International Contacts in the First Years of the Spanish CSIC, 1940–45

Abstract

The encouragement of scientific research in Spain by state organizations became centralized and systematized in 1907 with the creation of the Council for the Development of Studies and Scientific Research (JAE, Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas), an institution supplemented, and partly substituted since 1931, by the National Foundation of Scientific Research (Formentín Ibáñez and Rodríguez Fraile, 2002; Sánchez Ron et al., 2007). The Civil War deeply divided the scientific community, as it did the rest of the country, and caused a notable deterioration in academic and investigative life. On the rebel side, Franco’s first minister of education, Pedro Sáinz Rodriguez, created during the war, in 1938, a new organization to replace the JAE, the Spanish Institute (Instituto de España), which integrated the Royal Academies.¹ Once the fighting was over, José Ibañez Martín substituted Sáinz Rodríguez in August 1939. It was he and his team who gave us a new, even more ambitious, project driven by scientific activity in Spain: the High Council of Scientific Research (CSIC, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), created in November 1939. Alongside the minister, the principal inspiration of the new institution was José María Albareda Herrera, chemist and pharmacist.