 It is useful to begin with a brief historical background. Science and scientific thought have long functioned in Latin America as beacons of civic hope and progress amidst multiple recurrent frustrations that vary in kind and texture from place to place. In most of the region, the Enlightenment ideals that fueled independence movements of the early nineteenth century were quickly disappointed by the chaos and general barbarism that followed in much of the region until the 1860s. It was different in Brazil, where emancipation from Europe occurred gradually and orderly during the century, but there too problems grew as did also tensions between the economic elite and the country’s leading liberal thinkers.