Recasting the local and the global: the three lives of protein sequencing in

Spanish biomedical research (1967-1995)

Miguel Garcia-Sancho
Department of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies
University of Edinburgh
Miguel.gsancho@ed.ac.uk1

The circulation of knowledge has been a main concern in the study of science and technology
over the last 30 years. A key claim of Science and Technology Studies (STS) during its
anthropological turn was the essentially localised nature of knowledge production and this has
led, from the late 1970s onwards, to investigations in which the contents of science are seen
as depending on specific local factors (Ophir and Shapin 1991). This literature includes
historical investigations on the construction of authority and trust, sociological studies on
standards and the replication of results and, more recently, the analysis of the dispersion of
protocols and the journeys of scientific facts (Collins 1985, Schaffer and Shapin 1985, Latour
1987, Jordan and Lynch 1998, Howlett and Morgan 2010). The terrain for interdisciplinary
fertilisation has been wide, given that circulation always involves a historical process and
triggers sociological transformations in the spaces to which knowledge travels. However, a
still-standing problem is the proliferation of fragmented case studies, which makes difficult to
grasp, from their specific detail, how science acquires its global nature (De Chadarevian and
Strasser 2002).

An important body of literature within the study of circulation has been the so-called
reception studies. From the early 1990s onwards, historians addressed how knowledge
produced in “scientific centres” travelled to the “periphery” (Gavroglu 1999). This line of
research has placed, upon the STS map, geographical settings which were traditionally
considered secondary, such as Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia or Latin America. The
categories of centre and periphery, as this scholarship shows, change over time and do not
present a linear or symmetrical relationship: there are important irregularities in the
mechanisms by which knowledge disseminates and is appropriated at the reception points
after its journey (Greiff 2002, Jankovic 2004, Papanelopoulou, Nieto-Galán, et al. 2008, Díaz-
Rojo 2011).

This field of inquiry has evolved and gradually moved away from dependence accounts.
Historians have challenged comparative frameworks and defended “connected” or “crossed”
histories, in which the specificity of the interactions between local configurations of
knowledge – rather than how knowledge is received – lay at the centre of the investigations
(Subrahmanyam 1997, Werner and Zimmermann 2006). Building on this perspective, an
emerging historiography centred in areas such as Spain, the Portuguese Empire, Early-
Modern Eurasia or Mexico is suggesting that in order to address the global construction of
knowledge, one should focus on the intersection of specifically local case studies and refrain
from comparing with an arbitrary standard. In other words, instead of studying the reception,
at fragmented peripheries, of knowledge generated in an homogeneous centre, one should
look at the global implications of a number of localised and interconnected episodes of
knowledge production (Saraiva and Wise 2010, Santesmases and Gradmann 2011, Suárez-
Díaz and Barahona Upcoming). My paper will contribute to this line of research by exploring

1
The investigations reported in this chapter were conducted while I was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the
Department of Science, Technology and Society of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).

1
the circulation and local configuration of protein sequencing in Spain during the last third of
the 20th century.

Sequencing is a practice which emerged between the 1940s and 50s, as a consequence of the
work of biochemists Frederick Sanger in Britain and Pehr Edman in Sweden, among others
(Edman 1950, Ryle, Sanger, et al. 1955). Sequencing techniques, as applied to proteins, allow
the determination of the linear structure – the sequence – of amino acids, which are the
chemical constituents of the protein chains (see Figure 1). Sanger and Edman’s techniques
circulated across different fields and settings, being regarded with increasing expectations by
biomedical researchers (De Chadarevian 1996, García-Sancho 2012: 34 and ff.). My focus
will be upon how these techniques were transformed and their use diversified within a
specific, but internationally connected local context: the making of biomolecular sciences in
Spain.

I will use a different approach from other essays presented in this volume. In contrast with
ethnographic and policy-oriented studies, I will draw on a historical method called
prosopography. Prosopography is a form of collective biography which historians of science
started to conduct in the mid-1970s, in order to characterise research communities and place
them within a specific and continuously changing socio-political time (Shapin and Thackray
1974). The use of the term has faded in recent years, but prosopographical perspectives are
still important in a sociologically-informed history of science, as tools for contrasting
different research schools or analysing the genesis of a particular line of inquiry (for instance
Fruton 1985, Abir-Am 1987, Harwood 1993).

The resource to a prosopographical approach will enable me to argue that protein sequencing
had three distinct lives in Spain, embodied in the differential use of the techniques by three
individual researchers. Throughout their careers, which spanned between 1967 and 95, the
researchers struggled to construct a professional space in which their use of sequencing could
be legitimated, thus guaranteeing their survival as working scientists. The success of each
researcher varied and, with it, the fate of different configurations of protein sequencing in
Spain. In this process, each researcher attempted to mobilise elite support and achieve a
complex equilibrium between the demands of the changing local authorities and what was
considered as global and international at each historical time. My three lives of protein
sequencing will offer an insight to the mechanisms by which scientific elites are formed and
what happens to the researchers – and the practices – who do not achieve this status.

INSERT TABLE AND FIGURE 1 AROUND HERE

With the use of the terms ‘life’ and ‘professional space’ I aim to integrate different bodies of
literature on the circulation of knowledge and, more generally, the history and sociology of
science. Scholars – and particularly historians of biomedicine – have highlighted the
importance of disciplinary and institutional spaces for the consolidation of certain research
enterprises, including biomolecular sequencing. They have also identified different levels of
circulation, such as migration of researchers or technological exchange (Chadarevian and
Gaudillière 1996, Secord 2004). My three lives of protein sequencing seek to draw the study
of researchers, techniques, disciplines, institutions and their circulation into a common
analytical framework. Each life – technical configuration – of protein sequencing was
intimately linked to the life – career – of its user researcher and shaped by the deployment of
a professional space which involved an institutional setting and, at times, disciplinary
boundaries.

2
Given that a substantial part of my subject scientists is now deceased, I conducted oral
histories with younger members of their research groups, relatives, colleagues and scientific
rivals. The interviewees’ responses led me to uncatalogued archives kept by widows or
secretaries, sometimes in very poor preservation conditions. This, together with published
scientific papers and institutional annual reports, has resulted in a reconstruction of the
trajectory of each researcher and, with it, a life of protein sequencing. With this
reconstruction, I will complement the still developing historiography of Spanish science and
biomedicine in the 20th century (reviewed by Santesmases 2007) while, at the same time,
presenting key historical mechanisms for understanding scientific success, disciplinary
formation, and the role of old and new elites in these processes.

In each life of protein sequencing, the place in which the researcher learned the technique is
important, but not only from a comparative viewpoint: it is a point of departure for the local
configuration of sequencing in Spain rather than the ‘centre’ from which protein sequencing
in this country should be assessed. Spain, additionally, witnessed important transformations in
this period, which shaped the strategies of legitimation and diversified the uses of sequencing:
the end of the Fascist-oriented dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1967-1975); the
transition and early years of a democratic regime (1976-1986), and the consolidation of such
regime (1987-1995). My approach will, therefore, contribute to the object of this volume by
shedding light on the mechanisms by which local policies, institutions and training networks
reconfigure a global practice and generate a form of national diversity.

First life: biochemistry and the economics of Franco’s dictatorship

The first incarnation of protein sequencing in Spain was the Department of Biochemistry of
the Universidad de Madrid, led by Ángel Martín-Municio. Martín-Municio had obtained a
Chair in Physiological Chemistry in 1967 and created his own Department, after more than
ten years lecturing biochemistry at the University. Up to the award of the Chair, he had been a
teaching associate of the University’s Department of Organic Chemistry, and combined this
position with a research appointment at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
(CSIC, the national State-funded research council).

Both the award of the Chair and the foundation of the Department reflected the profound
transformations that Franco’s dictatorship was experiencing during the mid-to-late 1960s. The
foundation of CSIC had been one of the first initiatives of Franco after his triumph in the
Spanish Civil War in 1939. CSIC epitomised a centralised, highly hierarchical and politically
controlled institution with the duty of undertaking all the research activity in the country.
Following its creation, Franco delegated scientific policy in academics who had proven their
ideological adherence to the regime. Many researchers had fled the country with the outbreak
of the war or been purged from university departments upon Franco’s victory. The ones that
remained in the country had either not publicly shown their political inclinations or were
opposed to the previous secular, republican and democratic regime (Gomez Rodriguez and
Canales Serrano 2009).

One of Franco’s main trusted scientists was Manuel Lora-Tamayo, Chair of the Department
of Organic Chemistry in Madrid and Martín-Municio’s PhD supervisor. Between 1962 and
67, Lora-Tamayo was appointed minister of National Education and president of CSIC,
initiating a reform programme in the country’s scientific system. By that time, Franco’s
dictatorship was attempting to improve its international reputation and shift from an isolated

3
and self-sufficient regime to the endorsement of liberal economics. This shift crystallised in
the appointment of technocratic and less militaristic Governments, with strong links to the
catholic intellectual elite of Opus Dei.

In 1964, the first of a number of four-year Development Plans was launched, with the aim of
contributing to the country’s economic growth. The Plans originated in the shared belief by
Francoist authorities that Spain was lagging behind other neighbour nations and needed to
recover its past supremacy. Each Plan incorporated substantial investments in scientific and
technical research, especially projects linked to the interests of the Spanish industry. Lora-
Tamayo, as the head of science policy – his Ministry was renamed Education and Science in
1966 – slowly decentralised the research activity from CSIC to a growing role of universities
and teaching hospitals. However, despite this apparent liberalisation, the Plans maintained the
paternalist and nationalistic orientation which had characterised the dictatorship’s policy.2

Martín-Municio was one of the first researchers in transferring his laboratory from CSIC to
the new Biochemistry Department. This move was regarded with suspicion by other
academics and administrators, who saw the university as primarily devoted to teaching. In the
face of this questioning, Martín-Municio set as one of his priorities to underpin his
professional space and recruit support both nationally and internationally. One of his main
strategies was to present his research as substantially different from the metabolic and
functionally-oriented biochemistry which, at that time, dominated CSIC.

In 1965, two years before the creation of the Department, Martín-Municio had conducted
international stays in the Department of Organic Chemistry of the University of Newcastle
and Biochemistry at King’s College London. It was in these stays that he decided to expand
his investigations on the metabolism of lipids – started in CSIC – to the study of the structural
interactions between lipids and proteins during the development of an organism. Upon return
to Spain, he proposed a line of research on the biochemistry of development, building on the
techniques of organic chemistry and addressing, as a key goal, the problem of protein
structure (Martín-Municio 1969). Due to the novelty and resonance with the interests of the
chemical industry, Martín-Municio’s research was funded by the First Development Plan.

This support was crucial for the creation of the Department and, in 1969, Martín-Municio was
elected one of the three Spanish representatives in the European Molecular Biology
Organisation (EMBO) (Santesmases 2002). The position granted him with access to
influential international figures in biomedicine, such as the early Executive Secretaries of the
Organisation John Kendrew and John Tooze. Martín-Municio maintained a regular
correspondence with these scientists and secured funding for a series of molecular biology
courses he organised at the University, centred on the structural characterisation of proteins.3
The courses, together with a newly created laboratory internship in biochemistry within the

2
On the scientific component of the Development Plans, see reports of the Fondo Nacional para la Investigación
Científica y Técnica, written by the Comisión Asesora de Investigación Científica y Técnica between 1964 and
1986 (Madrid, President’s Office). On the creation of a “protected space” for science and technology, see Gläser,
Laudel and Lettkemann, this volume. On the nationalistic motivation behind these policies, see Kearnes, this
volume.
3
Spain’s presence in EMBO was shaped by its previous membership to the Centre Européen pour la Recherche
Nucleaire (CERN), given the strong support of the dictatorship to nuclear science. Both Lora-Tamayo and
Martín-Municio were members of the Junta de Energía Nuclear, the highest Spanish authority in the field of
atomic energy. For Martín-Municio’s early correspondence with EMBO and syllabi of the first editions of the
course on molecular biology see Personal Archive of A. Martín-Municio, Faculty of Chemistry, Universidad
Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Uncatalogued file on EMBO.

4
University’s undergraduate and postgraduate curricula, constituted the background of the first
recruits of the Department.

Martín-Municio appointed a number of faculty members with expertise in protein structure

and well connected – both professionally and personally – with the State-fostered
pharmaceutical, chemical and food industries. One of the focus areas was protein sequencing,
which was by then starting to be performed with commercial automatic instruments. In 1970,
the Department was awarded an automatic protein sequenator by the Second Development
Plan and a team leader, together with three graduate students, were recruited for the handling
of the apparatus (Rodríguez, Lizarbe, et al. 1990).

The fly Ceratitis capitata was chosen as the model to apply the protein sequencing
techniques. This insect – a relative of Drosophila melanogaster – was selected due to its
involvement in a number of agrarian plagues in Mediterranean countries. The Development
Plans – and more generally the dictatorship – privileged research with an emphasis in its
application to the economy, being agronomy a priority area (Camprubí 2010, Santesmases
Upcoming). The funding of Martín-Municio’s project benefited from this agrarian interest,
although in practice his investigations did not relate to plague control: they rather addressed
how the sequence of the proteins may affect the development of the insect.

INSERT FIGURE 2 AROUND HERE

In 1974, Martín-Municio obtained a grant by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to

study “Protein Structure: Catalysis and Metabolism”. The grant formed part of the bilateral
cooperation programme “Frontiers in Science”, which built on the increasing scientific
exchanges between Spain and the US in the context of the Cold War (Santesmases 2006: 770
and ff.). The scheme’s regulations required the grant to be administered by a US institution
and the researcher chosen for this purpose was Juan Oró, a professor of Biochemistry at the
University of Houston and one of the most reputed biologists in Spain at that time (Pairolí
1996, Calvó-Monreal 2012).4 Oró’s research addressed the origin of life and, from the early
1960s onwards, he had been involved in the Viking Project and other NASA initiatives to test
for the existence of amino acids and other biological molecules in outer Space. Exobiology –
the investigation of extraterrestrial life – had by then become a consolidated research field and
comparative biochemistry – the analysis and comparison of amino acid sequences – a suitable
approach for its development (Strasser 2010).

The award of this grant consolidated the space that Martín-Municio had sought to create for
his Biochemistry Department at the Spanish University. This space was differentiated from
the previous functionally-oriented biochemistry at CSIC, and drew on a strategic equilibrium
between the pursued national interests of Franco’s regime and his incipient international
alliances. On the one hand, Martín-Municio benefited from the political and academic power
of Lora-Tamayo, which was partly driven by the perception of organic chemistry as a field
with strong links to the Spanish industrial and economic necessities. This led to a strong focus
on the chemical structure of proteins at the Department and to the selection of the fly
Ceratitis as a relevant organism for the agricultural concerns of the Development Plans. On
4
Personal Archive of A. Martín-Municio, Faculty of Chemistry, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain).
Uncatalogued file on NSF. From the late-1950s onwards, the US Administration had seen in Franco’s regime a
potential ally against Communism and this had resulted in institutions devoted to cultural and educational
collaboration, such as the Fulbright Commission. Oró, a scientist born in Catalonia and strongly committed to
his homeland, was a key driving force for the institutionalisation of biomedical research in that region, namely in
Barcelona.

5
the other hand, Martín-Municio developed an international reputation for his project and
presented it as either basic molecular biology (EMBO) or comparative biochemistry (NSF).
This enabled him to attract EMBO’s support to research on protein structure and connect with
the interests of Oró, a key gatekeeper at both the NSF and the Spanish scientific authorities.

The sequencing of Ceratitis was, thus, placed at the centre of protein biochemistry in Spain
and, more generally, the strategic interests of the dictatorship during the late 1960s and early
70s. Protein sequencing, in its first Spanish life, spanned between a chemical approach to
development and evolutionary interests, in order to accommodate to the requirements of its
complex network of supporters. The funding from the NSF led the team to start with
cytochrome c, a widespread model protein in comparative biochemistry, and the sequence –
the first ever determined in Spain – was published in 1975, as an addition to the phylogenetic
tree which compared Ceratitis with other more evolved species (Fernández-Sousa, Gavilanes,
et al. 1975). A number of cytochrome c fragments could not be analysed with the sequenator
and this led to the combination of this apparatus with manual, more artisanal techniques. In
order to learn more about manual procedures, one of the graduate students of the team, José
Gavilanes, travelled to the US to visit a Spanish researcher who had learned sequencing by
remarkably different means.

Second life: practical vs. disciplinary spaces

The researcher Gavilanes visited was Enrique Méndez, who had also pursued the
undergraduate Degree of Chemistry at the Universidad de Madrid and been seduced by the
biochemistry course of Martín-Municio. However, at the time of Méndez’s attendance (1962-
67) the laboratory internship component had not yet been incorporated to the degree and the
prospects for most students were either a fellowship at Lora-Tamayo’s department or a job at
the growing chemical industry of 1960s Spain. Méndez, by contrast, was more inclined
towards a career in biochemistry and, after graduation, he actively sought a laboratory for its
pursuit.

In 1967, through the connections of an undergraduate classmate, Méndez entered into contact
with Margarita Salas and Eladio Viñuela, a couple of young researchers who had just started
as senior scientists at a CSIC institute, the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas (CIB).5 Salas
and Viñuela had returned from a postdoctoral stay at New York University (NYU), where
they had worked in the laboratory of Severo Ochoa, another admired biomedical scientist in
Spain. By the time of Salas and Viñuela’s postdoc (1964-67), Ochoa had won the Nobel Prize
and become an international representative of molecular biology, due to his contributions to
the decipherment of the genetic code – the mechanisms by which DNA exerts its genetic
function and synthesises proteins. Given Ochoa’s reputation and the background that Salas
and Viñuela brought back from New York, the young couple was appointed head of the first
molecular biology section in Spain at the CIB (Santesmases 2006: 782 and ff.).

Méndez became the first PhD candidate of Viñuela – in 1967, the same year Martín-Municio
founded his Department – and integrated a rapidly expanding research group. The group
benefited from the rise of doctoral fellowships during the Development Plans and attracted a
substantial number of young researchers. Salas and Viñuela’s project addressed the problem
of morphogenesis: how the viral particle is constructed in bacteriophage Phi29, a
5
R. Manso, J. Ávila, M. Salas and A. Sánchez, interviews with author, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and
Central Headquarters of CSIC, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

6
microorganism commonly used as an experimental model by molecular biologists. The work
was divided between the PhDs and Méndez, given his background in organic chemistry, was
assigned the structural characterisation of the viral proteins. He devoted his doctoral
dissertation to this problem, applying the analytical techniques he had used as an
undergraduate and other methods he learned from Viñuela, such as chromatography and
electrophoresis (Salas 2007: 8 and ff.).

The expertise in organic chemistry from Méndez’s undergraduate was especially valuable for
the bacteriophage project. Salas and Viñuela had also graduated in Chemistry in Madrid, and
attended one of the first editions of Martín-Municio’s course. However, they conducted their
PhDs at a more consolidated biochemical school in Spain at that time: the Instituto de
Enzimología of CSIC (Santesmases 2000a). This created a contrast between Méndez’s
interest in the structure of proteins, and the more functional and metabolic approach of his
supervisors, which permeated most of the other team members. Méndez’s profile occupied a
differentiated space in this early Spanish molecular biology, and the further refinement of his
techniques interested Salas and Viñuela. After the thesis submission in 1970, they mobilised
their contacts in NYU and proposed Méndez an international stay to apply his structural
expertise to medical problems. Postdoctoral stays overseas were becoming a standard career
step among Spanish researchers, many of them returning to their doctoral homes afterwards.

This led Méndez to also migrate to NYU and become a postdoctoral fellow of Blas Frangione,
an Argentinean immunologist who knew Salas and Viñuela via Ochoa. Frangione had
practiced as a physician in Argentina during the 1950s, specialising in the treatment of
rheumatic fever, which was then a widespread infant disease in this country. He worked as a
graduate student in the Medical Center of NYU, where a group devoted to the immunological
basis of rheumatic diseases was being created (Dammacco 1984). In the mid-1960s,
Frangione moved to the UK and joined the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of Cambridge
(LMB), where he became a doctoral and postdoctoral associate of Frederick Sanger, one of
the inventors of protein sequencing (García-Sancho 2012: 80 and ff.). His project in Sanger’s
group was the sequencing of the disulphide bridges (see Figure 1), the areas in which the
different protein chains are joined together (Frangione and Milstein 1968). In 1969, Frangione
returned to NYU and joined the then consolidated Rheumatic Diseases Study Group. He
brought back from Cambridge sequencing protocols and equipment, and applied them to the
structural characterisation of immunoglobulins, the proteins which form antibodies.6

By the time of Méndez’s arrival, in 1971, Frangione was trying to expand his target diseases
from rheumatism and arthritis to cancer. This was a generalised shift in the US, in the face of
scientific policies and increasing funding devoted to cancer research and, more generally, the
clinical application of biomedical science (Yi 2008: 592 and ff., García-Sancho 2011: 238 and
ff.). The postdoctoral fellowship that brought Méndez to New York was awarded by the
Damon Runyon Foundation to study the causes of myeloma. At Frangione’s group, Méndez
specialised in the sequencing of the disulphide bridges of immunoglobulins A, D and E,
which were believed to be involved in this type of cancer (Méndez, Frangione, et al. 1973).

Instead of a sequenator, Méndez used a semi-automatic strategy which included an amino

acid analyser and the manual sequencing techniques of Swedish biochemist Pehr Edman.
Despite Sanger having been traditionally considered the inventor of protein sequencing,
biomedical laboratories – including Cambridge’s LMB – adopted more widely the strategy
6
B. Frangione, phone interview with author, 2009, and personal communication, 2012. Annual reports of the
Department of Pathology, NYU Medical Center. Archives of New York University, years 1963 to 1973.

7
developed by Edman in the early 1950s, mainly due to its easier integration with automatic
instruments (García-Sancho 2010: 284 and ff.). Following Edman’s procedure, Méndez
submitted the template protein to a series of chemical reagents which chopped the last amino
acid of the chains. He then used the analyser to determine the amino acid composition of each
chain and identify the missing chopped amino acids. By repeating this operation, which
required bench dexterity and advanced technical skills, the sequence could be reconstructed.

This mastery in sequencing methods was crucial for Méndez’s appointment at the Roche
Institute of Molecular Biology in New Jersey shortly after concluding his postdoc, in 1973.
The Institute had been created in the late 1960s by the multinational company Hoffmann-La
Roche, in order to expand its expertise in organic chemistry to the promising medical
prospects of molecular biology. A number of prestigious molecular biologists were recruited,
with the hope of applying their expertise to the development of new drugs. Ochoa was
appointed as senior researcher after retiring from NYU (Santesmases 2000b: 728), and he was
instrumental in the recruitment of a number of promising young Spanish biomedical
researchers.

Méndez’s new laboratory in New Jersey was the space to which Gavilanes travelled to learn
manual sequencing for the Ceratitis project. When compared with the previous life of protein
sequencing, it presented similarities and differences with the Department of Biochemistry of
Madrid. Both professional spaces consolidated in the mid-1970s, with the help of
international biomedical elites – Ochoa and Oró – well connected with the Spanish and US
scientific administration and political power. Their local legitimation was based on the
potential of each space for applying a biomedical technique – protein sequencing – to
practical problems of interest for either agriculture or medicine. However, the place in which
each space was located differed at the geographical, scientific and socio-political levels.7
Martín-Municio’s Department was created in Francoist Spain and had a clear disciplinary
locus in protein biochemistry – which was presented as either basic or applied research
depending on the funding source being EMBO, the NSF or the Spanish Development Plans.
Méndez’s laboratory, in contrast, was a by-product of the shift to applied biomedicine in US
scientific policy: it emerged within a research institute of the pharmaceutical industry, not
being ascribed to any academic discipline.

The prosopographical approach, thus, allows the identification of two different strategies to
construct a professional space, embodied in the contrasting biographies of Martín-Municio
and Méndez{Fruton, 1985 #141}. In the case of Martín-Municio, there was a one-to-one
correspondence between the creation of the space – the Department at the University of
Madrid – and an academic discipline – biochemistry – which was presented as different from
previous incarnations of this field in Spain. In the case of Méndez, this correspondence did
not work as automatically, and his space was rather justified in solving a practical necessity
for a multinational company – providing protein sequences for the development of new drugs
by Hoffmann-La Roche.

This lack of disciplinary locus was the reason of the abrupt dissolution of Méndez’s space in
1975. Despite the research contributions of his laboratory to the refinement of Edman’s
technique – and their impact on sequencing efforts, such as the Ceratitis project (Méndez and
Lai 1975) – the Roche Institute considered that protein sequencing was no longer central for
its programme on drug development. By that time, Hoffmann-La Roche was experiencing a
shift in its research agenda which was common in other pharmaceutical companies: the
7
On the importance of place in emerging disciplinary spaces see Meyer and Molyneux-Hodgson, this volume.

8
priorities were being increasingly set by scientists with more biological and less chemical
background (Quirke 2008, chs. 5-6). These scientists included Ochoa’s closer circle of
collaborators, and acted as either advisors or newly promoted heads of corporate research
divisions. They defended a focus on the functionality of molecular reactions rather than on
structural analysis, and claimed that the molecule from which all biomedical functions could
be inferred was DNA instead of proteins.

Protein sequencing under pressure: the end of lives one and two

Méndez’s appointment at the Roche Institute coincided with the discovery of methods to
specifically cleave and reassemble DNA sequences. The researchers involved in the invention
and patenting of this set of techniques – Paul Berg, Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer at the
University of Berkeley between 1973 and 74 – belonged to a second generation of molecular
biologists who had started their careers during the golden age of this discipline. They were
endorsed by the so-called founders of molecular biology – among them Ochoa – and baptised
their techniques as ‘recombinant DNA’, a method which, allegedly, would allow the isolation
and transfer of DNA fragments from one organism to another (Yi 2008).

Both the old and new generations presented these techniques as the logical consequence of
progress in molecular biology, and persuaded public and private funders that the manipulation
of DNA was the promising new horizon of biomedicine (Abelson 1980). The shift in
scientific policies towards applied biomedicine and subsequent expectations around the
biotechnology market were decisively strengthened by the researchers’ enthusiasm (Bud
1993, Wright 1994). Recombinant DNA was inserted into a linear and teleological story
which started with the elucidation of the double helix in 1953, continued with the deciphering
of the genetic code and culminated with the possibility of altering DNA sequences. This story,
whose logic was the achievement of an increasingly perfect description of genetic material,
excluded the important role that protein research had played in the origins and development of
molecular biology (García-Sancho 2012: 170 and ff.). Protein sequencing and more generally
protein chemistry were thus regarded by biomedical researchers and science administrators as
increasingly unnecessary and out of date.

Protein biochemists responded in different ways to this situation. In life one of sequencing,
Martín-Municio embarked in the completion of other Ceratitis proteins after publishing the
sequence of cytochrome c in 1975. Nevertheless, he found increasingly difficult to fund these
projects: the renewal of the NSF grant met objections in the peer-review process and, in his
professional correspondence, Martín-Municio expressed concerns of being “sent to hospice”
by the Spanish authorities. Towards the end of the 1970s, the only funding available for
sequencing at his Department was from food and pharmaceutical companies owned by the
families of the group members.8

This led Martín-Municio to shift his investigations to the three-dimensional structure of

proteins. In 1978, he acquired a spectrograph and the members of the sequencing team were
trained in circular dichroism, a technique of physics which enabled to determine the atomic
configuration of a given molecule. Gavilanes and other Department’s graduate students, who
were pre-doctoral recruits at the beginning of the Ceratitis project, devoted their PhD theses

8
Personal Archive of A. Martín-Municio, Faculty of Chemistry, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain).
Uncatalogued folder on NSF. J. Gavilanes and R. Rodríguez, interview with author, Faculty of Chemistry,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2009 and 2012.

9
to the relationship between the sequence information and the spatial conformation of amino
acids in the proteins (Gavilanes, Lizarbe, et al. 1980). By the early 1980s, the use of the
sequenator at the Department was rather marginal.

The conclusion of this first life of protein sequencing proved beneficial for Martín-Municio’s
team. During the 1980s, the Department became a reference centre in circular dichroism, a
complex technique with which biomedical researchers were not normally familiar. Gavilanes
and other younger group members also moved to other target proteins of interest for the new
biotechnology industry – such as collagen, believed to constitute a suitable biomaterial – and
started to label their research as “molecular biology” (Gavilanes, et al. 1980). In 1986, the
department was renamed Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.9

In life two, Méndez opted for a different strategy and attempted to build a professional space
in Spain based on his mastery in sequencing. He left the US after the termination of his line of
research in New Jersey and returned to Madrid in 1976, where he had been awarded a position
in a new CSIC institute, the Centro de Biología Molecular “Severo Ochoa” (CBM). This
Centre had been opened just a year before and had Eladio Viñuela – Méndez’s former PhD
supervisor – in its Board of Directors. Viñuela sought to re-introduce structural protein
expertise into the project on bacteriophage Phi29 and endorsed the appointment of Méndez,
who had helped start the investigations on this model organism during his doctoral training.

The situation Méndez found in Spain had significantly changed since he left. Franco died in
1975 and the country faced increasing socio-political tension, especially among university
students who demanded a democratic regime. Lora-Tamayo had left the Ministry of
Education and his replacements founded new universities, among them the ‘Autonomous’
Universities of Barcelona and Madrid. These new campuses became the home of hybrid
research institutes, jointly administered by the University and CSIC, and provided
professional positions to young graduates. That was the case of the CBM, which was located
at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and hosted laboratories specifically designed for the
generation of molecular biologists of Salas and Viñuela. Many of their former PhD students
found accommodation in these new spaces upon return from their postdoctoral stays overseas.

The CBM also benefited from the support of both the latest Governments of the dictatorship
and the new democratic authorities, first elected in 1977. By fostering the new trends in
molecular biology, old and new Spanish elites sought to legitimate their international
authority, and calm researchers and intellectuals. In this goal, they were joined by the new
Chief of State – the Prince Juan Carlos – who personally inaugurated the CBM in 1975. This
involvement had a significant symbolic value and is highlighted in all the retrospective
accounts of the Centre’s founders (CBM 2003).

Prior to his incorporation, in 1976, Méndez requested to the CBM the purchase of an
automatic amino acid analyser and protein sequenator. These apparatus had evolved and the
latest generations – which required substantial investments – could work with smaller protein
samples and achieve a more efficient sequence output. However, the Centre’s Board of
Directors decided to request less expensive versions, suitable for the sequencing of protein
fragments rather than whole proteins. They forecasted that the use of sequencing instruments

9
The reason for this change of name was a Law for University Reform issued in 1983 and which set a number of
knowledge areas to which departments should be compulsorily ascribed. Biochemistry was not considered an
area in its own right, but only associated to molecular biology. Three years later, in 1986, Spain entered into the
European Economic Community and established a National R&D Programme (see below).

10
at the CBM would be limited to protein areas of interest for the research projects of the
different laboratories. In Viñuela’s group Méndez’s use of sequencing was thus restricted to a
number of protein fragments that were attached to the DNA of Phi29 (Mellado, Méndez, et al.
1977).10

This limitation profoundly disappointed Méndez and, while still recovering, he was
approached by a clinician, José María Sancho Rof, who had become the head of the
Endocrinology Service of a new hospital. The Hospital Ramón y Cajal had just started
admitting patients and, despite being inaugurated only two years after the CBM, in 1977,
presented a remarkably different history. It was conceived in the late 1960s by a number of
physicians, some of them with strong family and professional connections with Franco. The
planning was executed by the last technocratic Governments of the dictatorship and sought to
integrate, within a majestic building, all the surgical specialties. The conclusion of the works
coincided with the political change in Spain, and this led Sancho Rof and other physicians to
reform the regulations and departmental structure according to the new times (Ortuño 2003).
However, the Hospital was used by the newly legalised leftist organisations – enthusiastically
active after decades in the shadow – to criticise continuities between the dictatorship and the
new democratic regime.11

INSERT FIGURE 3 AROUND HERE

At the time of its foundation, the Hospital had 15 clinical services and a Department of
Research, which aimed to coordinate biomedical investigations in support of the medical
practice. Clinical research had significantly increased in Spain during the 1960s, due to the
development of a national insurance system and the proliferation of State-funded hospitals
which incorporated both physicians with research inclinations and biomedical scientists
(Segovia de Arana 1991). The Hospital Ramón y Cajal sought to strengthen this research
component by giving clinical investigation an institutional embodiment in the form of a
department. However, in practice, the Department of Research exclusively devoted to
neurology – following the legacy of the first Spanish Nobel laureate in science, Santiago
Ramón y Cajal, after whom the hospital was named – and the clinical services incorporated
investigators adapted to their necessities.12

The necessities of the Endocrinology Service constituted an opportunity for Méndez’s interest
in large-scale sequencing. Sancho Rof offered to him a state-of-the-art sequenator and
analyser, as well as a position to combine independent research with service to the diagnosis
of endocrine disorders. Méndez accepted the offer, joined the Hospital in 1978 and was
particularly successful in obtaining grants from the Fondo de Investigación Sanitaria (FIS), a
new fund established by the democratic Ministry of Health to foster biomedical investigation.
This enabled him to form a team via the recruitment of a technician and doctoral students.

10
CBM, Memoria, 1975-78. F. Soriano, interview with author, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CSIC),
2011.
11
Newspaper Archive of the Spanish Biblioteca Nacional, June 2011. Search of keywords ‘Hospital Ramón y
Cajal’ with chronological restriction 1965 to 1985. The main reported criticisms to the Hospital referred to the
megalomaniac orientation of the project, the incoherence of its medical services and the excessive input of
Franco’s trusted physicians in its planning. The reform efforts by Sancho Rof and other Hospital senior staff –
namely its first director, nephrologist Joaquín Ortuño – gradually improved this public perception.
12
E. Rodríguez Ocaña and T. Ortiz (2008) “Medical research in Franco’s Spain: an overview”, paper delivered
at the conference Science, Scientists and Totalitarian Systems: Spanish Science during Francoism, Universidad
Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. J.M. Sancho Rof interview with author, Hospital Ramón y Cajal, 2010. Hospital
Ramón y Cajal, Memoria Anual, years 1977 to 1979.

11
The team combined independent projects funded by the FIS with support to the analysis of
patient samples from the Service and collaboration with other researchers, among them
Méndez’s former doctoral and postdoctoral supervisors Salas, Viñuela and Frangione. While
the independent projects were aimed to the sequence of whole proteins, the diagnosis and
collaborations only involved the sequencing of protein fragments: those relevant for the
disorders the Service’s patients may suffer or of interest for the projects with which Méndez
collaborated. This resulted in the sequenator only being used in the FIS-funded projects,
whereas in the daily activity of the Hospital other techniques, such as protein purification,
were the main input of Méndez’s group.

The group initially enjoyed a robust position and, by the mid-1980s, Méndez was given his
own laboratory, which became a reference centre in both the practice and training of protein
sequencing.13 This laboratory epitomised the professional space that Méndez had managed to
create within the Hospital and the dramatic reconfiguration that protein sequencing had
experienced during its second Spanish life. Méndez had first attempted to introduce protein
sequencing within the boundaries of molecular biology in the late 1970s, taking advantage of
the extension of such boundaries during the transition to democracy. However, the CBM saw
protein sequencing as a technique to be applied to molecular biology projects rather than as a
research project in itself. The Hospital Ramón y Cajal, in contrast, represented a niche for
Méndez’s research-oriented understanding of sequencing. The Hospital was building an
infrastructure for research laboratories and this type of in-site biomedical investigation
received increasing support from the democratic governments, with a specific funding scheme
– the FIS – from 1980 onwards. Méndez achieved in the Endocrinology Service a complex
equilibrium between training, research and clinical assistance, the three pillars of the Hospital
after its reconfiguration by Sancho Rof and others.

However, as in the Roche Institute, this equilibrium broke when the practical contributions of
sequencing started to be put into question. Towards the late 1980s, the Hospital’s authorities
regarded Méndez’s contribution to clinical practice as increasingly insufficient, especially in
the face of the investments required by his laboratory. Méndez’s large-scale sequencing
absorbed financial resources – requiring the rapid renewal of equipment and reagents – while
the diagnosis of endocrine disorders needed only the sequencing of small parts of hormones
and sometimes no sequencing at all. Furthermore, the Endocrinology Service incorporated
other scientists, some investigating DNA and RNA, with whom Méndez developed a growing
rivalry. By 1992, Méndez’s laboratory was isolated from the Endocrinology Service, its only
justification being a substantial publication record.14 Life two of protein sequencing, as a
practice in between research and service – to both clinicians and other biomedical
investigators – was leading to an end. The PhD candidates of Méndez found postdoctoral
accommodation elsewhere, most of them reorienting their careers away from protein
sequencing.

Third life: from protein to DNA sequencing

13
J. Gavilanes, M. Salas and J.M. Sancho Rof, interviews with author, Universidad Complutense de Madrid,
CBM and Hospital Ramón y Cajal, 2008 to 2010. On the importance of specialised techniques and training
spaces see Vinck, this volume; Sormani, this volume.
14
Hospital Ramón y Cajal, Memoria Anual, years 1980 to 1994. There is no direct evidence in these reports of
the contribution of Méndez’s group to the diagnosis of endocrine disorders. In 1992, the format of the reports
changed and Méndez’s laboratory features only under the section “Research Activity”.

12
One of the most promising PhD students of Méndez was Carlos López-Otín. Like Méndez,
López-Otín had started a degree in Chemistry, but by the end of the 1970s he shifted to
Biochemistry, which was then a full specialisation at Universidad Complutense de Madrid –
the new name of Universidad de Madrid. Salas was among the lecturers of this new degree
and she recommended López-Otín to Méndez as a candidate for a doctoral fellowship. In
1981, López-Otín became the first PhD fellow of Méndez and was involved in his main
research project at the Hospital: the sequencing of Human Complex-Forming Glycoprotein
(HC). However, López-Otín’s thesis not only addressed the sequence of HC, but also its
connections with the protein’s three-dimensional structure. For this latter purpose, he
cooperated with Martín Municio’s Department and used its advanced techniques in protein
conformational analysis (Gavilanes, López Otín, et al. 1984, López Otín, Grubb, et al. 1984)
(Gavilanes, 1984 #80;López Otín, 1984 #77).

After finishing his thesis, in 1985, López-Otín started a postdoctoral fellowship at the CBM.
The project on Phi29 was already concluded and Viñuela had started a sequencing effort of
the genome of the African swine fever virus. Sequencing genomes involved addressing the
DNA of the target organism, rather than its protein products. During the second half of the
1970s, DNA sequencing methods had become available – two of them invented at Sanger’s
laboratory in Cambridge – and those methods had been received with enthusiasm amongst
molecular biologists (García-Sancho 2012: 39 and ff.). In Spain, the strong support of the
democratic authorities to the new trends in molecular biology resulted in substantial
investments in DNA sequencing, including Viñuela’s project.

The sequencing of the swine fever virus was funded by the new Spanish National R&D
Programme, issued after the approval of the first democratic Law for Science in 1986 (Muñoz
and Sebastián 2008). This Law was passed the same year Spain joined the European
Economic Community and sought to correct the “lethargy and lack of social stimuli” for
research under Franco’s regime. However, as in the Development Plans, the Law’s rationale
was founded on a perceived scientific underperformance of Spain and the necessity of
addressing the levels of the neighbour nations, in this case seeking European integration
rather than a revival of past imperial supremacy. The democratic Law also considered
scientific research as essential for overcoming the financial difficulties of the country and
encouraged projects to connect with local economic interests.15

This led Viñuela to link his sequencing effort to a commercial necessity. In the early and mid-
1980s, there were increasing suspicions that Iberian pigs – native from Spain and Portugal –
were infected by the swine fever virus and this complicated the exports of cured ham and
other idiosyncratic food products, especially within the newly opened European market. As
Martín-Municio had done with Ceratitis and crop plagues twenty years before, Viñuela
mobilised this national problem and presented sequencing as the basis for developing a
vaccine against the virus.16 The motivation among his group at the CBM was yet less tangible:
they wanted to use and develop a technique which was perceived as revolutionary for the
practice of molecular biology.

López-Otín focused his postdoctoral research on the expansion of his expertise on proteins to
DNA. As many biomedical researchers at that time, he believed that the possibility of altering

15
Quote from Ley 13/1986, de 14 de abril, de Fomento y Coordinación General de la Investigación Científica y
Técnica, section “Exposición de motivos”. Available on-line at http://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-A-
1986-9479 (last accessed March 2013).
16
CBM, Memoria, 1981-85.

13
the structure and determining the sequence of this molecule – rather than proteins – would
lead to crucial scientific breakthroughs and promising career prospects. His role in the swine
fever virus project was the isolation of genes which synthesised the viral proteins. In order to
achieve this he used an enzyme, reverse transcriptase, which allowed the synthesis of DNA
fragments from messenger RNA. The sequence of the fragments was then determined and
assembled, gradually completing the genome of the virus (Freije, Laín, et al. 1993).17

This expertise enabled López-Otín to gain a permanent position in 1987, only two years after
the start of his postdoc. The appointment was made at the Universidad de Oviedo, a small
institution in Northern Spain which was making substantial investments in biomedicine. A
priority area for the investments was what was then perceived as the future of molecular
biology: the analysis of genomes via sequencing and recombinant DNA techniques. From his
new post, López-Otín continued cooperating with the CBM and the sequence of the swine
fever virus was the first published genome in Spain, in 1995 (Yáñez, Rodríguez, et al. 1995).
Two years before this, López-Otín was appointed professor of Biochemistry and Molecular
Biology at just the age of 35.

López-Otín’s professional space followed a different strategy from the two previous lives of
protein sequencing. The creation of this space did not require the proposal of a new discipline
– such as Martín-Municio’s biochemistry – or the connection of protein sequencing with a
practical service – as in Méndez’s laboratory in the Hospital. López-Otín’s career was initially
within an established and favoured discipline, the molecular biology of mid-1980s Spain,
whose representatives had become the scientific elite of the consolidated democratic regime.
He capitalised in the increasing expectations around DNA sequencing and recombinant
techniques, and presented them as key mechanisms for the scientific modernisation of the
country. The specialisation in these techniques proved extremely successful, given that
between the late 1980s and early 90s, López-Otín was one of the few Spanish experts in the
methods which were regarded as the new horizon of molecular biology.

By the time López-Otín was appointed professor (1993), Méndez had left the Hospital and
moved back to CSIC, where the scale of his sequencing projects decreased and was finally
restricted to the detection of gluten in food processed for celiac eaters. López-Otín and other
molecular biologists who knew Méndez have retrospectively considered that a main reason of
his nomadic career was the increasing use of DNA sequencing and recombinant DNA in
biomedical research. These techniques, in their view, made protein sequencing less
demanded, given that research could concentrate in genes without the necessity of chemically
analysing proteins.18

However, Méndez continued to cooperate with molecular biology projects throughout the
1990s, including López-Otín and Viñuela’s sequencing of the swine fever virus (López Otín,
Freije, et al. 1990). His techniques were necessary to genomic sequencing, in order to
characterise part or the whole set of amino acid sequences synthesised by the determined
DNA sequence – much as proteomics does nowadays. This suggests that the different fates of
the three lives of protein sequencing were also shaped by factors related to the circulation of
knowledge and what this complex process bears on the historical conditions for scientific
success.

17
C. López-Otín, phone interview with author, 2009. CBM, Memoria, 1985-1987.
18
C. López-Otín, J. Ávila and M. Salas, interviews with author, phone and CBM, 2008 and 2009.

14
Conclusions

This paper has investigated the local configuration of protein sequencing in three different
contemporary Spanish settings. It has done so with two main underlying purposes: 1) to show
that from this apparently secondary historical event one may find global patterns in the
process of knowledge circulation (related to disciplinary formation, elite role and the rhetoric
of science policy), and 2) to argue that, in order to find such global patterns, the traditional
comparative framework – of a ‘peripheral’ case study versus an ‘international centre’ – is
clearly insufficient.

To this end, I have proposed three lives of protein sequencing in Spain with the aim of
following the generative power of a practice throughout the careers of three different
researchers. In this process, the focus has not been upon the similarities or ‘idiosyncratic
differences’ between the geographical area in which the practice is learned and that in which
the practice is locally introduced. These areas of learning and introduction, in my study, have
been part of an indivisible research object: the strategies by which researchers create a
professional space for their own.

The indivisibility of those strategies makes their assessment against an alleged global standard
inappropriate. Their proper investigation rather requires the reconstruction of what was
perceived as local and global in each life of protein sequencing and how this shaped the
different responses of my subject researchers. In other words, the level of comparison in this
paper has not been centres versus peripheries of protein sequencing, but contrasting strategies
of legitimation of protein sequencing in Spain at changing historical times. Comparing
professional strategies rather than the reception of a technique has proved more fruitful to
address long-standing STS problems, such as competing processes of disciplinary formation
and their impact on scientific prestige and reputation.

My theoretical approach has sought to make a distinctive contribution to this volume. As in

other essays, I have highlighted the importance of training, place, protected spaces and
nationalistic discourses in the process by which local diversity is created. However, in
contrast with other ‘big picture’ perspectives, I have opted for small numbers and followed
the trajectory of three individual scientists using prosopographical tools. This has enabled me
to reconstruct in detail the national and international domains through which a global research
practice – protein sequencing – circulated and diversified across Spanish biomedicine during
the last third of the 20th century.

The main conclusion to draw from my investigation is that the global should be problematised
as much as the local in the study of knowledge circulation. Global scientific trends are usually
invoked by scientists and administrators in funding applications or official policy documents.
They set such global directions as models towards which their local research or policy efforts
should be led. However, it is never clear to which precise entity – geographical place,
scientific institution or line of research – the invoked global refers, being this a main reason of
the difficulties to assess the outcomes of local policies. STS literature should address this
shortcoming and characterise global trends through detailed, interconnected and well-
researched local case studies. In these studies, the actors’ aspiration to a global science is
important, but as a rhetorical device rather than an empty standard against which their actions
should be compared.

15
In my story, and more generally in the history of Spanish science (Nieto-Galán 1998), the
rhetoric of backwardness has played a key role in scientific policy. Research planning in
Spain has always presented as a key objective the compensation of an alleged international
gap. The Development Plans were a means for the creation of a national science which would
lead the economy of Francoist Spain to international leadership. Similarly, the democratic
National R&D Programme sought to balance Spain with the European Economic Community
after the country’s membership in 1986. Both schemes, despite their different priorities and
opposing ideologies, set a discourse of international legitimation to which researchers needed
to adapt their careers.

Martín-Municio, Méndez and López-Otín thus presented their sequencing projects as a means
to correct a deficit and solve the problems of the country through the global techniques of
biochemistry, immunology and genomics. However, an analysis of the research practices
behind those discourses shows that the postulated national deficit had a minimum impact on
their scientific activity, which was rather shaped by the efforts to consolidate a professional
space. The rationale behind their scientific careers was not so much to follow the models of
Oró’s laboratory, Frangione’s rheumatism study group or Viñuela’s Centro de Biología
Molecular. Martín-Municio, Méndez and López Otín rather sought to underpin the niches
they had found at the universities of Madrid and Oviedo, as well as the Hospital Ramón y
Cajal. This led them to exhibit international cooperation – with EMBO, the NSF or NYU –
but their day-to-day practice was crucially shaped by historically specific local demands:
Martín-Municio chose Ceratitis rather than the more widespread model fly Drosophila, while
Méndez and López-Otín capitalised on new biomedical spaces to square the techniques in
which they were experts: the Hospital Ramón y Cajal saw protein sequencing as a means to
build clinical research and the Universidad de Oviedo used recombinant DNA to foster its
biotechnological capacities.

A key factor in the success of these professional spaces was the correspondence between an
institutional and a disciplinary locus. Martín-Municio and López-Otín successfully resolved
the tension between local problems and perceived global trends by constructing a research
agenda which resonated with both academic disciplines and the aspirations of the Spanish
State at different timeframes. Protein biochemistry satisfied the economic necessities of
Francoism, whereas molecular biology and recombinant DNA fit with the will of modernising
the country by the new democratic authorities. This disciplinary locus also provided scientists
with flexibility to develop their research interests while presenting them as applied to the
problems of the country: Ceratitis – an agricultural plague – enabled Martín-Municio to
pursue developmental biochemistry, and the swine fever virus – a problem for Spanish cattle
– was the means to learn sequencing and recombinant DNA methods for López-Otín.

Méndez, in contrast, failed to square large-scale protein sequencing with either a newly
introduced or established discipline. This forced him to use the techniques to solve practical
problems – the diagnosis of endocrine disorders and, later, the detection of gluten –which
were difficult to balance with his broader research aspirations. The professional space of
Méndez, ironically, provided other consolidated disciplines with specialised techniques and
the training of human capital. López-Otín made his name as a molecular biologist after
learning sequencing from Méndez and leaving his laboratory. The sequencing of the swine
fever virus – a leading molecular biology project in the mid-1980s – required Méndez’s
cooperation, despite genomic initiatives allegedly suggesting that protein sequencing was out
of date.

16
Elite support has also played a crucial role in the success of professional spaces. A main
outcome of prosopography in the field in which it was first applied – political history – was
the mapping of how power relationships in a society evolve over time (Stone 1971). My
collective biography of three sequencing scientists suggests that, in the history of science,
elites have acted as translators – sometimes even in a linguistic sense – mediating between
researchers, international disciplinary trends, and the local political and economic power. The
involvement of Oró as co-applicant made Martín-Municio’s grant to the NSF possible and
enabled him to present it as a contribution to evolutionary biochemistry. Similarly, Frangione
and Ochoa were instrumental for Méndez’s career in the US, firstly in immunology and then
at a research institute of the pharmaceutical industry.

The role of scientific elites is sometimes founded on political adherence to a regime – the case
of Lora-Tamayo – and sometimes on more instrumental reasons – an interest in fostering
Spanish science in the cases of Ochoa and Oró. The identification of elites with good science
makes then exemplars, with the power of persisting over time and shaping the development of
disciplines: the reference centre for molecular biology in Spain was named after Severo
Ochoa. This persisting effect of elites takes the form of research schools which are
retrospectively invoked in order to secure prestige and support. Viñuela’s early career in
Spain benefited from his postdoc with Ochoa, while López-Otín built on Viñuela’s
mentorship – rather than Méndez’s – in support of his appointment in Oviedo.

This overarching role of elites portrays a landscape in which the standard shifts in Spanish
political history are qualified in the light of science. The transition from Francoism to
democracy transformed the scientific system from a nationalistic model based on personal and
ideological connections into a more meritocratic and internationally oriented policy.
However, with the arrival of democracy a new elite – molecular biologists – substituted the
old ones – physicians and organic chemists – in the country’s aspiration to address an alleged
international gap. Professional, institutional and disciplinary spaces resisted political change
by adapting to the new configurations: biochemistry in Martín-Municio’s group shifted to the
three-dimensional structure of proteins, whereas molecular biology embraced recombinant
and DNA sequencing techniques.

The dynamics of these interconnected spaces point to both the potentials and limitations of
my story. More investigations – inside and outside Spain – are needed to see whether elite
support, a disciplinary locus and a rhetorical equilibrium between national problems and
international aspirations are generalized patterns of success in the process of knowledge
circulation. However, my proposed three lives of protein sequencing suggest a mechanism of
local configuration by which the global trends that scientists invoke are not mimetically
replicated, neither completely ruled out. A successful professional space needs enough
flexibility to secure scientific freedom without compromising the security of researchers. In
such a professional space, the investigative enterprise should avoid being tied up to local
problems and, at the same time, keep the scientist’s prestige within the closer community of
political and economic gatekeepers.

This double game of scientists in building a space for their own shows the limitations of STS
approaches focusing on either the similarities or differences between the local problems
researchers address and the global trends in which their work is inscribed. In accepting such
global trends uncritically, scholars are reifying the interested discourse of their subject
scientists and the rhetoric of backwardness of provincial scientific policies. The ‘global’, as
my story has shown, is not a given category, but the result of strategies that lead some

17
professional spaces to success and internationalisation. An approach that properly addresses
this category should, therefore, investigate local strategies in a way that globalises STS
questions, rather than limiting them with obstructive comparative frameworks. This would
enable scholars not to be afraid of their nationality or the alleged peripheral nature of their
case studies. The Universidad de Madrid can be as important as the University of New York
if the interconnection of their stories illuminates the global and overcomes long-standing
inferiority complexes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks are given to María Jesús Santesmases, Ana Romero, Emilio Muñoz and other
researchers at the Instituto de Filosofía of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) for
invaluable feedback and institutional support. The editors of this volume, Martina Merz and
Philippe Sormani, together with an external referee, also provided insightful comments.

The scientists I interviewed – and their personal assistants – kindly accommodated me in their
busy schedules and spent time in explaining both historical processes and technical aspects of
their work. One of them, Alberto Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa, died shortly after the interview and
this chapter is a tribute to his memory. Enrique Méndez’s widow, Pilar, also accepted an
interview and provided both valuable background information and archival materials.

Other researchers and institutions which helped me at different stages of my work are: Xavier
Calvó and Agustí Nieto-Galán (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona), Albert Presas
(Universidad Pompeu Fabra), Joaquim Guillén and José Ramón Bertomeu (Instituto López
Piñero), David Teira (UNED), John Pickstone and Niki Vermeulen (University of
Manchester), Janet Bunde and Andrew Lee (New York University), Rosario Gutiérrez
(Centro de Biología Molecular “Severo Ochoa”), Virginia Olmedo (Hospital Ramón y Cajal)
and Pilar Martínez (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC).

The research reported in this chapter was funded by the projects HUM2006-04939/FISO,
FFI2009-07522 and FFI2012-34076, awarded by the Spanish National R&D Programme, and
by two postdoctoral contracts within the schemes JAE-Doc and Juan de la Cierva, awarded by
the National Research Council (CSIC) and the Spanish Government. Without this financial
support, it would have been unfeasible.

18
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