On the Colombian scientific elite — I

When we think about a member of an elite in sports or pop music, we might think about Michael Jordan scoring 69 points in a single match or Beyoncé taking home six Grammy awards at the same ceremony.

There is also an elite in science. Members of such elite could be signaled by being recipients of international awards, such as the Nobel Prize, or ranked among the most influential thinkers in their respective discipline.

The concern with these yardsticks is that most researchers from developing countries are not Nobel Prize awardees, nor have they been ranked among the most cited researchers worldwide.

When it happens, those researchers are remarkable exceptions, such as Mario Molina or Luís Federico Leloir. Does it mean that developing countries do not have a scientific elite conceived, by and for, their particular context?

In Colombia, we have our own Nobel Prize: the Alejandro Ángel Escobar National Awards (AAENA), whose founder was inspired by the Swedish inventor and his legacy. The AAENA has been awarded since 1955.

By the words of its founder, the AAENAs:

“…are to be assigned for truly meritorious work, which deserves the mark of excellent, if not at all, at least within the cultural context of the country.”

There are three science categories: physics and natural sciences; social sciences and humanities; and environmental sciences and sustainable development. Among such local scientific elite, it can be found Salomón Hakim (neurosurgeon) awarded twice in 1967 and 1974, or Ana María Rey (physicist) awarded in 2007. One of the questions that could arise regarding the Colombian scientific elite is:

What topics did the submitted research work awarded by the AAENA addressed?

With a team of research assistants (Karen Pinzón y Andrés Cuestas), we sourced the research titles awarded with the AAENA since 1990 — a total of 88 documents, among research articles, books, technical reports, and thesis. In upcoming posts, I will analyze titles by category.

As an exploratory exercise, I built a semantic network composed of key terms or concepts of the document titles and their interconnections. In doing so, I can map the structure of key terms or concepts researched by the local elite.

Here the result:

The semantic network of the document titles awarded with the AAENA 1990–2020. The titles were sourced from the AAE Foundation website and a book that commemorated the first 50 years of the AAE Foundation. I processed the text in Quanteda and produced the layout in Gephi.

We can observe lots of things happening inside the lexical network. Some things were anticipatable, such as that Colombia is the key term with the highest betweenness or the capacity to serve as an intellectual bridge between clusters.

In this oversight, I’m going to focus on the largest component of the network, the one that comprised most of the key terms and concepts (over 12%). It was circled in red.

The local scientific elite has been working on sustainable development topics, emphasizing the agriculture sector, rural communities/territories, and food security/sovereignty issues.

I also found key terms and concepts related to earth sciences, such as hydrology or El Niño oscillation, the latter impacting people’s livelihoods heavily in developing countries.

Finally, under the ceiling of development studies, I could also identify key terms related to income inequality and social protests.

In essence -with all the limitations and difficulties it represents- I would label the Colombian scientific elite’s principal component: “Development studies and environmental sciences for Colombia.”

A different local elite, the Misión de Sabios (The Mission of Wise men/women) made a national policy call, to some degree, in that line.

The mission claimed that Colombia should focus its current and future science, technology, and innovation policies on converging its biodiversity, biomass production capacity, and local knowledge to make a quantum jump -a pinch of Deepak Chopra there- to sustainable development. In other words, conceive the country’s bioeconomy factors as a development engine.

I’m missing lots of angles here. For instance, if local scientific elites are immersed in global or at least Latinamerican research collaboration networks; their production and impact dynamics; their placement in the global landscape of knowledge; the appropriate treatment according to disciplinary characteristics, among others inquiries, that I will try to lighten in further exercises.

Contact: jcortesanchez@gmail.com