Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

In a conference held in Lisbon in 1937 at the Society of Agricultural Sciences, Câmara informed his audience how the “national-socialist titanic effort of reorganizing the country echoed in the laboratories” of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Biologie in Berlin-Dahlem:[86]

How could I be surprised with the nationalistic atmosphere around me when I, already for some years, know no other? How could I be surprised with Hitler’s propaganda when I was propagandizing in my own country? Were there scientists who had Hitler’s portrait on their desktops? But didn’t I have in my Dahlem Laboratory Salazar’s portrait?[87]

Perhaps more important than a shared cult of the leader is the presence of the future director of the EAN in a laboratory that was able to sustain the importance of fundamental research for Germany’s dreams of autarky.[88] Câmara, whose work was focused on the production of genetic mutations by physical agents (temperature and x rays), would certainly have shared that view. Indeed, he repeatedly expressed his opinions on the relationship between applied and pure research, paying tribute to the latter by asserting that “only with pure science may practical problems be solved.”[89]

Apparently that was also the opinion of the Minister of Agriculture, Rafael Duque, who after a visit to the modest Genetics Laboratory at the Lisbon Agronomy Institute decided to finance Câmara’s research on mutations more generously.[90] More than that, he asked Câmara for a report on how agricultural research should be organized in Portugal, and that report would become the founding document of the EAN.[91] Câmara, of course, offered genetics the role of “central science” of the would-be institution.[92] The tasks to be undertaken by the Department of Cytology and Genetics, headed by Câmara himself, were divided into solving practical problems directly connected with plant breeding, opening new possibilities to breeders, and attacking problems of pure science such as chromosome variations induced by physical agents or the cytogenetics of Drosophila. This ternary division reproduced exactly the research objectives of Erwin Baur, first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Plant Breeding, founded in 1927 in Müncheberg, as described by Câmara in his 1937 account of his Berlin days.[93]

Baur’s research on mutations, N. Vavilov’s theories of centers of origin, H. J. Muller’s induction of mutants, artificial duplication of chromosome constitutions by Blakeslee and Avery:[94] this was the canon mobilized by Câmara to demonstrate how genetics had powerfully changed plant-breeding perspectives.[95] And if he recognized that artificial induction of mutations since the end of the 1920s produced only lethal mutations of no practical value for plant breeders, he expected nevertheless, by working with x rays and temperature, to improve techniques of detecting mutants and develop tests to promptly select interesting mutants instead of just following an analysis of the phenotype of easily visible variations, as was then common. The main focus of Câmara’s research was on structural variations of chromosomes (trans-location, fragmentation, inversion, and so on). He used temperature and x rays, as well as centrifugation, as physical agents. At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Biologie, research had been modernized by the application of new laboratory technologies to biological objects. Câmara used the same approach at the EAN.[96]