International Contacts in the First Years of the Spanish CSIC, 1940–45

Abstract

The encouragement of scientific research in Spain by state organizations became centralized and systematized in 1907 with the creation of the Council for the Development of Studies and Scientific Research (JAE, Junta para Ampliacion de Estudios e Investigaciones Cientificas), an institution supplemented, and partly substituted since 1931, by the National Foundation of Scientific Research (Formentin Ibanez and Rodriguez Fraile, 2002; Sanchez Ron et al., 2007). The Civil War deeply divided the scientific community, as it did the rest of the country, and caused a notable deterioration in academic and investigative life. On the rebel side, Franco’s first minister of education, Pedro Sainz Rodriguez, created during the war, in 1938, a new organization to replace the JAE, the Spanish Institute (Instituto de Espana), which integrated the Royal Academies.1 Once the fighting was over, Jose Ibanez Martin substituted Sainz Rodriguez in August 1939. It was he and his team who gave us a new, even more ambitious, project driven by scientific activity in Spain: the High Council of Scientific Research (CSIC, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas), created in November 1939. Alongside the minister, the principal inspiration of the new institution was Jose Maria Albareda Herrera, chemist and pharmacist.