a project that was frustrated by the 1934 Code of Mines.

59. Lobato "accused the government of not being capable of discovering petroleum. To a certain extent this was not surprising. The Ministry of Agriculture's available equipment was faulty. The problem involved not just a lack of funds but how to manage these funds. This kind of criticism was undoubtedly justified." What the government did not agree with was Lobato's solution to the problem, which was to open the country's resources to private interests. The dominant view at the department was that "the government had to face Brazil's petroleum problem on a scale adequate to its available means" (Pereira 1975:35), which meant that if the government could not extract and control the oil industry in Brazil, then nobody should.

60. Lobato questioned Oppenheim's and Malamphy's qualifications on ethical terms (they supposedly had offered international consultant services on Brazilian petroleum while under contract to the department) but principally on professional terms. Lobato challenged Oppenheim's theses by referring to the work of another geologist, Chester Washburne, hired earlier by the state of São Paulo, who had raised serious doubts about the scientific validity of Oppenheim's work (Lobato 1936).

61. Leinz interview.

62. During World War II, an agreement was signed by the Department, the U.S. Bureau of Mines, and the U.S. Geological Survey through which American geologists came to help map out Brazil's strategic natural resources in a re-enactment of the old Comissão Geológica imperial. This cooperation lasted for about twenty years. In 1953, with Getúlio Vargas again in government, a law establishing the state monopoly over oil production and refinery was passed, and a state-owned company, Petrobrás, was created to that end. This was a direct consequence of the ideas generated at the Departamento da Produção Mineral in the 1930s. In time, Petrobrás launched its own training and research facilities and was influential in establishing the graduate program in engineering of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (known by the acronym COPPE), the largest in the country (Nunes, Souza & Schwartzman 1982).

63. "During Chagas' final years as director and the first few years of his successor, Cardoso Fontes, scientists who were not very well qualified were admitted to the staff at Manguinhos Such admissions resulted from personal ties. I [Herman Lent] was witness to the beginnings of a confrontation, of the building of a wall between two groups; on the one side stood those who did nothing even though there was so much to be done, and on the other side stood those who produced, published, worked, and struggled very hard for the funds they wanted. . . . I believe this was the beginning of an internal struggle and of troubles that later became more complex for the same reason; people on the one hand in greater and greater need of funds, facing greater and greater difficulties, while others, who could have been producing, did not do so with the needed intensity, with the intensity of the first group - and those were the ones to have access to funds, travel, conveniences, other possibilities, and even second jobs outside the institute. The institute no longer had its former spirit as a full-time work center" (Lent interview). Another source of antagonisms involved distribution of the profits from the manqueira and other vaccines. The group unoflicially headed by Cardoso Fontes defended distributing these earnings equally among all Manguinhos researchers and scientists instead of using them for the institute's work.

64. "Things had come to a standstill in Rio when I [Rocha e Silva] graduated [1934 35].... Things were very difficult for someone wanting to begin a scientific career. The only possibility was to join Manguinhos, earning starvation wages (if one managed to earn any salary at all) or doing unpaid training work. The wealthy could afford to do this, and they stayed" (Silva interview).

65. Bier interview.

66. Vital Brasil was educated in Brazil, and it was his studies on antivenim that first led him to travel abroad, in 1904, when he was already head of the Instituto Butantã. He had intimate connections with the Manguinhos group, and his stay as head of Butantã can be seen as evidence that scientific activities were firmly established in São Paulo, already independent of Adolfo Lutz' pioneering work. Vital Brasil remained director until 1919, when he was replaced briefly by João Florêncio Gomes, who had been trained at the Manguinhos Institute in Rio de Janeiro Following a disagreement with the state of São Paulo's sanitary service that same year, Vital Brasil and many of Butantã's other scientists transferred to Niterói, across the Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro, where they founded what is now known as the Instituto Vital Brasil.

67. Amaral felt comfortable in both. This is how he spoke of his American experience; "The climate I found at Harvard was very similar -although more ample, as it was richer-to that which I had left at Oxford, where I had spent some time earlier. . . I could see that at Harvard I would come in contact with what I needed most urgently to study up closely. . . . In the United States, biochemistry was developed by great American scholars who knew German and studied German textbooks, as did I They took specialization courses in Germany, where it had been proven that research is the basis of progress and that economic achievements depend on research. . . . The nations that did not follow its lead have repeatedly been met with defeat" (Amaral interview). The German presence was evident in the list of scientists Amaral brought from abroad to work at the institute; Karl Heinrich Slotta, Gerhard Szyska, Klauss A. Neisser (experimental chemistry), Gertrud von Ubisch (experimental genetics), and Dionisius von Klobusitzky and Paul König (experimental physico-chemistry).

68. Amaral 1958:387.

69. Amaral's ambitions would not be fulfilled for a long time. In the late 1930s, political interference at the institute increased and foreign scientists were pushed out, isolated, or simply became so discouraged by the lack of any research climate that they decided to leave. Directors came and went, with more than twenty serving between 1938 and 1954.

70. Born into a prestigious family. Carvalho had graduated from Rio's Faculdade de Medicina in 1889. and in 1897. at the age of thirty, he had become director of the clinical staff at that city's public hospital, the Santa Casa de Misericórdia. Much before this time Carvalho had earned a position of prestige and leadership in São Paulo, particularly because of his work as head of the Instituto Vacinogênico upon its creation in 1892.

71. Vale interview.

72. Frieiro 1982.

73. The Faculdade de Medicina was originally created as a private institute by the physician Cícero Ferreira. Ferreira was related to the Chagas family and came from the same home town, Oliveira.

74. Recipient of a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1924, Baeta Viana traveled to the United States, where he worked at Yale and Harvard with Otto Folin and L. B. Mendel, returning to the Universidade de Minas Gerais as its central figure in biochemical research. Another important name in chemistry in Minas Gerais was Francisco de Paula Magalhães Gomes, who after graduating from the high school Liceu de Ouro Preto studied at that city's Escola de Farmácia and went on to graduate in medicine from Rio, where he was a classmate of Oswaldo Cruz. Upon his return to Belo Horizonte, he became the first professor of chemistry at the Faculdade de Medicina, which was noted for its high standards of excellence. Another well-known Minas Gerais personality was Carlos Pinheiro Chagas, the first Brazilian to receive a Rockefeller fellowship in 1915. It is significant that he was also a relative of Carlos Chagas.

75. Staff members at Ezequiel Dias included Aurora Neves, bacteriologist and mycologist; Melo Campos, scorpion and snake specialist; Otávio Magalhães Ezequiel Dias' successor as head of the institute; and young Amílcar Viana Martins, who joined the institute in 1924 at the age of seventeen.

76. "Valadares appointed a cousin of his to the post of administrative director: Dr. Antônio Valadares Bahia, a totally unknown physician from Papagaio do Pitangui. He used to say that he'd rather split a yard of firewood than reach for a book. As a result, Otávio Magalhães left, and the institute as a research body disappeared" (Martins interview).

77. The Instituto de Química was headed by German-horn Alfred Schaeffer, who had received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Munich under the guidance of Adolph von Bayer. Schaeffer's collaboration with Baeta Viana was, to use Leal Prado's word, intense. Despite the dominant American influence on Viana's work, Leal Prado believes it is "possible to say that, albeit remote, the German influence [referring to Schaeffer; exerted over Baeta Viana and even on some of his students (Anibal Teotônio Batista, Ageo Pinto Sobrinho, and others) helped instill the department with an exacting attitude regarding the instruments and methods used" (L. Prado 1975)

78. Together with the chemists, various mining engineers (most of them Ouro Preto graduates) organized what came to be known as the Laboratório da Rua Bahia no.52. They included Djalma Guimarães, Otávio Barbosa, Sebastião Virgílio Ferreira, Olinto Vieira Pereira, and Manuel Pimentel de Godói. This group was responsible for the creation of Minas Instituto de Tecnologia Industrial, founded in 1944 and later transformed into the Centro de Tecnologia do Estado (Instituto de Tecnologia Industrial 1958).