Special Issue: Heredity and Evolution in an Ibero-American Context

Abstract

The history of science within the Ibero-American context has not received significant attention from historians of science. In the case of historical studies of science in Spain and Latin America, research has primarily been carried out under the umbrella of “centers and peripheries,” indicating that despite their historiographical and epistemological importance, narratives on science within certain national contexts have analytical limitations. Recent research has indicated a need to reconstruct transnational stories that account for how knowledge produced in developing countries forms part of the circulation of international knowledge via international networks of collaboration. This perspective enables the production of narratives that extend beyond the national framework, engaging transnational participants and processes and permitting new ways of thinking about science history in national and regional as well as global settings. People, practices, and ideas, after all, are not geographically bounded, but move back and forth. They may envelope somewhat different contours when configured within different physical and sociocultural contexts.The contributions included in this special issue each take a geographical approach toward analyzing the development of scientific practices and ideas by considering their place within different environmental, social, economic, and political contexts. All focus to varying degrees on different transnational concerns in Ibero-American science, filtered through the lens of the history of biology—specifically, a focus on questions related to heredity, genetics, and evolution. Each reveals, in one way or another, how science can be influenced by local patterns shaped by certain social, economic, and political circumstances, as well as by different institutional organization, in specific locales.The contributions to this issue emerged from a session the editors organized for the 2017 meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science in São Paulo, Brazil. To complement the core papers that addressed heredity and evolution in Ibero-American biology, we asked additional authors to address similar themes. Among the eight papers included in this issue, several dominant themes emerged. Several papers address questions related to gender in science, both in terms of the impact of women’s contributions to biological research as well as, more generally, how gendered approaches entered into scientific discourse within particular national contexts. Gender, then, forms a major subtheme explored in different national contexts. Another subtheme that emerges is how model organisms selected for use in genetics research programs (especially species of Drosophila) became acclimated to the different geographic and social contexts in Spain and Latin America. With its tropical environments yielding rich and unique populations of different insect species, Central and South America, as well as Mexico, became loci for important fieldwork and research in genetics, and especially cytogenetics and population genetics. Drosophila thus features in three of the included articles discussing work on population genetics in Spain and Brazil.The outcome of applying a geographic filter to our different subjects yields several interesting synthetic points to emerge that might otherwise be overlooked in papers published individually rather than collectively. As a whole, these contributions highlight how different contexts within the interactions in the flow of knowledge between Europe (especially Spain and Portugal) and North America were shaped by certain concerns, as well as organizational structures, of science in Latin America. This suggests the importance of considering national contexts when discussing research programs. For example, several authors note how different settings (both institutional and gender relations) framed research on population genetics in Brazil and Spain. Two of the articles illustrate how the public reception of scientific ideas (especially Darwinian evolution) and their appropriation within different national contexts were tempered by particular social contexts, examining the particular cases of Argentina and Mexico. Another exciting and unexpected result is how gender influenced the shape of both Latin American and Iberian life sciences in previously unrecognized ways. Despite the overall male-dominated global power structure of science and society, women researchers featured here were visible and influential figures in twentieth-century biomedical science, even though their presence has been hidden behind veils occasioned by marriage or institutional hierarchy. In addition, several authors illustrate how bonds of friendship as well as professional interests cemented the comportment and outcomes of important research programs. The individual papers engender even further interesting perspectives on Ibero-American science.These overall themes and subthemes emerge from the specific contributions to this issue, which we divide into three complementary categories, (1) Gender and Genetics, (2) Drosophila and Population Genetics, and (3) Gendered Science within national settings.In “South American Fieldwork/Cytogenetic knowledge: The cytogenetic research program of Sally Hughes-Schrader and Franz Schrader,” Marsha Richmond examines the scientific and cultural context of the fieldwork carried out in Central America by an American couple in the late 1920s. By explaining how these field trips contributed to the Schraders’ collaborative cytogenetic research agenda, Richmond reflects on disciplinary development in cytogenetics and gender dynamics in early twentieth-century biology. For Sally Hughes-Schrader and Franz Schrader, marriage became the means for both personal fulfilment and a successful, synergistic scientific partnership. Their association with Columbia University, influenced as graduate students by T. H. Morgan’s school of genetics and also by E. B. Wilson’s leading program in cytology and, after 1931 by Franz becoming Wilson’s successor, illustrates the status of cytology in the period before the introduction of C. D. Darlington’s “new cytology” after 1932, which they appreciated but also criticized. The case study also illuminates how marriage also served as a mutual support mechanism: for Sally, enable her to pursue scientific research by utilizing her husband’s university laboratory, and for Franz, to benefit from Sally’s collecting expeditions when his health prohibited his undertaking strenuous fieldwork.Similarly, in “Women in Early Human Cytogenetics: An Essay on a Gendered History of Chromosome Imaging,” Maria Santesmases explores the gendered context of twentieth century cytogenetics, and specifically medical cytogenetics, but employs a novel methodological approach. First, Santesmases casts her net widely to survey the work of multiple women from many different countries who shared in forming a broad community of practice, culture, and networks, which was foundational for the new field of cytogenetics. Second, she constructs a bold new historical narrative. Rather than following the traditional historical approach that chronicles the achievements of dominant men and mentions women in subsidiary roles, she rather focuses the narrative solely on women. That is, she abandons the traditional historical script that positions males in leading roles on center stage and women in supporting roles on the periphery. As she notes, shining the spotlight on women in their own right yields “an inclusive historical narrative” in which women’s achievements not only take on new significance but also reorient conventions applied in disciplinary history. Finally, she conveys her account as much by historicizing visual images as by biography, justified by their centricity to the visual epistemology of cytogenetics.Santesmases begins with a genealogy of chromosome images from plants and insects that launched cytogenetics around the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on knowledge produced and conveyed by means of the images that reveal structural features and suggest pairing behavior serves to lessen a concern over gendered power dynamics within laboratories that reflect institutional (and institutionalized) social control. A series of North American women take the lead, but European women soon emerge after the shift to focusing on human genetics and particularly the chromosome pathology due to the effects of radiation, harsh chemicals, cancer, or simply developmental errors. By the 1960s, advances in microtechnique, and especially the coupling of photomicrography with fluorescent staining of chromosomes, significantly advanced knowledge of human genetics. In short, by focusing on women and the images they produced, Santesmases provides an inclusive historical narrative that destabilizes gender within the traditional chronicle of achievements in genetics and cytology.In her article, “Women and the Workplace: Collaborative Networks of Women Geneticists in Mexico in the 1960s and Early 1970s,” Ana Barahona explores the gendered organization of work carried out within biomedical research institutes in Mexico. Her narrative places the work of two female geneticists in the context of the introduction and adaptation of cytogenetics in Mexico in the 1960s. Research on human genetics was just becoming a medical domain for diagnosis at an international level when Spanish-born Mexican physician Salvador Armendares founded the first research unit on human genetics at the National Medical Center Pediatrics Hospital in Mexico City. This was where physician Leonor Buentello (a specialist in virus genetics) was working doing karyotyping when she offered a place in her laboratory to Argentine-born Mexican physician Susana Kofman, who had recently returned to Mexico from France, where she had studied with Jérôme Lejeune and Jean de Grouchy. Although Kofman had been hired at the nearby General Hospital, there was not a place or genetics laboratory for her to conduct her cytogenetic studies. This chance meeting led to a lifelong friendship between Buentello and Kofman and their collaboration on a study of the correlation between clinical observations and cytogenetic research. Going beyond biographical analysis, Barahona describes the gendered nature of scientific workplaces in Mexico but shows how they were nonetheless places where women could rise to prominence. In so doing, she challenges the traditional narrative in the history of science that regards men as central figures in the development of science and women as merely assistants or technicians. Moreover, this essay shows how these women pursued laboratory research, field work, and clinical practice at the hospital while at the same time they used familial relationships to participate in international networks of medical genetics.The articles in the second section, Drosophila and Population Genetics, form a coherent narrative focusing on new methods in the population genetics of fruit flies and modifications in fieldwork practices, which became major issues in evolutionary biology in the second half of the twentieth century. Theodosius Dobzhansky’s work forms a starting point, followed by studies of his wife Natasha Sivertzeva-Dobzhansky and two other female geneticists, Elizabeth Wagner Reed and Maria Monclús. These papers deal with scientific knowledge that circulates in collaborative international networks and help us to understand how the discipline worked in practice and its receptiveness of women’s roles in science.Tito Brige de Carvalho’s “Modern Evolutionary Biology and Brazilian Population Genetics: Theodosius Dobzhansky at the University of São Paulo,” focuses on the work of Dobzhansky’s early group of Brazilian researchers who carried out important work on sibling species of Drosophila. The author addresses the development of population genetics in Brazil by analyzing Dobzhansky’s work on balanced polymorphisms, placing it within the context of the science and politics of the period. He describes how Dobzhansky, a leading biologist and public intellectual (as well documented in the literature in history, philosophy, and social studies of biology), was able to marshal his various institutional positions in the US and at foreign universities to export and amplify his scientific ideas and reflections on political issues (such as race, diversity, and social equality) to a host of countries, but particularly Brazil. In this essay, Carvalho argues that the work the geneticist did in the US and in Brazil from his first trip in 1943 until 1973, two years before his death, cannot be treated separately as they are part and parcel of his evolutionary and social conceits. During this period, Dobzhansky not only fostered a community studying population genetics and evolution in Brazil, but also modified the theory of evolutionary genetics due to the results of the study of Brazilian Drosophila. Likewise, he was a key figure in the international landscape of science. Thus, Dobzhansky’s research on tropical Drosophila species and his role in the development of Brazilian population genetics are prime examples of transnational knowledge.José Franco Monte-Siao and Lilian Al-Chueyr Pereira Martins’s article, “Dobzhansky and Dreyfus’s Groups: The Introduction of Natural Population Genetics Studies in Brazil (1943–1960),” on the other hand, does not engage with the knowledge base of evolutionary genetics, but rather focuses on factors affecting the growth of genetics as revealed by the publication of papers. The authors apply bibliographic methodology to address the range of Brazilian researchers who were drawn into evolutionary genetics. According to their quantitative analysis, genetics in Brazil received a big boost from the 1930s onwards in three biological centers in São Paul, headed by Brazilian geneticists Carlos Arnaldo Krug and André Dreyfus, and German geneticist Frederic Gustav Brieger. By the mid-1940s, genetics was already fully institutionalized in Brazil as other centers were founded and Dobzhansky first visited the country. Focusing on the contributions of Dreyfus’s group between 1943 and 1956, when a partnership was formed between Dobzhansky and Brazilian collaborators to carry out a major project supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the authors assess, in quantitative as well as qualitative terms, the impact on the studies of genetics and evolution by Dobzhansky’s visits to the Latin American country. Their analysis covers a representative sample of works written individually or coauthored by members of Dreyfus’s group in collaboration with Dobzhansky. The results of their analysis make it clear that Dobzhansky’s visits to Brazil not only produced many publications, but also changed the various lines of investigation. While prior to 1943 Dreyfus’s group was working with invertebrates, after Dobzhansky’s visits began, members became concerned with the study of chromosomes and evolutionary aspects of the population genetics of Drosophila. Altogether, this group came to be regarded as an important center of knowledge production at an international level.Following with a focus on Drosophila genetics, albeit from a gendered perspective, Marta Velasco Martín’s article “Women and Partnership Genealogies in Drosophila Population Genetics” describes the pioneering work of geneticists Natasha Sivertzeva-Dobzhansky and Elizabeth Wagner Reed in the US and María Monclús in Spain. Offering parallel biographies of these three women geneticists, Velasco emphasizes how gender can be a useful tool for understanding the practice of Drosophila genetics at a time when the discipline was mainly practiced by men. All three worked together with their husbands—Natasha with Theodosius Dobzhansky, Elizabeth with Sheldon Reed, and María Monclús with Antonio Prevosti—to contribute to population genetics. Although each had different trajectories, as well as temporal, geographical, and cultural differences, this collective narrative well illustrates the gender norms the three of them encountered in their respective research. Placing gender at the center of the analysis allows Velasco to situate women at the forefront of genetics and to illustrate their contributions at a time when research on population genetics was becoming central to evolutionary theory in international settings. This gendered approach not only allows Velasco to analyze the practices of the early drosophilists, geographical centers of production, and relationships established in the post-1945 era, but also to situate these women within a genealogy of inspiration and instruction within the history of genetics and demonstrate that they too should rightly be included in the historiography of early population genetics as investigators, not simply spouses.In “Science, Sensibility, and Gender in Argentina, 1820–1852,” Adriana Novoa also analyzes gender in science, but from a different perspective. Rather than focusing on individuals, either singly or collectively, Novoa casts her gaze more widely to the scientific ethos of an entire nation, Argentina. Applying a close reading of texts and arguments circulating over the critical three-decade period in the new republic’s early years, she persuasively argues that gender permeated scientific culture, but was conceptualized differently by liberals and conservatives. In the 1820s, liberals turned to science to shape the kinds of citizens they believed would best advance a “brotherhood of enlightened equals” in the new nation. Drawing on Enlightenment philosophical discussions that were influential in Europe (particularly the discussion of sensibility in France), liberals, she shows, fashioned an understanding of masculinity connected to feminine virtues of self-transformation and progress. Conservatives, on the other hand, held a more traditional, paternalistic and authoritarian view of male dominance, which came to fore after civil war and the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Gender continued to have a central place in philosophical debates over how to achieve national unity after 1837. With the end of the dictatorship in 1852, the liberals (and their feminized gendered views) again gained ascendancy. However, Novoa shows how in the 1870s, with the coming of the new ideas of natural selection (and sexual selection) spread by Darwinism, promoted an emphasis on competition and survival and again tipped the balance towards conservative cultural views of masculinity. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century were these opposing tensions aligned.Erica Torrens’s “From Darkness to Gloom: The Feminine Presence in the Teaching of Human Evolution in Mexico” is an essay about how science is communicated in an educational setting, specifically addressing gender representations of human evolution. She seeks to expose the treatment of the female figure in the teaching of human evolution in Mexican elementary school textbooks. Her main objective is to compare gender representation and to reveal sexism in a small but representative portion of Mexican visual culture represented by three generations of textbooks. It is worth noting that Mexican textbooks for elementary school have been free of charge and universal in content for nearly 60 years, time in which there have only been four generations, three of them including the topic of evolutionary theory. The author shows the astonishing disproportion in the representation of men and women in Mexican educational material, which has not changed over this time in the teaching of biological evolution. Societal and cultural values of the era were and are reflected in these books, which have not only a pedagogical agenda, but also reflect ideological and political bias. Here, the term culture is important for the author to remind readers of the political stakes inherent in the visual images used in pedagogy. The results show deeply entrenched and systemic problems of gender representation in Mexican pedagogical tools past and present.Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue provide a robust examination of gender integrated into considerations of the interchange of ideas, techniques, model organisms, research programs, and work practices associated with the pursuit of knowledge about heredity and evolution in an Ibero-American context of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.