A Space for Science, Simon Schwartzman, 1991, chapter 7

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

Simon Schwartzman

The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991

Chapter 7

TOWARD A SCIENTIFIC ROLE

The Pioneers

Second Generation: Beginnings of Professionalization

Second Generation: The Hard Sciences

Modern Scientists: The Third Generation

Sources of Financial Support

The Rockefeller Foundation in Brazil

Centralized Administration and Scientific Research

Notes

Scientific institutions and communities with stability and space for long-term projects and growth can prosper only when society comes to recognize and accept science as a profession. Some of this recognition existed in the old museums and other scientific institutions of imperial times, but none survived the pragmatic mood of the Republic. When the protective emperor left, those who wanted to do research had to teach in professional schools, work on sanitary campaigns, produce medications, take care of patients, work on engineering projects, and look for mineral riches. Long-term scientific work could be done only during leisure time or hidden under applied activities. It was not only that society did not recognize science but also that the scientists themselves, with a few exceptions, lacked a clear view of their role and place in society. In the following decades this role began to take shape in the scientists' minds, and they worked to obtain recognition from society, a struggle that is far from complete.

We have seen different aspects of this process in the preceding chapters. Here, we look at it again through a broad comparison between different generations of scientists that shaped the Brazilian scientific community, which should bring the previous chapters into clear focus. As a reference, we shall take a closer look at the professional careers of the sample of fifty-six leading scientists interviewed for our study.⁽¹⁾ The dividing line between generations is always arbitrary, hut the sample falls naturally into three groups. The first contains those who were born at the turn of the century; whom I call the pioneers; the second group is made up of those who were born ten to twenty years later, who were introduced to the sciences by the first and who created the first modern scientific institutions in Brazil; in the third group are scientists who studied in these new institutions and are the bridge between the older generation and today.

The Pioneers

With few exceptions, the Brazilians in the oldest generation studied either engineering or medicine in Rio de Janeiro They were all children of middle-class, educated families. Their parents were small-businessmen, physicians, and teachers, so contact with some kind of intellectual activity was not alien to them.

Of the four names in the physical sciences (see Table 1), only the first, Lélio Gama, had, properly speaking, a scientific career. He graduated with a degree in engineering from the Politécnica in Rio de Janeiro and later participated in the group of mathematicians headed by Otto de Alencar and Amoroso Costa. Lélio Gama worked as an astronomer in Rio de Janeiro's Observatório Nacional with Henrique Morize.

Another member of this group, Francisco Magalhães Gomes, taught physics at the Escola de Minas and later at the Escola de Engenharia de Minas Gerais, but was never a researcher in the proper sense of the word. He was influential in orienting a small group of outstanding scientists who got their training in São Paulo and abroad. The other two, Othon Leonardos and Mário da Silva Pinto, were mostly men of action and were involved in creating institutions set up by the Brazilian government to exploit Brazil's natural resources. Leonardos was also the author of a significant work on the history of Brazilian earth sciences.

Silva Pinto does not see himself as among Brazil's true pioneers in geology, "such as Glycon de Paiva or Octávio Barbosa." He describes himself mostly as a "technologist, manager, and specialist in raw materials." He considers his work on applied geology, economic geography, hydrography, and navigation secondary and incidental. After World War II, however, he helped organize the teaching of geology and establish geology as a profession. He also helped negotiate cooperation agreements between Brazil and the U.S. Bureau of Mines and the U.S. Geological Survey.⁽²⁾

By comparison, the biologists of this generation tended to be much more defined in their scientific roles (see Table 2). They all studied medicine, and almost all went through the Instituto Manguinhos in Rio de Janeiro and further advanced training abroad. They had an older generation to provide a pattern, including Oswaldo Cruz, Adolfo Lutz, and Ezequiel Dias. São Paulo had also its own research group in bacteriological and tropical diseases, but in contrast to Manguinhos it did not develop a research tradition of its own and did not survive for long. It gave rise, however, to the Instituto Butantã, where Afrânio do Amaral made his scientific and institutional career.

Both the physical and biological disciplines were French-oriented, but the field of tropical medicine and public health came under North American influence quite early, carried on mostly through the Rockefeller Foundation, which was present in Brazil in 1916. It worked both directly, in campaigns against yellow fever and ancylostomiasis, and through institutional support to the Faculdade de Medicina de São Paulo, which from the beginning adopted several features of the American system of medical education, including full-time work for professors and numerus clausus for students. There was close cooperation between the Rockefeller health specialists and Manguinhos, and several Brazilians of the next generation would continue their training in the United States through this channel.

TABLE 1. Physicists and Geologists, First Generation (1892-1907), First Degrees in Brazil
Year of Birth and Name	Specialization and Education	Place of Birth and Family Background
1892 Lélio Gama	Astronomer and mathematician, Politécnica do Rio de Janeiro	Rio de Janeiro, father a military engineer
1899 Othon Leonardos	Geologist, Politécnica do Rio de Janeiro	Minas Gerais, father a businessman
1906 Francisco Magalhães Gomes	Physicist, Escola de Minas de Ouro Preto and Universidade de Minas Gerais	Minas Gerais, father a professor at the Faculdade de Medicina
1907 Mário da Silva Pinto	Geologist and metallurgist, Politécnica do Rio de Janeiro, Departamento Nacional de Produção Mineral	Rio de Janeiro, father a professor at medical school, mother a schoolteacher

TABLE 2. Biologists, First Generation (1892-1907), First Degrees in Brazil
Year of Birth and Name	Specialization and Education	Place of Birth and Family Background
1894 Afrânio do Amaral	Tropical medicine, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, Harvard University	Pará, Brazil, father an entrepreneur (rubber plantation owner)
1895 Olímpio da Fonseca	Parasitologist, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, Manguinhos U.S., and France	Rio de Janeiro, father a medical doctor
1904 Adolfo Martins Penha	Faculdade de Medicina de Minas Gerais, Manguinhos	Interior of Minas Gerais, parents died early
1905 Otto Bier	Bacteriologist and immunologist, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro and Manguinhos	Rio de Janeiro, son of European immigrants
1907 José Reis	Bacteriologist, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, Manguinhos, Instituto Biológico de São Paulo, and Rockefeller Institute	Rio de Janeiro, father a small businessman
1907 Amílcar Viana Martins	Zoologist, Faculdade de Medicina de Minas Gerais and Rocky Mountain, U.S.	Minas Gerais, father a public employee

TABLE 3. Scientists Educated Abroad, First Generation (1892-1907)
Year of Birth and Name	Education and Specialization	Place of Birth, Family Background, Year of Arrival
1889 Gleb Wataghin	Physicist, Turin, Italy	Russia, father an engineer, arrived in São Paulo 1934
1900 F. Brieger	Geneticist, University of Breslau, Germany	Germany, father a physician and professor, arrived in São Paulo 1934
1902 Quintino Mingóia	Chemist, University of Pavia, Italy	Italy, arrived in São Paulo 1935
1903 Guido Beck	Physicist and mathematician, Vienna, Cavendish Laboratory, Leipzig and other places	Arrived in Rio de Janeiro 1951
1904 Viktor Leinz	Geologist, University of Heidelberg	Arrived in Rio de Janeiro 1933
1905 Bernhard Gross	Physicist, Stuttgart and Electric Research Association, London	Arrived in Rio de Janeiro 1933

In short, the first generation of Brazilian scientists was trained in conventional courses of engineering and medicine. For some peculiar reason its members were related to one of the few places in the country where some kind of scientific concern existed-the Observatório Nacional, the Instituto Manguinhos, or its counterpart in São Paulo. A scientific role, however limited, already existed for the biologists at the time, but not for the others. We see little or no continuation coming out of the old imperial institutions, such as the Museu Nacional or the Jardim Botânico.

It is interesting to contrast these pioneers with the group of foreign-born Brazilians in the same age bracket who arrived in the 1930s and had a great influence on the country s scientific environment (see Table 3). They were all born at the turn of the century and had their training not in the liberal professions but in science as such. They came with their doctorates already completed, and some had already begun an academic and scientific career. The reasons they came vary: some were displaced by the prewar tensions in Europe; others were not happy with their career prospects; others were still very young and adventurous and accepted a long stay in a far-away country. Several of the Italians came with support of the Mussolini government in what was considered an important cultural mission from Italy to Brazil. The same thing happened with some of the Frenchmen, whose government had an active policy of cultural dissemination.⁽³⁾

Only a few of those who came remained in Brazil and continued their academic life. The achievements of those who did stay can be explained not only by the fact that they had better training than the Brazilians and knew firsthand what science was about but also because, coming later, they could benefit from a much better though still quite limited institutional environment. Since their professional identities were already established, they could use them to shape the institutions they helped organize. Wataghin and Brieger were part of the first group of professors of the Faculdade de Filosofia in São Paulo. Mingóia came in 1935 with a contract to work in a private institution, the Laboratório Paulista de Biologia, and in 1945 was hired as a professor at the Faculdade de Farmácia of the Universidade de São Paulo.⁽⁴⁾ Gross helped establish the Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia in Rio de Janeiro, participated in the creation of the Universidade do Distrito Federal, and with Joaquim da Costa Ribeiro started the teaching of physics in the Universidade do Brasil. Guido Beck came later, and his influence was also significant.

Second Generation: Beginnings of Professionalization

Scientists of the second generation all had similar careers, following very closely the road opened by the first. Those in the biological sciences, almost without exception, graduated from the schools of medicine in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and hater had access to the Instituto Manguinhos in Rio or the Instituto Biológico in São Paulo (see Table 4). The pattern is similar: while in medical school the young student caught the attention of a professor who worked also in Manguinhos, and started his apprenticeship. The Instituto Biológico was established in São Paulo in 1927 and was directed by Arthur Neiva, of Manguinhos' first generation, and all its initial staff was trained in Rio de Janeiro There was little in terms of scientific knowledge or scientific models that a student could get at the faculties in those years. Carlos Chagas Filho reported that the Faculdade de Medicina in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s had "no practical courses, no seminars, no contacts between professors and students; only professorial lectures, given with punctuality and great eloquence."⁽⁵⁾ Because of these conditions, scientists usually held the professional schools in contempt and limited their contacts to lectures and the eventual recruiting of some gifted students. To meet a prestigious scientist and work under his guidance was the only way for a young student to start a scientific career. Family ties helped: Walter and Oswaldo Cruz Filho were sons of Oswaldo Cruz; Evandro and Carlos Chagas Filho were sons of Carlos Chagas; Emanuel Dias was a son of Ezequiel Dias. For others, introduction to a scientist came through a family friend. That was how Olímpio da Fonseca Filho, Otto Bier, and José Reis, among others, started their careers.⁽⁶⁾

Once in touch with a patron, the next step was to begin working in his laboratory outside the university. Besides the few public institutions, there were also private initiatives, the most famous being the laboratory kept by the brothers Alvaro and Miguel Osório de Almeida in the basement of their home in Rio de Janeiro, which Chagas Filho describes as the place where research in physiology started in Brazil.⁽⁷⁾

Manguinhos' training course (curso de aplicação), launched in 1909, was the first organized path to a scientific career in the country. Admittance was possible only by invitation, and instruction was provided informally in a system of internship without formal courses or lectures. The trainees had to learn procedures for sterilization and handling glass, tasks usually given to laboratory assistants. Later the course became more formal, and lectures on microbiology were given for eighteen months. New modifications were introduced in 1913-14 with the inauguration of the institute's permanent building: the course became more rigid and formalized and lasted for fourteen months, there was a strict system of exams and evaluation, and those who missed ten classes were dropped from the course. About twenty trainees were selected each year, but only one-third to one-half usually made it to the end.⁽⁸⁾ A few other, less organized, alternatives existed. The Museu Nacional admitted "voluntary assistants" by invitation only. After a year the voluntary assistant could be promoted to nonpaying trainee. Then, in the unusual event of an opening, the trainee could be hired as a naturalist - a general term encompassing a large variety of subjects from ethnology and ethnography to mineralogy or petrography and including botany, zoology, and linguistics.

Table 4. Biologists, Second Generation (1908-1920), First Degrees in Brazil
Year of Birth and Name	Specialization and Education	Place of Birth and Family Background
1908 José Ribeiro do Vale	Biochemist, Faculdade de Medicina de São Paulo, and U.S.	Minas Gerais, father a farmer
1909 Hugo de Souza Lopes	Entomologist, Escola de Agricultura e Veterinária, Rio de Janeiro	Rio de Janeiro
1910 Zeferino Vaz	Geneticist, Faculdade de Medicina de São Paulo and Instituto Biológico de São Paulo	São Paulo, father a businessman
1910 Mauricio Rocha e Silva	Biochemist, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, Instituto Biológico de São Paulo, U.S., and England	Rio de Janeiro, father a liberal professional
1911 Carlos Chagas Filho	Biophysicist, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro Instituto Manguinhos and University of Paris	Rio de Janeiro, son of biologist Carlos Chagas
1911 Herman Lent	Entomologist, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro and Instituto Manguinhos	Rio de Janeiro, father a small businessman
1914 Wladimir Lobato Paraense	Parasitologist, Faculdade de Medicina do Pará and Pernambuco, and Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro	Rio de Janeiro
1914 Mário Viana Dias	Neurophysiologist, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro and National Institute of Medical Research, U.S.	Rio de Janeiro, several physicians in the family
1919 Crodowaldo Pavan	Geneticist, Faculdade de Filosofia, USP and Columbia University, U.S.	São Paulo, father an entrepreneur
1929 Manuel da Frota Moreira	Physiologist, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro and studies in the US and England	Rio de Janeiro, father a physician

This was also the period in which a few people, even those not professional scientists themselves, played a crucial role in spreading scientistic values, finding talents, and stimulating their scientific careers. Baeta Viana, in Belo Horizonte, is often presented as an example. He was less a scholar or specialist than a propagandizer for a new approach to medical science. He graduated from the medical school in Belo Horizonte and was one of the first Brazilians to go to the United States with a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. He worked in the States for two years, in a period of rapid expansion of biochemistry, and on his return to Brazil he came into direct conflict with the French tradition that dominated the school. Still, he managed to carve a place for himself and organized one of the best medical libraries in the country. His students, including Moura Gonçalves and Wilson Beraldo, would be counted among the best biochemistry specialists in Brazil.⁽⁹⁾ André Dreyfus, one of the founders of São Paulo's Faculdade de Filosofia, played a similar role in a very different context.⁽¹⁰⁾ Men like Baeta Viana and Dreyfus therefore made the transition between old professor-highly rhetorical, bookish, self-sufficient, sometimes knowledgeable but insensitive and prejudiced against empirical work-and the modern scientist, trained to identify a problem, define it, and solve it.

Second Generation: The Hard Sciences

As the biologists started with medicine and then went to Manguinhos, most of those in the hard sciences started in the school of engineering and moved to the Faculdade de Filosofia of the Universidade de São Paulo (see Table 5). Data on family background is scant, but they suggest that hard scientists came from less privileged families than the biologists. Although medicine and engineering had similar social standing at the time, Manguinhos was a prestigious institution, and its scientists intermingled easily with the country's elites. As for the Faculdade de Filosofia in São Paulo, it was elegant and becoming to a Paulista intellectual in the 1930s to attend lectures by foreign professors in the new institution, but making that their career was another matter altogether.

The Escola Politécnica was similar to the Faculdade de Medicina in its shortcomings regarding scientific research. Gross recalls that the flame of physics was kept alive only by the lectures of one teacher, Ducídio Pereira.⁽¹¹⁾ In the 1920s, under Eusébio de Oliveira, the Serviço Geológico initiated its own system of internship.⁽¹²⁾ But the most important road to science was through personal influence. What Dreyfus did for the biological sciences, and more, Luis Freire in Pernambuco did for physics and mathematics. Freire's list of students is impressive: physicist's Mário Schenberg, José Leite Lopes, Fernando de Sousa Barros, and Ricardo Ferreira; mathematician Leopoldo Nachbin. One of them recalls:

Freire was very stimulating but never became a scientist himself. He was a very competent and brilliant teacher, very stimulating, but he was not a person who could guide and form his students. . . . He was a scholar of the type we can find in all Latin countries. They are extremely knowledgeable professors who get the latest publications and have an incredible personal library in their homes. They know everything, give beautiful lectures, and could teach in any university in the world. But they are not scientists; they do not come down to carry on a limited research work. Freire was a good example of that. He was born in Recife in 1900, studied engineering, became a professor of physics, and wrote a few articles that were published in the Annales de la Physique in France, but I believe he never became a scientist because of the circumstances in which he lived.⁽¹³⁾

José Leite Lopes was less enthusiastic, but confirms Freire's influence.⁽¹⁴⁾

TABLE 5. Physical and Chemical scientists, Second Generation (1908-1920), First Degrees in Brazil
Year of Birth and Name	Specialization and Education	Place of Birth and Family Background
1908 Simão Mathias	Chemist, Faculdade de Filosofia, USP and University of Wisconsin, U.S.	Father a small businessman
1909 Paulus A. Pompéia	Engineer, Politécnica de São Paulo and University of Chicago	São Paulo, father an engineer
1914 Mario Schenberg	Engineer and physicist, Faculdade de Filosofia, USP; Italy and U.S.	Pernambuco father a European immigrant
1914 Marcelo Damy de S. Santos	Physicist, Universidade de São Paulo and Cambridge, England	São Paulo
1917 Pascoal A. Senise	Chemist, Universidade de São Paulo, and Louisiana State University, U.S.	São Paulo, son of Italian immigrants
1918 José Leite Lopes	Chemist, Universidade de Pernambuco; Physicist, Universidade de São Paulo; Princeton University	Pernambuco, father a small businessman
1921 Walter B. Mors	Chemist, Universidade de São Paulo, and University of Michigan	São Paulo, family of immigrants
1920 Otto Gottlieb	Chemist, Escola Nacional de Química, Rio de Janeiro, England, and Israel	Czechoslovakia, secondary education in Europe; arrived in Brazil with his family before World War II
1920 Jaime Tiomno	Physicist, Universidade do Distrito Federal and Faculdade de Filosofia da Universidade do Brasil; Princeton	Rio de Janeiro, son of immigrant, small businessman

Modern Scientists: The Third Generation

The novelty with members of the third generation was that for the first time in Brazil they had the chance to go directly to a science course without going through a professional school first. Those who were not in São Paulo attended some of the short-lived chemistry courses in their regions and then transferred to the Universidade de São Paulo or went abroad. During World War II and afterward, the Rockefeller Foundation began to provide fellowships for Brazilian scientists outside the health sciences, which benefitted many scholars of this generation. The different sizes of Table 6 and Table 7 reflect a sampling bias and do not necessarily mean that the group of hard scientists was larger than the group of biologists. But they also reflect the fact that in the 1930s and 1940s physics was the most prestigious scientific discipline, and that in Brazil as in other places, physics attracted an unusual group of gifted minds. A look at the family backgrounds in Table 6 and Table 7 confirm that the hard scientists came from families that were far less established than the biologists. While most of the biologists kept to their professional work, many physicists joined the country's intelligentsia and became well-known public figures engaged in the general discussions on the role of science, technology, and education in Brazil's development. It is as if the biologists tended to remain in their already established positions of social privilege while the physicists, in a clear drive for social mobility, took up a much more explicit intellectual role. In some ways they reproduced the European scientistic movements of the past, trying to grasp the most prestigious field of knowledge of their time and from that position acting to influence society as a whole.⁽¹⁵⁾

TABLE 6. Physical and Chemical Scientists, Third Generation (1921-1931)
Year of Birth and Name	Specialization and Education	Place of Birth and Family Background
1921 Blanka Wladislaw	Chemist, Faculdade de Filosofia, USP	Poland, family arrived in Brazil in 1935
1921 Ernesto Giesbrecht	Chemist, Faculdade de Filosofia, USP	Father a civil engineer
1922 Oscar Sala	Physicist, Faculdade de Filosofia, USP, and Illinois and Wisconsin, U.S.	Italy, family of immigrants, did all his studies in Brazil
1923 Aluísio Pimenta	Pharmacist, Universidade de Minas Gerais	Minas Gerais, father had a pharmacy
1924 Jacques Danon	Chemist, Escola Nacional de Química, Rio de Janeiro, and Paris	Father a small businessman
1924 Cesare Lattes	Physicist, Faculdade de Filosofia, USP, and Princeton, U.S.	Parana, family of Italian immigrants, father a bank clerk
1925 Paulo Leal Ferreira	Physicist, Faculdade de Filosofia, USP and Rome	Rio de Janeiro, father an engineer
1925 Jean Meyer	Physicist, Faculdade de Filosofia, USP, and École Politechnique, Paris	Dantzig (Gdansk), secondary studies in Europe, family of immigrants
1926 Sérgio Porto	Chemist, Faculdade de Filosofia, USP, and physics, Johns Hopkins University and Bell Laboratories, U.S.	Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, father a small businessman
1928 Roberto Salmeron	Engineer, Faculdade de Engenharia, USP; Faculdade de Filosofia, Rio de Janeiro and Manchester, England	Rio de Janeiro
1928 José Israel Vargas	Chemist, Universidade de Minas Gerais; physicist, Universidade de São Paulo, and Cambridge University	Minas Gerais, father a small industrialist
1928 José Goldemberg	Physicist, Universidade de São Paulo, and studies in Canada	Rio de Janeiro, father an engineer
1928 Ricardo Ferreira	Chemist, Pernambuco, physicist, Universidade de São Paulo, and California Institute of Technology, U.S.	Pernambuco, father a small businessman
1930 Gerhard Jacob	Mathematician and physicist, Faculdade de Filosofia, Rio Grande do Sul	Germany, family of immigrants
1931 Rogério Cerqueira Leite	Engineer, Instituto Tecnológico da Aeronáutica, and physicist, Bell Laboratories, U.S.	São Paulo

TABLE 7. Biologists, Third Generation (1921-1931)
Year of Birth and Name	Specialization and Education	Place of Birth and Family Background
1922 Warwick Kerr	Geneticist, Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz	São Paulo, father a. specialized worker
1923 Paulo Emílio Vanzolini	Zoologist, Universidade de São Paulo and Harvard University	São Paulo, father an engineer related to the Escola Politécnica in São Paulo
1925 Antônio Cordeiro	Geneticist, Faculdade ole Filosofia, Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul, and Columbia University	Rio Grande do Sul, father a. military officer
1928 Francisco M. Salzano	Geneticist, Faculdade de Filosofia, Rio Grande do Sul	Rio Grande do Sul, father a physician

The Faculdade de Filosofia in São Paulo would introduce in Brazil new working standards that were almost unknown at the time. Marcelo Damy recalls the courses offered in 1934, when the introductory courses of the Escola Politécnica were combined with those of the new institution:

I had the chance to follow the courses of mathematical analysis with Luigi Fantappié, geometry with Giacomo Albanese, and physics with Gleb Wataghin. We met a completely different world. In our education as future engineers, we still had the type of lectures so common in most of the Brazilian universities: the professor comes in, delivers his lecture, and walks away, without talking with the students and often teaching from an obsolete book. These professors were not researchers; they had other professions and taught only a few hours a week. For most, their own education was very deficient. There was strong inbreeding in the school, with one engineer training another for teaching basic disciplines. Be cause of that we believed disciplines like mathematics, chemistry, and physics were the study of things that were completely solved, crystallized, dead. For us, physics was something that resided in the books of physics; the same held for chemistry and mathematics. It was a surprise for us when we attended lectures that followed a completely different approach, that showed us these sciences were not only alive but going through such intense change that the amount of research published in the last few years had been greater than the amount since the beginnings of these sciences. . . . We also came in touch with something that was totally unknown in Brazil-the seminars. Each week the Italians and the Germans, who taught chemistry, would get together to present their research or the main lines of fundamental research being developed abroad. Then there was an open interchange of views. For us - young students used to listening without questioning - it was strange to hear a professor raise questions about and strongly criticize the work of a colleague. Very often the criticism was correct, but that did not mean the researchers would not remain friends and that life would not continue as always. So we learned that science was alive. It could be developed, it was being developed in the rest of the world, and this possibility was opened also to Brazil.⁽¹⁶⁾

From the initial group of foreign professors a new model of scientist, which would have an extremely important role in the years to come, was built. The testimony of Gleb Wataghin allows us to see how this was done:

I came from Italy with Fantappié. We received from the Faculdade de Filosofia one office, and we were told to teach. We asked for a library... I was lucky. I found very able and interested young men without doing anything toward it. Who could assure a young man in 1934 that if he followed a course during three or four years he could become a professional physicist? Anyhow, they wanted to do science and I taught them what they wanted. Among them was Marcelo Damy de Sousa Santos, Mário Schenberg, and later Paulus A. Pompéia. In the Escola Politécnica, where I taught, I tried to tell the students that one could not do several different things at once. Then some of them decided to leave the engineering courses and dedicate themselves to physics. They knew about electricity, how to build radios, antennas. . . . Because of that, it was easy for them to work in experimental physics. . . . As much as possible I tried to send them to Europe after two or three years of study. I sent Mário Schenberg to my friend Dirac, who I believe is the most important physicist alive. I went to Europe with Schenberg; we went through Italy on the way to England. I met Fermi and asked him to talk with Schenberg. It was then that Fermi convinced Schenberg to work with him. I did the same thing with the experimental physicists. Some, like Lattes, went to Cambridge, England. They would write to me, showing solutions to technical problems-how to improve a circuit we had done here, for instance. I learned a lot from my students, and I trained them with the help of great physicists from all over Eu rope, Germany, England, and Italy. . . . Contact with Europe was essential. The only condition I had when I came here was that I wanted to spend two or three months each year in Europe. This was very good for me and for Brazil.⁽¹⁷⁾

The impact of foreign professors in the biological sciences was less pronounced, probably because there was already a much more developed tradition of research in these fields. Besides, the German professors of zoology and botany-Breslau, Marcus, and Rawitscher-belonged to well-established traditions of taxonomic research that were stronger than but not so different from what was already being done in Brazil. They did not have the appeal of novelty that came with physics. An important exception was Friedrich Brieger, who came to the Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz and who, with Dreyfus, was responsible for the beginnings of genetics research in Brazil.

The creation of the Laboratório de Biofisica at the Faculdade de Medicina in Rio de Janeiro in 1937, under the leadership of Carlos Chagas, was a landmark in the introduction of organized research activities in Rio de Janeiro's academic institutions. For Chagas at the time, Manguinhos was a place plagued with low salaries and little administrative autonomy and lacking students to teach and stimulate the researchers to keep on working and studying. The university, with all its limitations, was perceived as holding greater promise. The laboratory, later called the Instituto de Biofisica, was one of the two main outgrowths of the Manguinhos tradition, along with the Instituto Biológico de São Paulo.

Sources of Financial Support

Hidden behind all sorts of applied activities, fighting for a space in a few higher education institutions, relying whenever possible on personal fortune or powerful friends and relatives, Brazilian scientists in the 1930s began to look for more legitimate and stable bases and sources of support. To ask how science is financed is in a way to ask how science is institutionalized and accepted as a legitimate activity in a society.

The old scientific institutions were supported by the federal and state governments, and witnesses tended to characterize researchers' salaries as "decent" and adequate for people willing to live a methodical and modest life. To this simple compensation was added the sense of privilege derived from work that would transform Brazil into a civilized country, free from ignorance and backwardness. Public health specialists firmly believed that most of Brazil's problems were caused by the population's poor health, and they saw their role as much broader than simply striving for medical progress.

This belief in a good cause helps explain why the directors of Manguinhos circumvented the rigidity of its budget to finance all kinds of activities not predicted in their statutes. For about thirty years the institute put profits from the sale of a veterinary vaccine into a fund that was used freely to establish outposts, finance scientific expeditions, hire specialists, or buy drugs and equipment that could not wait for the lengthy procedures of the federal bureaucracy. In 1938, however, the Institute became completely dependent on federal allocations because it was no longer allowed to produce the vaccine. The impact was not only material but also psychological, since it made it clear that Manguinhos no longer had its special place in Brazilian society. The withdrawal of this source of income helped accelerate the institute's decay. Only the laboratories that maintained an independent source of support could continue their work: the laboratories of helminthology (headed by Lauro Travassos) and hematology (headed by Walter Oswaldo Cruz), both linked to Evandro Chagas' Serviço Especial de Grandes Endemias.

Eduardo Guinle, who supported the Serviço Especial with private resources, is the most important name in Brazil's short history of scientific philanthropy. Late in the nineteenth century, two associates - Cândido Gaffrée and Eduardo Guinle-secured the contract for exploitation of the Santos harbor in the state of São Paulo for one hundred years. As the Brazilian economy moved to São Paulo, Santos became the country's busiest port, and Gaffrée and Guinle's company became its wealthiest enterprise. In 1906 Santos' Harbor Company asked Carlos Chagas, father of Evandro and Chagas Filho, to develop a program to end the malaria epidemics in Itatinga, a region in São Paulo where the company was building a hydroelectric dam. This was the beginning of a long history of association between the entrepreneurs and the scientists. In 1923 a Fundação Gaffrée-Guinle with philanthropic purposes was created, and Eduardo Guinle's son Guilherme carried this tradition a long way.

A volume published in 1958 by the Instituto de Biofisica in Rio de Janeiro in honor of Guilherme Guinle shows the breadth of his support. He helped maintain the laboratory of Alvaro and Miguel Osório de Almeida. and with Carlos Chagas created an international center for leprology, created and supported the Serviço Especial de Grandes Endemias, and provided resources for Chagas Filho's Instituto de Biofisica and several laboratories in Manguinhos.⁽¹⁸⁾

Assis Chateaubriand, for several years the owner of Brazil's largest network of newspapers and radio stations, was also known to help young scientists. A colorful and unpredictable man, the support he provided tended to be full of surprises. Lobato Paraense had a typical story about fellowships he and three other colleagues received from Chateaubriand to come to São Paulo from Recife. They arrived in Rio by ship with money borrowed from a professor and went to see their sponsor, Chateaubriand, at his O Jornal newspaper office. At first Chateaubriand did not recall sponsoring them, but later he took the phone and cajoled four wealthy businessmen to support the students for the next year. In only a few minutes they had their fellowships and could start their careers.⁽¹⁹⁾

Manuel Frota Moreira, a biologist from the Chagas group who was the key person behind the Brazilian National Research Council in the 1950s and 1960s, explains the Brazilian scientists' failure to get stronger support in those years:

Scientific activity was considered a cultural activity, and few people, in Brazil or elsewhere, believed that scientific research could be an instrument for power, wealth, and development. The contribution of scientific research and scientific knowledge to economic and military power is a novelty that was recognized only after the atomic bomb was produced with knowledge derived from basic and pure research. Although we had many examples of how scientific research, scientific knowledge, and technology could be useful for development of a country, it is striking that it was seldom considered as such.⁽²⁰⁾

Thus, to get support, scientists had to prove their practical worth. In 1935 Arthur Neiva organized a short-lived Diretoria Geral de Pesquisas Científicas within the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce, which was supposed to bring together institutions like the Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia, the Laboratório Nacional da Produção Mineral, an institute of meteorology, and an institute of animal biology to be headed by Alvaro Osório de Almeida. Its practical orientation was obvious. This Diretoria would have been the first federal agency directly responsible for scientific activities in the country, but it never really got off the ground; after a conflict between Fonseca Costa, director of the Instituto de Tecnologia, and the minister of agriculture, the institute moved to another ministry and the whole project was abandoned. The idea of scientific planning was already capturing minds, and in 1938 Chagas went to Paris to learn about the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique headed by Jean Perrin and established by the Curies in the years of the Popular Front. Chagas took all the documentation related to the CNRS to Minister of Education Gustavo Capanema, who was "extremely interested," as Chagas recalls it, but completely unable to raise the interest of President Vargas. Only much later, in 1951, would a national research center be created.

The Rockefeller Foundation in Brazil

The third source of support for science, other than the government and the private sector, was international foundations, of which the most important for many years was the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1909 as a philanthropic institution "to foster civilization, to spread knowledge, and to reduce suffering"⁽²¹⁾ with a $50 million endowment from the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. It was preceded by three institutions: the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research established in 1901; the General Education Board of 1903, aimed at developing the natural sciences, agriculture, humanities, and arts, mostly in the North American southern states; and the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission of 1909, geared toward the control of ancylostomiasis in the U.S. southern states.

The achievements of the Sanitary Commission influenced the decision to turn the activities of the new foundation in the direction of the field of medicine and public health and extend it to other countries. International activities were institutionalized in 1916 with the establishment of the International Health Board (previously the International Health Commission), which was responsible for taking to other countries the work of eradication of ancylostomiasis, for establishing public health agencies, and for spreading modern scientific medical practices. Other epidemics, such as malaria and yellow fever, were also targeted. Another program was directed toward improving medical education and public health in the United States and abroad with fellowships and institutional grants.

At the end of World War I the Rockefeller Foundation and the Education Board established a program to support medical schools in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Two commissions were sent to Latin America in 1916: one to study the spreading of yellow fever and its sources of contamination and to make suggestions for its eradication; the other to identify centers for medical education and public health to support.

The commissions went to Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil, and in that same year an agreement was drawn up with the Faculdade de Medicina de São Paulo, then directed by Arnaldo Vieira de Carvalho: two new chairs were to be established at the Faculdade, to be supported jointly by the foundation and the São Paulo authorities for five years. Two American professors-Oscar Klotz and Robert Lambert came to teach in the new chair of pathological anatomy, and two others, S. T. Darling and Wilson Smilie, came to teach hygiene. Two Brazilian physicians, Geraldo Horácio de Paula Souza and Borges Vieira, were sent to study at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. The foundation required a system of full-time teaching and numerus clausus for admittance of students, and the Faculdade had to change its regulations and submit them for approval to the state authorities to adjust to these requirements.

Besides the two chairs, the foundation supported the construction of laboratories of anatomy, physiology, chemistry, pathology, and hygiene, while the state government agreed to build a hospital. Later a grant was provided for the construction of a new building. An Instituto de Higiene was established in 1924, and in 1945 it was transformed into the autonomous Faculdade de Higiene e Saúde Publica.⁽²²⁾ Other institutions received smaller grants. The Faculdade de Medicina in Minas Gerais received support to create its chair of pathology, and Carlos Pinheiro Chagas was given a fellowship to study in the United States and take up the chair on his return. He was supposed to be the first Brazilian fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation.⁽²³⁾

There was also an agreement between the Brazilian government and the Rockefeller Foundation for eradication of yellow fever and ancylostomiasis. In a period of five years, twenty-five stations were to be created in eleven states. Resources would come from the states, the cities, the local landowners, and the International Health Board. In 1917 a service for prevention of ancylostomiasis was established within the Departamento Nacional de Saúde Publica and began to provide technicians, physical facilities, and transportation, while the International Board supplied medication and microscopists. At the end of 1924 a network of 122 stations in twenty states was already in place. Research on ancylostomiasis was carried on at the Faculdade de Medicina in São Paulo in cooperation with the International Health Board.

An outgrowth of this campaign was the creation of local health services in several states to improve the medical and sanitary conditions of rural populations - first in São Paulo and Minas Gerais and later in other regions. The teams, made up of a doctor, a nurse, a sanitary inspector, and an administrative assistant, had to inspect the local sanitary conditions, do laboratory tests, treat ancylostomiasis, and give inoculations. All the agreements between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Brazilian government were made through Carlos Chagas father, who was also director of public health and director of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, formerly Manguinhos. Bowman C. Crowell, a pathologist from Bellevue Hospital in New York City, came to guide the work of Manguinhos' pathologists, including Magarinos Torres, César Guerreiro, Osvino Pena, and Carlos Burle de Figueiredo. This cooperation became still more intense with the yellow fever epidemics of 1928.⁽²⁴⁾ A laboratory for yellow fever research was established in the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz in 1937 with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, which could work only on problems directly related to the disease.⁽²⁵⁾

Another epidemic was malaria, transmitted by the mosquito Anopheles gambiae. In 1937 it was first identified in the interior of Ceará, in the Brazilian Northeast; in 1938 Evandro Chagas and his team of the Serviço Especial de Grandes Epidemias found that the whole rural population in the Ceará valleys was contaminated. In a short period they counted 14,000 deaths and more than 100,000 cases in the Jaguaribe Valley. In October 1938 a team from the Serviço de Febre Amarela made up of technicians from the International Health Board and Brazilians arrived in Ceará to start the campaign. In January 1939, the Brazilian government created the Serviço de Malária do Nordeste, which signed immediately an agreement of cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation.⁽²⁶⁾

During the 1930s the Rockefeller Foundation broadened its range of concerns, providing resources for basic research, graduate education, institutional development, and higher education. For this it worked through five divisions: international health, which carried on the international sanitary campaigns; medical sciences, dealing mostly with physiology, industrial medicine, and psychiatry; natural sciences, for physics and biology; social sciences, concerned with the fields of international relations, economics, and public administration; and arts and humanities, with emphasis on archaeology and classic culture.⁽²⁷⁾

The activities of the foundation in Latin America were at first restricted to the field of health, but during World War IT one of its European specialists, Harry M. Miller, was sent to Latin America to identify promising scientists in all fields of knowledge to receive the foundation's support. Candidates had to be intellectually qualified and related to an institution that could support them upon their return. Resources were also provided to purchase equipment and for visiting professors from abroad. The Faculdade de Filosofia of the Universidade de São Paulo was a main recipient of this support, and mostly in the fields of genetics, physics, and chemistry.

Harry Miller, a biologist by education, proved to be good at finding young talent, and the support the Rockefeller Foundation provided was of great importance for the third generation of Brazilian scientists. However, support for basic science never became the main concern of the Rockefeller Foundation in Brazil (Table 8). All resources went to public health until World War IT, when the Escola de Sociologia e Política in São Paulo and the natural sciences received limited support. An increase in support for agriculture and medicine followed. The foundation increased its support in the years of the Alliance for Progress (between 1955 and 1960) and then retreated. In 1970 it supported only the Universidade da Bahia, Salvador, in the field of applied social sciences. In short, beyond its direct contribution to the control of tropical diseases, the Rockefeller Foundation had a major impact in the Brazilian scientific community by exporting American expertise and institutional models and by giving a significant group of Brazilians direct exposure to the American scientific and educational milieu. More specifically, it was instrumental in replacing France with the United States as the place where Brazilian scientists go to get their education, inspiration, and models.

One might wonder whether, in the long run, this influence had a positive or a negative impact on the Brazilian scientific community. The relevance and benefits of the sanitary campaigns, from a humanitarian point of view, seem beyond dispute. More debatable, eventually, was the adoption of the American model of medical education and professional organization, which was introduced when the Faculdade de Medicina in São Paulo was reorganized and which became the standard for the entire country.⁽²⁸⁾

TABLE 8. Rockefeller Foundation Contributions to Science, Research, and Education in Brazil, 1932-1975 (Thousand Dollars)
Period	Public Health	Medicine	Natural Sciences	Social Sciences	Agriculture	Others	Total
1930-33	1,719						1,719
1936-40	1,117						1,117
1941-45	634		6	10		10	661
1946-50	392		80	5	18	40	537
1951-55	49	224	84	--	265	76	699
1956-60	190	1,466	592	286	955	144	3,634
1961-65	127	411	419	8	345	49	1,365
1966-70	319	37	235	2	168	--	611
1971-75	11	--	--	450	--	--	462
SOURCE: Calculated from the Rockefeller Foundation's annual reports (V. M. C. Pereira 1978).

In principle, it would have been possible to adopt a different model of medical education and health care without sacrificing the knowledge that could be obtained through contacts with the more advanced scientific centers. In practice, however, such a path would have required an awareness of alternate models and a strong commitment to one of them by Brazilian authorities. In their absence, the American pattern was simply copied as closely as possible as the model to be followed. This happened not only in medicine but also in other scientific fields, and as the United States evolved into the world's major scientific center, the adoption of American models became a standard practice for most Brazilian scientific institutions.

Centralized Administration and Scientific Research

These movements toward institutionalization were to suffer the impact of a general tendency to political and administrative centralization that gathered speed in the 1930s and hit the new scientific and educational institutions particularly hard. There were many who looked favorably on the process of centralizing and homogenizing Brazil's educational and administrative systems, considering such moves to be signs of modernization. Fernando de Azevedo, who was asked to write the introduction to Brazil's 1940 census, knew both sides of the fence and tried to strike a balance

to agglomerate, bring together, and strengthen the similarities of the federated states in the spirit of national Brazilian communion - this was the main task the government instituted under the new political system, beginning with strengthening the authority of the central power, expanding borders, eliminating local differences, and merging of rural and urban states and communities into one nation. Unifying educational systems-not by adopting identical teaching structures but by adopting the same basic guide lines or in other words by organizing public education according to a general policy and joint plans-is one way (certainly the most powerful and efficacious way) the new regime intended to attain national assimilation and reconstruction.⁽²⁹⁾

The fact is that the strengthening of the central government and the attempts to place the state bureaucracy under the aegis of rational management and "scientific administration" had the unintended consequence of putting much of the scientific research that still existed in the country's capital into disarray, without leaving much in its place. In 1937 the Departamento Nacional do Serviço Público (National Department of Civil Service) was established under Luis Simões Lopes a close adviser to Getúlio Vargas, with the task of bringing all Brazil's public administration under control. For the first time, such ideas as the merit system, professionalization, careers, technical training of civil servants, and utilization of scientific methods in administration were brought to Brazil. The assumption was that state dirigisme would only increase in the years to come and that it required a strong, centralized, and scientifically minded public service. The larger ambitions never materialized, but the impact of the department in the daily life of Brazilian public institutions was long-lasting.⁽³⁰⁾

One of the first acts of the new department was to decide that public servants would no longer be allowed to hold more than one civil job. This decree, known as the law of "desacumulação," had an immediate effect on the teaching and research environments.⁽³¹⁾ Most scientists decided to leave their academic appointments and remain in their institutes, where payment was higher and it was possible to carry on research or technical work. Full-time employment was almost unknown in Brazilian higher education institutions at the time, except at the Faculdade de Medicina in São Paulo, which received support from the Rockefeller Foundation and was supposed to follow the patterns then being introduced at American medical schools. Leinz recalls that his salary at the Departamento Nacional da Produção Mineral, about three "contos de réis," was ten times that of a tenured professor at the Escola de Engenharia. The indiscriminate application of the "desacumulação" law to teaching and research activities failed to take into account the peculiarities of the time. The enforcement of full-time work schedules put what had already been constructed into disarray. By simultaneously holding research and teaching jobs in different institutions, it was possible for Brazil's small scientific community to maximize productivity. A network bringing together scientists from institutes, colleges, public offices, and museums had been formed, often making it possible to overcome the material and technological limitations of each.

Cut off from the academic environment, and subject to the formal regulations and decreasing salaries of the public service, most institutions of applied research entered a period of decline. Scientific and university activities were doubly hit by the centralizing drive. First, they were victims of the attempt to unite and control the cultural and teaching scenes as a whole, carried on by the Ministry of Education. Then, as of 1937, they became victims of administrative unification, sponsored by the Departamento de Administração do Serviço Público, which believed that the scientific and educational system was simply part of a larger administrative body. "Desacumulação" made it clear that scientific activity had by itself not attained enough of its own distinct personality or autonomy for the powers-that-be to recognize a need to grant it special treatment or to recognize it as something valuable that needed to be protected from political and bureaucratic vicissitudes. It was believed that whoever did scientific work at a government research institute, whoever taught at a public university, was first and foremost a civil servant, not a researcher or scientist. The aftermath of "desacumulação" made it clear just how fragile science was and just how little those enforcing the centralized, bureaucratic norms of the federal administration were aware of its worth and its special character.

Only those who somehow managed to escape from this general rule were able to succeed. Two striking cases, each reflecting a different way of dealing with the same situation, confirm this. The first case was São Paulo's Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, backed by the state of São Paulo's broader movement for regional autonomy. The second was the biophysics laboratory at the Faculdade de Medicina in Rio de Janeiro, which later became the Instituto de Biofisica, where Carlos Chagas Filho eventually managed to create research conditions for his handpicked group of aides. In both cases, it is clear that circumstances made it impossible to overcome difficulties and obstacles through the prestige and recognition of their scientific and academic worth; it was necessary to go the way of politics or to use personal and family networks to get through bureaucratic red tape and the lack of broader support. For Chagas Filho an aristocratic family background and connections to top level administrative posts - hardly the norm among scientists-turned out to be crucial.⁽³²⁾ Scientific and academic work was therefore still unusual, and the exception rather than the rule, as Brazilian society moved into modernity.

Notes

1. This was hardly an unbiased sample. There was a preference for older people. who could give a personal account of events further back into the century. The age bracket includes people born between 1892 and 1931. (We excluded. from this analysis the younger ones who were also interviewed.) There is also a biological bias, since we could interview only those who were alive in 1977. Finally, we were concerned mostly with the biological and hard sciences. So mathematics, engineering. medicine, the social sciences, and. the humanities were excluded. The tables in this chapter were first published. in Schwartzman 1984a, and. their limitations were revealed. by the comments they provoked. (Cruz 1985; Ladosky 1985; Moors 1985; M. da S. Pinto 1985). Some people who should. have been included in the study were left out for good or poor reasons, and. the opposite may be also true. Any complete listing in biological sciences should. include entomologist Angelo da Costa Lima, biologists Ernst and Evenine Marcus, botanists Frederico Carlos Höhne, Felix Rawitscher and. Mário Guimarães Ferri in São Paulo, João Geraldo Khulman. Kurt Brade and Carlos Toledo Rizini in Rio de Janeiro; and Adolfo Ducke and. João Murça Pires in Belém. A significant group of followers of Carlos Chagas Filho should. also be included, starting with Aristides Pacheco Leão. Frota Moreira, the younger in Table 4, was part of this group and would. probably best be placed in the next generation. Gottlieb and Mors (Table 5). although slightly older, see themselves in the same generation as Wladislaw and Giesbrecht. Mors began his career as a researcher only in the late 1940s in the Instituto de Química Agrícola in Rio de Janeiro, and. Gottlieb also had a late start. The younger generation would be best represented by the inclusion of Haiti Moussatché, Walter Oswaldo Cruz, Johana Döberainer, Moura Gonçalves and Wilson Beraldo. However, even such an improved listing would still be incomplete.

2. M. da S. Pinto 1985.

3. Pyenson 1982 and 1984.

4. Mors 1985.

5. Chagas Filho interview.

6. Bier and Reis interviews

7. "Thanks to the help of Cândido Gaffrée, an associate of Eduardo Guinle in the organization of the Companhia Docas de Santos [a private corporation that controlled the docks of the Santos harbor in São Paulo], Alvaro Osório put together his small laboratory which became a cultural center that attracted intellectuals of all origins, including Amoroso Costa, the founder of modern mathematics among us. Miguel Osório was trained there. Silva Melo and Tales Martins, among others, participated in informal gatherings." Such an environment could stimulate intellectual curiosity but could hardly provide for a continuing career, as revealed by the fate of Miguel Osório de Almeida. "Miguel Osório, who had an exceptional intelligence, was a victim of the limitations of the Brazilian scientific environment. He was defeated in a public competition for the chair of biological physics, when he gave an extraordinary demonstration of culture and arrogance... He did not know with whom to speak. Very close to the French school, he was lost in an endless stream of correspondence, letters, and long voyages, but always restricted to the Sorbonne, although I am sure that with his ability to work, his intelligence, and his culture he could have an extraordinary impact in another environment" (Chagas Filho interview).

8. Fonseca 1974:13-14.

9. "It is difficult to find a good Brazilian biochemist who is not related, directly or indirectly, to the Baeta Viana school. And this is still more remarkable because by himself he was not a great researcher. No single important research work can be attributed to him" (Chagas Filho interview; Ladosky 1985).

10. Crodowaldo Pavan recalls how his career as a geneticist was set after he attended a conference by Dreyfus. " He was an incredibly stimulating teacher. Complicated things became very simple after his explanations. He could get to the core of a problem, explain it, and make everybody feel it made sense, even if one did not understand the question completely. His lectures were important events for young intellectuals. He would link genetics with histology and give classes and courses on psychoanalysis. When he became a full-time teacher at the Faculdade de Filosofia, he realized that all his time was being spent on lectures, something he really enjoyed. But his scientific basis, his experimental basis, was quite restricted for the kind of program he wanted to conduct (Pavan interview).

11. Mauricio Rocha e Silva relates his experience: "I wanted to become a physicist before studying medicine, and I used to come to the Laboratory of Ducídio Pereira in the Politécnica
...I got a terrible impression from the Laboratory. It was worse than in medicine; they did absolutely nothing... There was a spectrometer, new for those years, which only Ducídio Pereira could touch. Everything else was for teaching physics at the gymnasium. Anyone who wanted could use it, but nobody did... There was nothing in theoretical physics. The only famous mathematician, was Amoroso Costa, with whom I liked to get in touch... All the others were technicians pretending to be mathematicians" (Silva interview).

12. Mario da Silva Pinto recalls how the system worked in the Laboratório da Produção Mineral: "We wanted to be as close as possible to the institutions of higher education-in chemistry, close to the Escola Nacional de Química; in metallurgy, close to the school of engineering and with Ouro Preto. The students were admitted as trainees without pay in the first year. We had organized a true learning program, and they had to go through all sections of the Laboratory, from the preparation of samples to the processing of minerals, and through the sections of physical chemistry and chemistry. We selected those with more aptitude for production and invited them to take an examination for selecting those who would remain for another year as paid interns. Later they could apply through a public examination and begin their professional career" (Pinto interview).

13. Ricardo Ferreira interview. See also Mota and Hamburger 1988.

14. "Because of Freire, I began to study physics and mathematics more seriously. Of course he could not teach the same way as in Europe, or even like a specialist who is in contact with large scientific centers. Recife was a province in Brazil, but relatively speaking the professors there were capable of opening minds, attracting students, showing the way, and providing the main principles of the sciences" (Lopes interview).

15. Schwartzman 1984a..

16. Damy interview

17. Wataghin interview.

18. Instituto de Biofisica. 1951. In the hook, Paulo de Goes describes Guinle as "some kind of private research council." Walter Oswaldo Cruz thanks Guinle for being "he who allowed us to free science from petty restrictions of an obsolete bureaucracy, who made it possible for us to buy without constraints the equipment needed for our work, who protected us from capricious administrators, and who gave us the chance to do science cheerfully."

19. Paraense interview.

20. Frota Moreira interview.

21. Shaplen 1964:6.

22. A. de A. Prado 1958:790, 794-95.

23. Braga interview.

24. Fonseca. Filho 1974:73. The campaign against yellow fever had begun in 1923, and for that purpose the country was divided into two regions: the North, to be handled directly by the Rockefeller Foundation from its seat in Salvador, and the South, under the responsibility of the Departamento Nacional de Saúde Pública and the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. In the early 1930s it was possible to achieve reasonable levels of control, but in 1932 a wild form of yellow fever was identified - which led to the notion that the carrier, the mosquito Aedes aegypti, could not be totally eliminated, making inoculation the only alternative available for the exposed populations (Braga interview).

25. Dias interview.

26. Soper and Wilson 1943:84-86; Picaluga, Torres & Costa 1977:79.

27. Nielsen 1972.

28. Pena 1977.

29. F. de Azevedo 1963:689-90.

30. Schwartzman (ed.) 1983: chap. 1, pp.15-70; Daland 1967.

31. "'Desacumulação' was decreed toward the end of 1937, beginning 1938... [Formerly] a. teacher or any other public servant could hold several posts simultaneously... Of course this resulted in exaggerations that drew heavy public criticism. When the Estado Novo came to power; the so-called accumulation of posts was prohibited. Every employee had to opt for one definite post. This was done, I presume, with the best of intentions. I think each employee really should have only one job. But I believe 'desacumulação' was disastrous for Brazil in certain cases. At the same time 'desacumulação' was enacted, something should have been done to improve substantially everyone's professional situation. Posts were often accumulated not because employees wanted to have several different bosses but simply because they needed to earn more" (Leinz interview).

32. "I was invited to join Manguinhos in the area of endemic diseases. This made it easy for me to meet with a. minister-a very important minister of culture, Minister Capanema and especially with one of the most dedicated public spirits I know, Luis Simões Lopes, director of the Departamento de Administração do Serviço Público, which was more powerful than it is today. It was Luis Simões Lopes who made it possible for me to hire Herta Meyer, Veiga Sales de Moura Gonçalves, and others by creating a special category of staff members designated specialized technicians. These employees could work thirty-three hours a week and earned more than a tenured professor-not a. great deal more, but more" (Chagas Filho interview).