A Space for Science, Simon Schwartzman, 1991, Preface

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

Simon Schwartzman

The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991

PREFACE

This book started in the mid-1970s at one of Brazil's main science and technology financing agencies, the Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos (FINEP), as a research project aimed at drawing a broad picture of the arrival and growth of empirical sciences in Brazil. The work was carried out on two fronts. First, an effort was made to gather and consolidate as much of the published materials on the history of Brazilian science as possible. Second, lengthy open-ended interviews were carried out with a group of about seventy scientists who played significant roles in this history, either scientifically or institutionally. The text of these interviews and the original tapes are now available for consultation at the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação em História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro⁽¹⁾.

Earlier products of this effort, published in Portuguese since 1979, constituted what was probably the first attempt to take a comprehensive look at the development of Brazil's scientific community from its historical roots and to provide a coherent view of its struggle to exist. The first (1979) version of this book relied on contributions of Ricardo Guedes Ferreira Pinto, who worked with the history of physics and engineering; Maria Clara Mariani and Márcia Bandeira de Melo, who concentrated on the biomedical sciences; Tjerk Franken, who worked with the history of institutions and produced a detailed chronology of Brazilian science from 1500 to 1945; Nadja V. X. Souza, who worked on earth sciences and chemistry; Antonio Paim, who studied the Portuguese cultural heritage, the role of positivism in the Brazilian scientific outlook, and the creation of the Universidade do Brasil in the 1930s; and José Murilo de Carvalho, who carried out independent research on the history of the Escola de Minas in Ouro Preto.⁽²⁾ Joseph Ben-David visited the project at an early stage, writing an insightful report on his perceptions of Brazilian science at the time.⁽³⁾ The project enjoyed the broad support and sympathy of Brazilian scientists and science policymakers, and it would not have been possible without the personal interest and incentive of José Pelúcio Ferreira, then president of FINEP, who stands as a central figure in the present history of Brazilian science. FINEP supported all the research work and the Portuguese language edition of the book.

The present book started as a project for a straightforward English translation of the 1979 Portuguese text, which proved to be impossible to achieve. As the translation work proceeded, it became clear not only that the original text had to be revised, corrected, and updated, but also that it had been produced for a different public and with a different emphasis than the present text. While the Portuguese edition was aimed at a wide, educated audience of professionals, teachers, scientists, and policy-makers who knew a lot about Brazil and very little of the current literature on the social studies of science and technology, the opposite would be true for an English-language text; while the Brazilian reader would be interested in the detailed history of institutions that existed and very often disappeared decades ago, or even in the nineteenth century; the international reader would be concerned with its general meaning and direction.

The present book is a compromise between the two extremes. It is based in part on materials used in the 1979 volume, but it also makes use of subsequent texts and a variety of other sources. Everything is placed within a much more cogent and explicit interpretive framework. Over the past ten years, I hope to have evolved in my perceptions of the role science can play in societies such as Brazil, and this book is accordingly more personal and affirmative than the 1979 text. Most of the general sections of the Portuguese edition have been abandoned, and background materials on Brazil's social and economic history have been added. Historical details have now been placed in footnotes, to preserve their value as references for the specialist and to clear the text for everybody else.

I am indebted to Nancy Stepan for her criticism of an early draft and to Herbert S. Klein for detailed comments and extensive suggestions. I hope the book is now more to their liking. Walzi A. Sampaio da Silva helped with his critical reading of several chapters. Part of the translation was carried on by Diane I. Grosklauss, and Helena Araújo Leite de Vasconcelos was helpful checking the accuracy of names and references. The preparation of the first English draft was made possible by a grant from Brazil's Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico. Finally, I am indebted to Ermínio Martins and Richard Whitley for the incentive to prepare an English version of the 1979 text, which is now this book. Part of the writing was done while I was a visiting associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, during the spring of 1987, and the final text was concluded during a period as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Estudos Avançados, Universidade de São Paulo, in 1988, thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation.

Along with the support and cooperation received throughout these years, I always enjoyed complete freedom - and, accordingly, bear full responsibility-with respect to how the study was conducted and with respect to the ideas and interpretations put forward here.⁽⁴⁾ Thus, the mistakes found in the following pages should not be attributed to my colleagues who participated in different parts of the project or to the agencies that supported our work. I hope that, because of our common effort, we all have a better understanding of the history and predicaments of Brazil's scientific community; are better equipped to place this knowledge in a broader interpretive framework, and can therefore be more confident about the future.

Notes

1. CPDOC 1984. The interviews were carried out with the help of the Program of oral history of CPDOC headed by Aspásia Alcântara de Camargo. The interview with Gleb Wataghin, the founder of modern physics in Brazil, was carried out independently by the physicist Cylon E. Tricot Gonçalves, of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, São Paulo. Principal transcription and editing of the interviews were done by Marcílio Morais, Beatriz Resende, and Maria Beatriz de Pena Vogel.

2. Schwartzman 1979. Most of these scholars continued with their own independent work, some of which was later organized in a separate volume. See Schwartzman (ed.) 1982; R. G. F. Pinto 1978; J. M. Carvalho 1978; Mariani 1982a and 1982b; Paim 1982; Nunes, Souza & Schwartzman 1982.

3. Ben-David 1976.

4. I am also responsible for the accuracy of quotations from interviews and for translations of Portuguese texts into English. According to standard usage, Brazilian names (with a few exceptions) are spelled according to modern Brazilian orthography; this applies mostly to double consonants, "i" instead of "y", "s" rather than "z" between vowels, "f" instead of "ph," and rules of accentuation. Foreigners who migrate to Brazil usually adopt Brazilian given names and keep their original surnames, and I have also followed this practice. Brazilian and Portuguese institutions are called hy their Portuguese names, with an English translation provided the first time they are introduced.