Jungle Laboratories

Gabriela Soto Laveaga wants to put Mexico central to the discussion of science, manufacturing, resources, knowledge, and global trends.  Specifically, she wants to shift agency away from the American and European chemists and companies who have traditionally monopolized the historical narratives of science and medicine.  The focus should be, she tells us, on the Mexican scientists, politicians, and, most importantly, the peasants who picked barbasco and enabled the entire chain of the synthetic hormone story to be forged in the first place.  Like Soluri’s exposure of the lives and concerns of the Hondurans who worked on banana plantations in Banana Cultures, Soto Laveaga moves much of the discussion into the Mexican countryside and uses oral histories to help expose the important role that the campesinos played in this industry.  Soto Laveaga’s approach goes deeper, however, in showing how, with progressive government intervention, the campesinos became barbasqueros who not only provided the barbasco root but who also began to use the language of chemistry and business in order to gain some control over the barbasco trade.  I particularly enjoyed the chapters in which she charts the growing knowledge of the campesinos as they learn about the importance of barbasco and the medications synthesized from it.  Particularly the purposeful linkage of the “once lowly root pickers” who were “equated with heroes of Mexico’s past who had defended Mexico from foreign hands” as the state-owned Proquivemex tried to empower them and simultaneously vilify the foreign pharmaceutical companies (146).  Nationalism has a profound presence in many commodity histories. 

Soto Laveaga tells us in the introduction that she includes rural Mexicans in the narrative of discovery because steroid research could not have occurred without them.  She also attempts to convince us that Mexico should be lauded as the birthplace of oral contraceptives (the Pill) and that Mexican scientists like chemist Ernesto Miramontes have not been given enough credit for such groundbreaking discoveries.  She tells us that a kind of “historical amnesia” afflicts the world that harbored “the erroneous image of Mexico as a technologically backward nation whose citizens were ill prepared to grasp the complexity of chemistry” (53).  Soto Laveaga tries a little too hard here.  After all, she negates the image of a modern Mexico in describing the lack of roads, literacy and basic medical care in the countryside; by looking at the precariousness of the Mexican economy; or in discussing the corruption of the police that Marker, the American chemist, experienced on a root-finding mission.  She also notes but fails to notice that early “Mexican” laboratories like Syntex, where Miramontes did his research on progesterone, was established in Mexico by a Hungarian lawyer and a German chemist.  And that at the national university UNAM a Hungarian-born chemist started a Ph.D. program to train Mexicans based on “a perceived lack of trained Mexican chemists” (61).  Is this, then, a perceived lack or an actual lack?  Ernesto Miramontes, without UNAM’s doctoral program and Syntex’s lab, would not have been successful.  The Americans and Europeans who on one hand created evil pharmaceutical “cartels” as the author calls them, also helped provide Mexico with chemical expertise.  So I believe this book is successful in the chapters that focus on the campesinos, but that it is less so in the early chapters on bioprospecting (or biopiracy) and scientific discovery.  The perceived slights against Mexico and Mexicans handicap Soto Laveaga’s interpretation and it results in a clunky start to an otherwise informative history.