Mexico, 1980: the construction of bacterial molecular genetics

Abstract

At the beginning of the new millennium, in 2001 to be precise, a work began that at the time turned out to be a titanic task. The project of sequencing the genome of the bacterium Rhizobium etli -a nitrogen-fixing bacterium symbiotic with the bean plant- was the first to be carried out in Mexico and the results were not published until a few years later. But how did molecular biology and genetic engineering arrive in Mexico? Among the many ways and paths that can lead to an answer, we chose the laboratory work of Dr. Fernando Bastarrachea Avilés and his trajectory to answer this question but mainly how the practice of bacterial molecular genetics was constructed in Mexico during the last years of the Cold War (1970-1980). As a first step we used the global history of science, where the units of historical analysis are the circulation of knowledge and collaborative networks. As a second step, we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with former students of that laboratory in the ‘80s. Consequently, our aim is to account for the process of building socio-technical networks, focused on the field of microbiology.

Keywords

• bacterial molecular genetics
• cold war
• fernando bastarrachea
• global history of science