A political discourse of peace marked the distribution and use of radioisotopes in biomedical research and in medical diagnosis and therapy in the post-World War II period. This occurred during the era of expansion and strengthening of the United States' influence on the promotion of sciences and technologies in Europe as a collaborative effort, initially encouraged by the policies and budgetary distribution of the Marshall Plan. This article follows the importation of radioisotopes by two Spanish research groups, one in experimental (...) endocrinology and one in molecular biology. For both groups foreign funds were instrumental in the early establishment of their laboratories. The combination of funding and access to previously scarce radioisotopes helped position these groups at the forefront of research in Spain. (shrink)

Why was the road to EMBL 'more difficult than anticipated', as Francois Jacob put it? The standard account, advanced by scientists, is that it was because molecular biology did not require big, complex and expensive equipment like high-energy physics. European governments therefore lacked the incentive to pool their efforts and to build together a supranational laboratory 'modeled on CERN'. This account is one-sided. It overlooks the fact that many scientists themselves were less than enthusiastic about building a European molecular biology (...) laboratory in the early 1960s. Taking John Kendrew and Conrad Waddington as representative of two different and opposing views on how best to promote molecular biology in Europe at this time, I argue that a supranational laboratory project could only come to fruition once the field had been entrenched in national institutional niches (or after determined efforts to do so had failed). Until that time, the usual fear that a European laboratory would drain essential human and financial resources away from incipient or planned programmes in universities and national research centres dominated the horizons of most molecular biologists in Europe. Hence their preference to first establish EMBO to coordinate existing activities and only later to set up a supranational laboratory. (shrink)

From the mid-1960s onwards, a set of Spanish molecular biology research groups emerged in Spain. The factors contributing to this included: the return of a group of molecular biologists from their postdoctoral period abroad, the negotiations for the return of Spanish-born Nobel prize winner Severo Ochoa from New York, the negotiations for Spanish membership in the European Conference of Molecular Biology, and national policy towards university reform. As a result, the early molecular biologists’ research groups began to be recognised as (...) research schools by Spanish authorities and postgraduate courses and new research centres for molecular biology were set up. Foreign influence in the whole process was crucial. (shrink)

This paper takes Franco's Spain to be a powerful case study for analyzing the ways in which power shapes science and technology and is shaped by them in return. Spain was the last country in Western Europe to establish closer links with any of the international cooperative institutions emerging after WWII. As such, developments internal to Spanish society were quite autonomous and relatively free from foreign influences. The paper focuses first on the brand new, powerful institution that the Francoist regime (...) created to promote scientific research under tight political control, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Next it turns to applied science and technology, top priorities for the regime's state-supported programs of industrialization. They were implemented through the politically and financially powerful Instituto Nacional de Industria. Using diplomatic sources, the paper next argues that, until the late 1950s, Spain maintained substantial political and economic isolation essentially because the regime bet on autarkic policies and a model of largely isolated development. In this model, it was crucial for the regime to develop its own technological and scientific resources. Finally, the paper examines how the regime fostered a new Spanish identity in which science had a new role. (shrink)

Joan Oró Florensa (1923-2004), al mismo tiempo que fue un destacado científico del siglo XX, es una de las figuras más desconocidas y olvidadas por parte de la historiografía de la ciencia contemporánea. Su destacado papel en las primeras investigaciones sobre el origen de la vida, en los análisis bioquímicos de las muestras lunares recogidas en la misión Apollo 11, así como su decisiva participación en los experimentos biológicos de la misión Viking ―entre otras importantes aportaciones―, ameritan con mucho el (...) inicio de estudios históricos que atiendan y analicen pormenorizadamente alguna de las dimensiones de su poliédrica figura. Este artículo, que analiza su figura y aportaciones en el contexto histórico y científico en el que se desarrollaron y utiliza el archivo inédito de Joan Oró, busca conmemorarlo en el centenario de su nacimiento (2023) y contribuir a los estudios historiográficos sobre el bioquímico español. (shrink)