Scientific life under the Portuguese dictatorial regime (1929-1954)

Introduction

This paper aims at analyzing the scientific agenda of the Portuguese dictatorial regime and how it interacted with the emergence and development of two distinct communities, the community of physicists and the community of geneticists. With the word “interaction”, we mean to approach the relationship between science and politics from a dynamic point of view, considering each one as a resource for the other.

The analysis of different political regimes – democratic, fascist, and communist – led Carola Sachse and Mark Walker to conclude “that no one political ideology or system is best, or for that matter worst, for supporting science.”[1] Likewise our concern is to show how science developed in Portugal under a dictatorial regime whenever its officials deemed it desirable to fund scientists and scientific institutions in order to implement their policies.  We question how and in what ways specific scientific contents and practices co-evolved within a particular political context.

In this paper we use the comparative method to contrast two different groups of scientists which due to their more noticeable dissimilarities and loosely connections offer the opportunity to illustrate in more dramatic ways different instances of co-evolution of science and politics. The group of geneticists reveals a more loosely nature, the group of physicists gave way to what genuinely may be named as a research school. One emerged concurrently in the university context (University of Coimbra) and in one experimental station designed to respond to the international and political context of autarky; the other was grounded solely in the university context (University of Lisbon). Both were the result of events which took place around 1929.

In the context of peripheral countries, scientific groups were often heavily dependent on charismatic leaders, and in the same way political agendas were often dependent on the stamina and ideas of individual politicians. In the Portuguese case, the role of two scientists turned politicians, the agronomist and geneticist Sousa Câmara, and the geneticist and advocate of eugenics Tamagnini, proved crucial. Our narrative ends in 1954 when the relationships between the regime and physics changed noticeably, pushedforward by external events and the ideas of another individual, Leite Pinto.[2]

de Júlia Gaspar, Maria do Mar Gago, Ana Simões

(continue a ler em HOST- Journal of History of Science)