By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Sep 14 1996 (IPS)

Science should be lifted out of the ‘ghetto’ into which it has fallen in Latin America and be exposed to new audiences.

Only then will it be able to make a meaningful contribution to the region’s development, participants in a meeting of the region’s scientific researchers currently taking place in Venezuela concluded.

In all of Latin America, Spain and Portugal there were only 100,000 scientists and technological researchers — less than the number in Germany and the United States, said Mario Albornoz of Argentina.

The search for a new “social contract” for Latin American science meant abandoning the idea of competing with the industrialized North and shifting focus instead towards adopting formulas to halt the “brain drain.”

The “Second Latin American Congress for Social Studies of Science and Technology,” underway here this week, discussed a 1994 report from the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development (OECD) examining the impact of science in various parts of the world.

OECD, a grouping of 24 industrialized countries found that for every million inhabitants, there are 3,360 researchers in North America, 2,210 in Europe, 400 in Asia, 365 in Latin America and the Caribbean, and only 120 in Africa.

The U.N. Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) has established an ideal goal of at least 1,000 scientists, technology experts or engineers per million inhabitants.

Besides these differences in quantity, there is also the issue of quality. “It’s not that our scientists are inferior, but rather they are poorly articulated with the rest of society, working in isolated institutes and with fewer resources,” says Albornoz, director of a research center in the University of Quilmes, Argentina.

The vast resources in the North are a magnet for researchers from the South, which “in the case of the United States is the result of explicit policies of promoting talent among women, ethnic minorities, and brilliant young people from the Third World,” according to the expert.

Brazil, for example, recovers barely 40 percent of the students which it sends abroad to get their doctorates. And a recent survey of young Argentines that study in the United States showed that the majority planned to stay there even before they started their courses, he adds.

As an alternative, Albornoz says, “poles of attraction” must be created in order to bring people back to the region, in addition to accepting that many will not return.

It is a question of “turning weaknesses into strengths, so that we don’t lose everything, and establish networks of Argentine scientists throughout that the world that can work with us on these problems,” he said.

Argentina and Uruguay have implemented programmes to that effect. Colombia has a very effective network, called CALDAS. Venezuela inaugurated its own network on Monday, with the hope of recruiting some 350 Venezuelan researchers currently disseminated throughout the world.

Another facet of the problem is the fact that “research in our countries has remained ghettoized, separated from the problems of development,” said Venezuelan researcher Victor Alvarez, of the government’s Council on Science and Technology, and coordinator of the conference.

A previous meeting took place in Buenos Aires in 1995, with over 100 papers on the social aspects of science: the meeting in Caracas brought together some 120 papers.

Alvarez said that the conference has given impulse to the search for a new social contract for scientific activity, because “in countries in crisis, societies are not willing to finance and sustain science for science’s sake,” if it does not engage in issues of development.

The search for “new audiences” is also being discussed at the conference, as well as the promotion of scientific discussion not only among scientists themselves, but among members of civil society, who also identify problems and demand solutions.

The conference is also dealing with ethical issues, said Alvarez, who advocates that scientific and technological research not experiment with human beings and avoid contributing to depletion of the environment and contributing to the arms race.

Albornoz said the search for a new social contract for science in the region starts with accepting the fact that Latin America is no longer separated from the North “by a scientific and technological gap, but rather an abyss.”

For that reason, he believes that the efforts of the scientific community should not be geared towards catching up with the North, but rather towards the problems of poverty, hunger, education and health.

Though “many of these problems are more political than scientific, science is a social activity and people who practice it cannot act like ostriches with their heads in the ground.” He added that “if money is invested in science instead of hospitals or schools, it is because something is expected of the scientists.”

On the other hand, Albornoz also pointed out that the most innovative scientists are the products of innovative societies, and even though good scientists can come from underdeveloped societies, “science is always a product of modern societies.”

To illustrate this point, Albornoz evoked a phrase that was made popular last century by Argentine politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who visited Boston and predicted that the United States would supersede Europe in development because “there, mathematics are in the muscles of the workers.”

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