Andean Biology in Peru: Scientific Styles on the Periphery

T EN THOUSAND YEARS AGO, the inhabitants of the Andes learned to live at an altitude of 10,000 feet above sea level. The first scientific explanation for this phenomenon was provided by French and British researchers, who began investigations in the highlands of Mexico and Peru in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of them believed that the native Indian of these highlands was a physically inferior being, since "normal" physiological functions were impossible at altitudes where oxygen is rarefied. But some Peruvian doctors saw that physiological normality might vary from place to place. In 1927 one of these, Carlos Monge Medrano, organized an expedition to the highlands, where he confirmed the existence of physical and physiological mechanisms that had over the centuries acclimatized the Andean people to the low oxygen pressure of high altitudes. This was the beginning of experimental physiology in Peru. Its history is one in which scientific ideas became intertwined with nationalistic motivations; the story features a small group of researchers who carried out original work in a country whose scientific tradition was peripheral to world centers of knowledge. The Institute of Andean Biology, created in 1931 at San Marcos University, became the center of this new field in Peru; it has been in continuous operation since its founding. That continuity is uncommon among Latin American scientific communities. However, it should not be equated with uniform development. We can distinguish two different scientific styles in Peruvian physiology, interacting in a relationship both tense and complementary. Monge Medrano, who was engaged in a scientific and cultural crusade for the redemption of the Andean people, personified the first, while Alberto Hurtado, who tried to categorize high-altitude studies under an international academic standard, was the exemplar of the second. Such a combination of excellence, institutional continuity, and variety of scientific styles is rare in less developed countries. I will analyze their emergence during the first years of high-altitude studies in Peru.