Mexican science during the Cold War: an agenda for physics and the life sciences

Gisela Mateos, Edna Suáraz

Resumen


This paper aims to offer a programmatic agenda for a social history of science and technology of Mexico during the Cold War period (from 1950 to the mid-1980s). We take into account recent trends in the field of science studies, such as the inclusion of postcolonial studies and a robust attention to the circulation of knowledge, understood as the traveling of scientific practices, people, tools and materials. After a brief survey on the international literature on Cold War science, including Latin America and Mexico, we introduce two requirements: a symmetrical treatment of global and local (Mexican) historical trajectories, and the necessity to write interconnected stories to account for the co-construction of the US scientific and technological hegemony after World War II. Finally, we provide a set of specific questions to be answered by historians of Mexican physics and life sciences during this period.

Key words: Cold War science, social history of science, postcolonial science, knowledge circulation, scientific practice, interconnected historical trajectories, American hegemony, Mexican physics, Mexican life sciences.

 


Texto completo:

PDF

Referencias


Abraham, Itty (1998), The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial World. London: Zed Books, Ltd.

Abir-Am, Pnina (1985), “Themes, genres and orders of legitimation in the consolidation of new scientific disciplines: The constructing the historiography of molecular biology,” His. Sci. 23: 73-117.

Azuela, Luz Fernanda and José Luis Talancón (1999), La historia de la energía nuclear en México, 1945-1995, México: CEPE, IIS, IG and Plaza y Valdés.

Barahona, Ana (2009), Historia de la genética humana en México, 1879-1970, México: Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM.

Barahona Ana, Pinar Susana and Ayala Francisco J. (2003), La genética en México. Institucionalización de una disciplina, México: UNAM.

Bartolucci, Jorge (2000), La modernización de la ciencia en México. El caso de los astrónomos, México: CESU-UNAM.

Basalla, G. (1967), “The spread of Western science,” Science 156: 611-622.

Boudia, Soraya (2007), “Global regulation: controlling and accepting radioactivity risks,” History and Technology 23(4): 389-406.

Bruno, Laura A. (2003), “The bequest of the nuclear battlefield: Science, natures, and the atom during the first decade of the Cold War,” HSPS 33, part 2: 237-60. Cañizares, Jorge (2001), How to Write the History of the New World, Stanford: Stanford University.

Cañizares, Jorge (2007), Cómo escribir la historia del Nuevo Mundo, México: FCE.

Creager, A. N. H. (2002), “Tracing the politics of changing postwar research practices: the export of ‘American’ radioisotopes to European biologists,” Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. and Biomed. Sci. 33: 367-388.

Creager, Angela (2009), “Radioisotopes as political instruments, 1946-1953”, Dynamis 29: 219-240.

Creager y Santesmases (2006), ”Radiobiology in the atomic age: Changing research practices and policies in comparative perspective,” J. Hist. Biol. 39: 637-647.

Cueto, Marcos (2006), “Excelence in twentieth century biomedical science,” in Saldaña, J. J. (ed.), Science in Latin America, Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 231-240.

Cueto, Marcos (2007), Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955-1975, Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, The Johns Hopkins University Press.

De Chadarevian, Soraya (2003), “Mice and the reactor: The ‘genetics experiment’ in 1950s Britain,” Jour. Hist. Biol. 39: 707-35.

De Greiff, A and M. Nieto (2006), “What we still do not know about South-North technoscientific exchange: North-centrism, scientific difussion, and the social studies of science,“ in Doel, Ronald E. and Thomas Söderquist (eds.), The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine, New York: Routledge, pp. 239-259.

Domínguez Martínez, Raúl (2000), Historia de la física nuclear en México, 1933-1963, México:CESU-UNAM/Plaza y Valdés.

Forman, Paul (1987), “Behind quantum electronics: National security as basis for physical research in the United States, 1940-1960,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18: 149-229.

Galison, P. (1987), How Experiments End, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Galison, P. and B. Hevly, eds. (1992), Big Science, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Glick, Thomas, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper and Rosaura Ruíz (1999), El darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica, Madrid: Doce Calles.

Gordin, Michael D. (2010), Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin and the end of Atomic Hegemony. New York: Picador.

Hamblin, Jacob Darwin (2007), “A dispassionate and objective effort: Negotiating the first study on the biological effects of atomic radiation,” Journal of the History of Biology 40: 147-177.

Harwood, J. (2009) “Peasant friendly plant breeding and early years of the green revolution in Mexico,” Agricultural History 83: 384-410.

Hecht, G. (2006), “Negotiating global nuclearities: apartheid, decolonization, and the Cold War in the making of the IAEA,” Osiri 21: 25-48.

Herran, Néstor (2006), “Spreading nucleonics: the Isotope School at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, 1951-67,” BJHS 39: 569-86.

Heilbron, J. y R. W. Seidel (1989), Lawrence and his Laboratory. A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Heyck, Hunter and David Kaiser (2010), “Introduction,” Isis 101: 362-6.

Jassanoff, Sheila (2005), Designs of Nature. Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kaiser, David (2002), “Cold War requisitions, scientific manpower, and the production of American physicists alter World War II,” HSPS 33: 131-59.

Kaiser, David (2011), How the Hippies Saved Physics. Science, Counterculture and the Quantum Revival, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc.

Kevles, Daniel (1990), “Cold War and hot physics: science, security, and the American State, 1945-56,” HSPBS 20 (2): 239-64.

Kevles, Daniel (1995), The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Krige, John (2006), “Atoms for Peace, scientific internationalism, and scientific intelligence,” Osiris 21: 161-81.

Krige, John (2008), “The peaceful atom as political weapon: Euratom and American foreign policy in the late 1950’s,” HSNS 38: 5-44.

Krige, John (2010), “Building the arsenal knowledge,” Centaurus 52: 280-296.

Kusnick, P. J. and Gilbert J. G. (2010), Rethinking Cold War Culture. Washington: Smithsonian Books.

Leslie, Stuart W. and Robert Kargon (2006), “Exportig MIT: science, technology, and nation-building in India and Iran,” Osiris 21: 110-130.

Martínez, S. and E. Suárez (2008), Ciencia y tecnología en sociedad. El cambio tecnológico con miras a una sociedad democrática, México: Limusa/UNAM.

McMahon, Robert J. (1994), The Cold War in the Periphery. The United States, India, and Pakistan, New York: Columbia University Press.

Miller Clark A. (2006), “An effective instrument of peace: Scientific cooperation as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, 1938-1950,” Osiris 21: 133-60.

Minor, Adriana (2011), Unpublished master degree thesis, México, UNAM.

Moore, K. (2008), Disrupting Science. Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-1975, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Moreno de los Arcos, Roberto (1989), La polemica del darwinismo en México, Siglo XIX, México: UNAM.

Morley, J. (2008), Our Man in Mexico, Kansas: University of Kansas Press.

Oldenziel, Ruth and Karin Zachmann, eds. (2009), Cold War Kitchen Americanization, Technology, and European Users, Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Ramos Lara (2006), “Particle accelerators in Mexico,” Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci. 36: 297-309.

Reardon, Jenny (2004), Race to the Finish. Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics. New York: Princeton University Press.

Safier, N. (2010), “Global knowledge on the move: Itineraries, Amerindian narratives, and deep histories of science” Isis 101: 133-145.

Saldaña, Juan José, ed. (1996), Historia social de la ciencia en América Latina, México: UNAM y M. A. Porrúa.

Saldaña, Juan José, ed. (2006), Science in Latin America, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Santesmases, Ma. Jesús (2006), “Peace propaganda and biomedical experimenttion: Influential uses of radioisotopes in endocrinology and molecular genetics in Spain (1947-1971),” . Hist. Biol 39: 765-794.

Seidel Robert W. (1986), “A home for big science: The Atomic Energy Commission’s Laboratory System,” HSPB 16: 135-75

Seidel Robert W. (2001), “The national laboratories of the Atomic Energy Commission in the early Cold War,” Part I, HSPS 32: 145-62.

Sosa-Alvarez, I. (2000), “América Latina: retos y resultados en la investigación”, IXXth International Congress of Historical Sciences, Agosto, Oslo, Norway.

Suárez, Edna and Barahona, Ana (forthcoming), “Postwar and post revolution: human heredity and cultural anthropology in Mexico (1945-1970)”.

Subrahmanyam, S. (1997), “Connected histories: notes towards a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia”, Modern Asian Studies, 31: 735-762.

Strasser, Bruno (2009), “The co-production of neutral science and neutral State in Cold War Europe: Switzerland and international scientific cooperation, 1951-69,” Osiris 24: 165-87.

Vessuri, Hebe (2006), “Academic science in the twentieth-century Latin America” in Saldaña J. (ed.), Science in Latin America, Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 197-230.

Vettel, Eric J. (2006), Biotech. The Countercultural Origins of an Industry, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Wang, Jessica (1999), American Science in an Age of Anxiety. Scientists, Anticommunism, & the Cold War. The University of North Carolina Press.

Wang Zuoye (2010), “Transnational science turing Cold War. The case of Chinese/American scientists,” Isis 101: 367-377.

Weinberg, Alvin M. (1961), “Impact of large-scale science on the United States,” Science 134 (3473):1 61-164.

Whitfield, S. J. (1996), The Culture of the Cold War. New York: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Zea, Leopoldo (2005, 1943 primera edición), El positivismo en México: nacimiento, apogeo y decadencia, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.


Enlaces refback

  • No hay ningún enlace refback.


Revista semestral editada por el Centro de Estudios Filosóficos, Políticos
y Sociales Vicente Lombardo Toledano de la Secretaría de Educación Pública,
la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa y Edicions UIB de la Universitat de les Illes Balears.

Lombardo Toledano 51, Col. Ex-Hda. Guadalupe Chimalistac,
Del. Alvaro Obregón, C.P. 01050, México, D.F.
Tels. (5255) 5661-4679 y 5661-4987
Fax: (5255) 5661-1787