The “Science Policy Actors” in Portugal presented at FCT

The Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) hosted a conference entitled "Actors in Science Policy" on December 10 and 11, which marked the opening of the conference cycle dedicated to the History of Science and the heritage of archives. This cycle is the result of a joint organization between the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC) of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the New University of Lisbon and the Science and Technology Archive of the FCT.

With an eclectic and pragmatic program, the cycle "Actors in science policy" highlighted, among the variation of geniuses, the professional relevance of doctors in the first half of the 20th century and engineers in the second half, in the public administration of science and its historical bodies in Portugal.

The "Actors in science policy" panel was made up of: Augusto Celestino da Costa (1884-1950), founder of the Institute of Histology and Embryology at the Faculty of Medicine in Lisbon; Francisco de Paula Leite Pinto (1902-2000), first president of the National Board for Scientific and Technological Research (JNICT) and Minister of National Education; Amândio Tavares (1900-1974), rector of the University of Porto, President of the Portuguese Association for the Advancement of Sciences and founder of the Center for Humanistic Studies; António Mendes Correia (1888-1960), anthropologist and archaeologist, president of the Junta das Missões Geográficas e de Investigações Coloniais and director of the Escola Superior Colonial; Manuel Abreu Faro (1923-1999), president of the Centro de Estudos de Electrónica and the Comissão de Estudos de Energia Nuclear; and Kaúlza de Arriaga (1915-2004), Undersecretary of State for Aeronautics, professor at the Instituto de Altos Estudos Militares and president of the Junta de Energia Nuclear.

All these men of science and public managers played important roles in science policy in Portugal throughout the 20th century, due to their direct links with public science management policies and their roles in public organizations, such as the Institute for High Culture (later the Institute of High Culture), the Nuclear Energy Board or the JNICT itself, the ancestor of the FCT that we know today.The lives of these actors in science policy were presented by a group of young guest researchers, specialists in the history of science.

The meeting was also attended by Leoncio López-Ocón, from the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales of Spain's Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, who was invited to Lisbon to present Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934), who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1906 and also played a crucial role in the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios, a distant counterpart of the Junta de Educação Nacional. In his speech, López-Ocón did not fail to mention the importance of Cajal's work in Portugal, particularly among what became known as the Medical Generation of 1911.

The conferences culminated in a debate on the last day of the meeting, centered on the issue of documentary preservation applied to historiographical production, knowledge and the reconstruction of scientists' life stories from their documentary collections. Participating in the debate were researchers José Pedro David Ferreira (son of histologist David Ferreira) and Tiago Brandão, from the IHC; Pedro Penteado, from the Directorate-General for Books, Archives and Libraries; and Tiago Santos Pereira, coordinator of the FCT's Studies and Strategy Office.

With a dynamic model, this meeting aims to establish itself as a benchmark event for sharing recent research trends in the history of science and, not least, a privileged forum for debating and stimulating archival practices - both public and private - as instruments for building the memory of science in the modern and contemporary era.