A path of one’s own in the international scientific insertion: on the research trajectory of an Argentine neuroscience laboratory

ABSTRACT

Scientific publications in indexed international journals currently define what is considered as belonging to “world science” for Latin American scientific communities. To address how the global/local dynamics occur in a specific case, this work presents an ethnographic analysis of the research processes in an Argentine neuroscience laboratory that led to an outstanding international scientific publication, as well as its repercussions. It is shown that the authors' ways of conceiving the international discussion in which they participated and their particular way of working with a non-conventional animal shaped the theoretical–conceptual contribution of the article. It is argued that this original publication was part of a long-term research trajectory of this group of scientists, rooted in its own production conditions and research tradition.

RESUMO

Atualmente, as publicações científicas em periódicos internacionais indexados definem em grande parte o que é considerado inserido na ciência globalizada para as comunidades científicas da América Latina. Para abordar como ocorre a dinâmica global/local em um caso específico, este artigo apresenta uma análise etnográfica dos processos de pesquisa em um laboratório argentino de neurociências que deram origem a uma publicação científica internacional de destaque, e suas repercussões. Isso mostra que as formas de conceber e avaliar a discussão internacional da qual os autores participaram e a forma particular de trabalhar com um animal não convencional nas neurociências se refletiram na contribuição teórico-conceitual do artigo. Argumenta-se que esta publicação original e de qualidade fez parte da longa trajetória de pesquisa de um grupo de cientistas, enraizada em suas condições de produção e em sua própria tradição de pesquisa.

RESUMEN

Actualmente, las publicaciones científicas en revistas internacionales indexadas definen en gran medida la producción científica que es considerada inserta en la ciencia globalizada para las comunidades científicas de América Latina. Para abordar cómo se da la dinámica global/local en un caso concreto, en este trabajo se presenta un análisis etnográfico de los procesos de investigación en un laboratorio de neurociencias argentino que derivaron en una destacada publicación científica internacional y sus repercusiones. Se muestra que las maneras de concebir y valorar la discusión internacional en la que participaron los autores, y la forma particular de trabajo con un animal no convencional en las neurociencias se plasmaron en la contribución teórico-conceptual del artículo. Se argumenta que esta publicación original y de calidad fue parte de la trayectoria de investigación de un grupo de científicos sostenida en el largo plazo, arraigada a sus condiciones de producción y a su propia tradición de investigación.

KEYWORDS:

• Local–global
• neuroscience
• ethnography

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• Local–global
• neurociências
• etnografia

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Local–global
• neurociencias
• etnografía

1. Introduction

Currently, internationalized science works in a competitive regime presented as a quest for scientific excellence and managed mainly through journals, their prestige, visibility, and authority. In Latin America, scientific publications in indexed international journals broadly define what is considered as belonging to “world science” (Vessuri, Guédon, and Cetto 2014). In this region, the pressure to publish in global circuits has become more acute due to the central role that these publications have, together with their impact factors, in the evaluative cultures of scientific and university institutions (Beigel 2019; Santin and Caregnato 2019). In this way, these publications forge forms of legitimization and consecration (Beigel and Salatino 2015).

The study of the effects of this publication system on the research practices of Latin American scientific communities contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of international insertion relative to their production conditions. These dynamics, known as center–periphery or global–local, have been addressed by Science and Technology Studies in Latin America since the 1980s (Vessuri 2007; Cueto 1989; De Greiff 2002; Kreimer 2010). The main analyses structured their views in terms of the tensions between the desire to integrate into the international scientific system and the autonomy of the scientific communities of the region in defining their profile, interests, and legitimacy (Vessuri 1994).

In recent years, researchers have sought to make the geography of science more plural by showing the heterogeneity of situations in scientific communities, in each discipline and their changes over time (Matharan 2017; Gavroglu et al., 2008). Although academic dependency is not being denied, it has been important to observe and analyze it through specific situations (Beigel 2016). Therefore, the impulse to recognize an active role of the sciences of the peripheries has continued, instead of representing them as mere replicators within the global circuit of production and circulation of knowledge disseminated from the North Atlantic (Chauca and Ragas 2021). In this sense the scientific productions of these latitudes have been highlighted, paying attention to the characteristics that make them distinctive through their local contexts (Kervran, Kleiche-dray, and Quet 2019). Various circuits of recognition and different paths for prestige building provide room for maneuvering between global standards and local orders were observed (Beigel 2021).

However, a deterministic perspective on peripheral scientific productions in circuits defined as mainstream still exists. The main works that emphasized the unequal nature of global scientific competition have continued to point out that the groups that effectively integrated into the international scene have little freedom in the definition of agendas and technical choice. Their publications have therefore been characterized as the result of lines of research and methods chosen according to the standards of the main research centers. Likewise, it has been stressed that their contributions do not imply significant advances in conceptual terms and that they respond to scientific problems disconnected from their own societies (Kreimer 2006a; Delvenne and Kreimer 2017).

In this work, I present an ethnographic analysis of the research processes in an Argentinian neuroscience laboratory that led to an outstanding international paper, as well as its repercussions. Here, through ethnography we answer questions and address sensitivities typical of Science and Technology Studies (Pérez-Bustos, Martínez Medina, and Mora-Gámez 2018). Based on this case, I show how the global and the local were articulated in a publication in the global mainstream circuit. This approach focuses on how the scientists studied defined and lived their research experiences (Spivak and Hubert 2012). This functions not as a transcription of what the people studied thought about their world (Balbi 2012), but also integrates into the analysis significant aspects they pointed out to understand the frameworks in which they participated.

In 2013, I began my anthropological research guided by questions about how memory was investigated by a team of neuroscientists at the Neurobiology of Memory Laboratory of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). When I learned about their work at a science fair, I was curious about the way they conducted research on this phenomenon. I wanted to understand how it was being questioned according to perspectives, procedures, methods, and contexts different to those of the discipline in which I had been trained. Promptly, I decided to take a course in the Biological Sciences program of the faculty, whose teaching team was made up largely of members of the laboratory, to study the main themes and approaches to memory.

In the first class I attended, a paper caught my attention because of the interest in its discovery and its significant impact. Later, I would find that on the day of its publication, scientific journalist Nora Bär, who at that time wrote for the Argentinian newspaper La Nación, dedicated her column “Science/Health” to this event, entitled “Complex Mechanisms of Memory Were Deciphered.”

Not only do [these findings] help to clarify some of the enigmas of memory, but they also give an unexpected twist to the passionate worldwide theoretical dispute that tries to elucidate what are its most intimate mechanisms. (Bär 2003)

In June 2003, the scientific article “Protein Synthesis Subserves Reconsolidation or Extinction Depending on Reminder Duration” (Pedreira and Maldonado 2003) was published in Neuron, an internationally renowned North American journal dedicated to neuroscience. Its authors, María Eugenia Pedreira and Héctor Maldonado, obtained international and national recognition from this work. The experimentation had been carried out with an animal that the members of the laboratory had been investigating since 1984, the Chasmagnathus granulata¹ crab. It is a “non-conventional” animal, as characterized by the members of the group, being the only researchers in the world who studied neuroscience phenomena, such as memory and visual perception, with them.

To increase my understanding of the processes of production and circulation of the article (Latour 1992) I met with Pedreira on several occasions. I also read the book Animal Memory: Acquisition, Persistence and Forgetting that Maldonado had published in 2008 in the Ciencia Joven Collection of EUDEBA University Press, dedicated to popular science. This book in Spanish, which circulated in areas geared toward education, complemented my view of the paper, which is usually the predominant publication in this area of studies (Beigel and Gallardo 2021). These inquiries were the beginning of a long-term ethnographic fieldwork (Guber 2013) carried out between 2013 and 2019.² During it, participant observation was carried out in different instances linked to the scientific work of this laboratory, as well as numerous open interviews with its members over these 7 years, inlcuding the reading of texts and journalistic articles written by them or about their work.

In what follows, I show that the authors’ ways of conceiving the discussions about the study of memory, and their particular way of working with Chasmagnathus, shaped the theoretical–conceptual contribution of the article published in Neuron. I argue that this original publication was part of a long-term research trajectory of this group of scientists, rooted in its production conditions and its research tradition.

1.1. Crabs’ memories

The origins of the UBA laboratory go back to 1984. With the return of democracy to Argentina after its last military dictatorship (1976–1983), biologist Héctor Maldonado³ returned to UBA's Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences. After the Night of the Long Batons in 1966,⁴ he had resigned from his teaching position and, was returning to the country after 17 years of working in Venezuela and Italy.⁵ Together with colleagues from the 1960s, and with some of those postgraduate students who would become the first Ph cohort trained under his direction, they began to set up a laboratory that came to be known as the Neurobiology of Memory Laboratory.

María Eugenia Pedreira joined the lab in 1990 and under Maldonado's direction obtained a bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences. She later won a doctoral scholarship from the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). Her two children were born while she was carrying out her second thesis. She has continued her career in Argentina within CONICET where she currently holds the title of Principal Researcher. Maldonado and Pedreira's educational and research trajectories followed the trajectory of many Argentine scientists from their generations: Maldonado's circulation through prestigious scientific research centers during his doctoral training and Pedreira’s career in Argentina are characteristic of Argentinean science from those periods (Kreimer 2006a; Beigel and Gallardo 2021).

From the creation of the laboratory its members chose the crab Chasmagnathus granulata, among other options, to investigate phenomena such as memory and visual perception. It is a wild animal that had to be collected in San Clemente del Tuyú, a seaside city in Buenos Aires province 300 km away from the Capital city, to take it to the laboratory and do experiments. This practice, carried out by the members of the laboratory themselves, was maintained over the years to supply their experimental animals.⁶

The advantages of this animal in neuroscientific research were discovered as the research progressed and included economical and practical aspects. For example, crabs were a cheaper option than animals from a vivarium; neither too large nor small, Chasmagnathus were convenient for handling, transfer, and lodging and are sensitive but resistant to changes in their environment. Likewise, these crabs gave continuity to Maldonado's research, comprising invertebrates such as octopuses and mantises. In the convergence of material and cultural criteria, the novelty of the animal in neuroscience was important (Dietrich et al. 2020). The research team referred to this as “non-conventionality.” This choice was the result of research in low-budget conditions, but also a strategic decision that enabled them to participate in global discussions.⁷

What I was learning through ethnographic fieldwork led me to think that Chasmagnathus were the true articulators of the laboratory research processes. Daily work was organized around the crabs, different lines of research were brought together, and the group created an identity. Chasmagnathus gave specificity to the ways of doing science in this laboratory (Ferroni 2022).

Some of the conceptions about the study of memory that the members of the lab shared are reflected in Maldonado's book, in which the author established that what specifically drew those who do biological research to this area was an interest in “the evolutionary history of memory” (2008, 23). In other words, how the ability to remember in animals was transformed and what of it remained constant throughout evolution. For Maldonado, the biologist was like a historian of animal evolution.⁸ So, the interest in the crabs’ memories, an animal that is considerably “far” from humans in the evolutionary history, had value in itself.

The memories of a monkey, of a man or of a cockroach are, of course, very different. But there are basic principles of organization and operation that are universal, valid throughout the evolutionary scale. (Maldonado in Moledo 2008)

This interest, which was not restricted to what could have effects on the study of humans, differed from what Maldonado defined as “biomedical” interests that “focus on human memory, its pathologies and possible therapies” (2008, 2). Therefore, from this “non-conventional” animal, research was carried out according to the production conditions of a country like Argentina, but also from questions and ways of working which opened pathways in internationalized science.

2. “Reconsolidation of memory, or cornerstone of the scandal": a scientific controversy that led to a theoretical change

On my first day of fieldwork, I went to a lecture on the subject Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Arturo Romano, full professor and researcher at the laboratory, had agreed to allow me to attend the course as an observer. María Eugenia Pedreira was leading the class as a visiting professor. Romano introduced her as the one who was going to speak about a “new approach” in neurobiology, which maintains that memories were not “fixed,” but that “the process was much more dynamic.” He added that Pedreira and Maldonado had “faced an issue that was unthinkable.” Due to my interest in memory, this question immediately caught my attention, and I wanted to know what this change in perspective on memory in neurobiology consisted of and what made it dynamic. Likewise, I could not avoid the fact that their work had some unusual components and that they had pioneering participation in these investigations.

In her presentation, Pedreira exposed the scientific controversy that led to a new theoretical proposal in neurobiology, intertwining the laboratory's contributions to this field of inquiry. In this account, whch Maldonado also included in his book, she discussed their conceptions of the history and epistemology of their research topics. The territory in which this controversy was resolved was in scientific articles. It is the arena in which the most dynamic and changing knowledge of scientific specialties are found – or the border zone, as Latour and Fabbri (1977) proposed, between the known and the unknown. Pedreira alluded to this scenario before beginning her PowerPoint presentation. She warned the students that in her slides they would find the headings of many papers, not to study them in detail, but because she wanted them to know “where one gets the information from.” Her focus was on the main ideas in that particular lecture.

The question that Pedreira identified as the one that organized the field of discussions in the neurobiology of memory was: “How do animals learn, remember and use new information to guide adaptive behaviors?” In the twentieth century, “great advances were made thanks to tools of the molecular type, or of different types, which allowed us to begin to describe in more detail how this happened at the synapse level.” In other words, it was possible to relate the cellular and molecular bases of memory in the nervous system with the behavior of animals. The phase of memory that was characterized during the last century was called “consolidation.” It consisted of the fact that after a “period of susceptibility to the action of interfering factors,” the memory remained “fixed, incorruptible and unchangeable.”

This phase of memory gave its name to what became known as “consolidation theory.” Maldonado and Pedreira, in the book and in the class respectively, referred to this theory as a “dogma” that prevailed for more than one hundred years. This term alluded to the essential, undeniable, and irrefutable point of the current theory. It had pitted neurobiology against cognitive psychology, another area of neurosciences, which had always recognized that memories were malleable and could be reconstructed.

“The cornerstone of the scandal” that challenged consolidation theory arrived towards the end of the twentieth century. Maldonado did not care whether this transformation in memory studies in the neurosciences was a scientific revolution in terms of Thomas Kuhn or a gradual but equally transcendent transformation as defined by Ernst Mayr. The question for him, as he wrote in his book, was that they were at a moment in which new perspectives for memory studies would open up.

Maldonado and Pedreira summarized works from the 1970s in which their authors reported that “an already consolidated memory could be blocked or strengthened, that is, modified during evocation” (2008, 80–81).⁹ These studies that revealed certain anomalies in the accepted theory, for Maldonado, received little attention because “they were not accompanied by a coherent theoretical proposal that called for an enriching discussion” (2008, 81).

In 1997, Susan Sara and Jean Przybyslawski from the Physiology of Perception and Action Laboratory of the French National Center for Scientific Research took up the term “reconsolidation” coined by Norman Spear in 1973. And, according to Maldonado, since then there has been a “categorical revival of interest in the subject.” The debate at that time was whether they were facing a new phase of memory research or not.

2.1. “Oh! We have something to say”: life and oeuvre of a paper

Once the “consolidation theory” and the first works that questioned it were discussed, Pedreira told her class, “Here comes what we began to do.” Immediately afterwards she asked if students had already met the crab Chasmagnathus granulata, precisely because the lab would intervene in these discussions with and from this animal.

Laboratory animals, which usually come from different backgrounds, interact with each other in research. The evidence that supports the discussions is created and presented by them. The best known are usually rodents, whether rats or mice, but also fruit flies, whose Latin name is Drosophila melanogaster, bees, and chickens. In the specific field of memory, the investigations with Aplysia and Hermissenda are famous, two exotic mollusks from which different debates were raised. An example is the work conducted in US laboratories by Eric Kandel, 2000 Nobel Prize winner for his contributions on the memory of the marine snail Aplysia.

The lab's first publication on “reconsolidation” was in 2002, just two years after the publication of Karim Nader, Glenn Schafe and Joseph LeDoux (2000) from New York University that revitalized research on reconsolidation using a behavioral protocol in rats. Maldonado and Pedreira, along with Luis Pérez Cuesta, a doctoral student at the laboratory at that time, demonstrated that this phase of memory was present in crabs. This meant that it was seen “for the first time in an animal phylogenetically very distant from a rodent.” And, furthermore, “since that experiment, studies with very diverse animals followed” (2008, 86). For Maldonado, doing research with different animals, as in their case, would be the study of “non-conventional” animals:

It can support the validity of some innovative proposal in the study of memory, based on the demonstration that the phenomenon and the mechanisms that serves it also occur in another very different animal. (2008, 21)

However, the acceptance of “reconsolidation theory” by the international scientific community was neither automatic nor immediate. A few teams rejected it and continued to maintain that memory, once consolidated, could be evoked but could not be modulated (blocked or enhanced) by an interference factor. It was argued that the procedures carried out in the “reconsolidation” experiments were like the previous ones typical of another phase of memory called “extinction.” Consequently, research with rodents presented evidence in favor of both “extinction memory” and “reconsolidation memory.”

To try to reconcile the two positions, LeDoux and Nader proposed in 2002 that both processes occurred, but that their triggering had to do with a competition between them that occurred at the molecular level. Towards the end of that year, an editorial appeared in Neuron written by Myers and Davies, who were considered to be specialists on “extinction” at Emory University in the US, asking if there was any relationship between “reconsolidation” and “extinction.” When referring to that editorial in her class, Pedreira said that “We were working on extinction and we said ‘Oh, we have something to say on the subject’.”

This is how she presented the scientific article they published in 2003 in which they formulated an answer to the question raised about the relationship between these two phases of memory. They postulated that both processes depended on “protein synthesis” and that a procedural variable, time – that is, a difference in duration in one step of the experiment – made it possible to differentiate whether one memory or another was triggered.

The first author of the paper, Pedreira, carried out the experiments and raised the discussion with other neurobiologists based on long conversations she used to have with her director. Maldonado was the “corresponding co-author,” being the director and researcher who, with his subsidies, provided the necessary resources to carry out the work. Other research by the authors had been published in foreign journals from countries such as the Netherlands, France, Germany and England dedicated to the neurobiology of memory and learning, animal cognition or research on the brain, among others. Neuron was nevertheless especially prestigious.

Furthermore, this paper was included in two important databases: Scopus and Science Citation Index Expanded (WOS). The article was written in English, as the language of “globalized” science (Ortiz 2009). Therefore, Pedreira and Maldonado’s paper was research considered legitimate by international standards of scientific knowledge production.

Bruno Latour has defined this type of text as an inscription characterized by its orbital departure from the daily work of the biologists who prepared it in their laboratory and being read by other scientists (Latour 1986). It was, therefore, one more link in the knowledge production processes, but it was put into circulation through the channels of globalized science. Its physical extension was limited to barely seven pages. The vocabulary was specific to neurobiology. It was a discursive piece intended to convince other colleagues (Kreimer 2006b) in an argument that appealed to allies, identified opponents, and tried to get others to recognize and accept the findings (Latour 1992).

In the paper, they wrote about the crabs’ memory, analyzed, processed, and based on experiments. The laboratory worked with an associative memory in the “pilot experiment” that they called “Context-Signal Memory.” The biologists placed the crabs in containers, called “actometers,” through which a “screen” (the stimulus) passed. In this way, the crabs learned the association between the context and the signal, and remembered it for several days, which the scientists considered a “long-term” memory. For Maldonado, the “acuity of the design and experimental control” (2008, 8) were highly valued aspects that they had been able to capture.

Regarding the story of this publication, in an informal conversation, Pedreira recalled how they used to say that “you have to give time to experiments.” That was the case with experiments she was doing on “extinction memory” with crabs that were giving her “slightly messy” results. Maldonado advised her to “to put them aside for a while.” This situation was common for other researchers, but they did not suspect that those experiments could later be related to “reconsolidation.” In fact, about this publication, Maldonado wrote that “in addition to making an important contribution to understanding the dynamics of reconsolidation, it could offer an explanation for many of those contradictory results” (2008, 87), referring to other papers from their interlocutors.

Before being published, the paper went through different instances which modified it based on the readings of other scientists. Once the article was written and the authors decided which journal to publish in, Pedreira and Maldonado sent the manuscript to the Neuron editors on December 20, 2002. It was the first version that would go through an evaluation process that other scientists would oversee. An evaluator did not approve the research, arguing that it did not include molecular or cellular aspects considered priority aspects for the journal. This evaluation could have left them out of the international discussion. However, the editor of Neuron opposed the objection and, instead, allowed the authors to only consider the positive comments, considering the paper a novel contribution. The authors modified it based on the positive feedback and resubmitted the revised version on February 22. Having something to say, in short, referred to positioning themselves as valid interlocutors in international discussions and generating a place of enunciation from which to participate in international debates.

The publication was significant for its authors. The evaluation systems of scientific institutions and universities qualify researchers to promote them or assign them subsidies largely depending on to their publications. Most systems also classify journals from around the world through different rankings. For CONICET, Neuron belongs to “Group 1,” that is, is seen as one of several core journals that give the highest scores to the authors that publish in them. In addition, it considers a citation index that counts the times each article was cited in other (similarly indexed) papers. This is an indicator that aspires to quantitatively register the “impact” of the contributions, although it does not directly refer to the quality of the published research or how others cite them: whether to criticize them or to confirm them. According to Google Scholar, the paper was referenced 462 times up to January 2023, a significantly high number. Once published, the paper evaluated in the local scientific system gave its authors high scores and recognition from their peers. For Pedreira, who had entered CONICET's Scientific Researcher Career in 2001, this publication was decisive for advancing in the career track, and obtaining subsidies and scholarships under her direction. Also, Maldonado crowned a research career of more than 40 years. Upon publication, the authors celebrated in the laboratory with their colleagues.

2.2. Let’s do research with humans after studying crabs!

In the Argentine and Latin American neuroscience congresses that I attended during fieldwork, this article in Neuron (between 10 and 12 years after its publication) continued to be referenced in symposiums on “reconsolidation” of memory by researchers from different laboratories and parts of the world. At the same time, the implications of this investigation were numerous. On the one hand, for Maldonado “reconsolidation theory” became a turning point on how to understand memory and the brain in neurosciences. He arrived at the following fascinating formulation:

The brain cannot be conceived as something stable, but as a terrain that is continually changing, even though new internal representations are continually fixed on it. In other words, the brain appears as the place where the past is kept, but a past subjected to repeated modifications, as if it was made up of millions of stories never told in the same way. (2008, 98–-99)

On the other hand, their participation in this international controversy about the definition of a new phase of memory was also an example of how a “biological” question could contribute to understanding a “biomedical” inquiry. What Maldonado intended to show, in short, was that they were not opposing research areas, but rather, they could become blurred. The discussions about “reconsolidation” led to questions about implications of phase of memory in human therapeutic treatments:

Because we raise the possibility that already consolidated memories can be eliminated with the trick of activating them and exposing them to an amnesic agent, something that could be applied in certain psychiatric disorders. (Maldonado in Bär 2003)

However, their questions and concerns differed from those aimed at designing a therapy. Their inquiry had instead to do with understanding the “biological role” of this phase of memory. Pedreira said in that 2013 class:

After speaking for almost two hours and forty minutes, I want you to get the idea that reconsolidation can be the bridge that unites these two disciplines [cognitive psychology and neurobiology]. From a mechanistic point of view, reconsolidation theory offers in neurobiology many things that were known in the field of cognitive psychology. And that it not only explains, but also potentially offers a new field to explore for the study of traumatic memories … I don't know if to propose new treatments, but to understand what is happening in humans. (Pedreira, transcription of class, September 2013)

While the paper's publication in Neuron marked the end of an investigation, it was also the start of a new chapter.

I will tell you what we did in humans. We had been working on crabs. We began to think about it at the end of 2003 and we were able to start it at the end of 2005. After having done this work that established relationships between reconsolidation and extinction and seeing that everyone was beginning to wonder if there was reconsolidation in humans, we said … let's go for it! Let’s do research with another model organism. (Pedreira, transcription of class, September 2013)

There were very few groups that were working on this issue with humans. “Let’s go for it,” as Pedreira used it, could be interpreted as determining to do something risky, the opposite of a conservative attitude. The same investigation had encouraged them to continue with the subject, but from their questions.

From this paper and others that followed on this subject, new lines of work and approaches were developed both in the laboratory and in the natural environments of the animals, that were integrated and complemented each other. These investigations were enriched by the incorporation of new experiments and the establishment of comparisons with bees, mice, flies, ants, and humans that began in 2005. In 2007 one of their publications was one of the first two studies that showed that reconsolidation also occurred in declarative memory, a specifically human type linked to conscious evocation (Maldonado 2008, 94). The publication in Neuron, instead of being a point of arrival, was a point of continuity.

3. Conclusion

This work addressed the insertion in internationalized science of an Argentine neuroscience laboratory based on the analysis of a paper in English published in a mainstream journal. The analysis of the research processes that were part of this work focused on how the authors positioned themselves in the geopolitics of science. This situation was defined through how they organized the discussion of the article considering a historical dimension of the theories under debate; the “biological” question that they made expressed the tradition in which they had been working; and they answered it through a creative and robust experimental design. Above all, it was a discussion that excited them because of the new perspectives on memory that were opened by their findings, which encouraged them to begin new lines of work in which they were also pioneers, even if it meant distancing themselves from “biomedical” approaches to the subject that could have obtained more funding.

Analyzing these interests, conceptions, and values together shows us that their participation in a major global controversy was not based on the passive acceptance of the standards of the research centers from the central countries. They did so through their way of conceiving the research, which that was expressed in how they managed to articulate the global discussion with what they were doing locally. The path, in this case, was not defined by where the article circulated, but rather how the published findings were achieved.

Before finishing the first manuscript of this work, I asked Pedreira if the publication of Neuron had “consecrated” her. She was uncomfortable with the term I used. She explained to me that it was not something they were after. In this way, she taught me about the diversity of values on scientific production and prestige in this field. In any case, the recognition they achieved was an “excuse” to make visible what they had been doing: their research trajectory with “non-conventional” animals. Maldonado's book can be understood as the publication of the premises on which his team's work was based for more than 20 years and what they could achieve with crabs: his legacy.

My interest in memory studies in the neurosciences was used as a resource to approach the understanding of the story of the paper and to emphasize common searches. It was an attempt to draw near our scientific communities by showing the most vivid aspects of the sinuous paths they go through, which can be like walking sideways for crabs: neither towards the mainstream nor towards the periphery.¹⁰

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luana Ferroni

Luana Ferroni holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from General San Martín University (UNSAM), Argentina. She is a postdoctoral fellow of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) at CIS-CONICET/IDES-UNTREF. Her research interests include ethnographic studies of Science and Technology.

Notes

1 Chasmagnathus granulatus is the name that this species received in the nineteenth century, then becoming Chasmagnathus granulata, until 2005 when the classifying taxonomy defined it as Neohelice granulata.

2 A first version of the analysis presented in this paper was part of the author's master thesis (Ferroni 2017).

3 Maldonado graduated with a degree in Biological Sciences from UBA in 1958 and received his PhD from University College London in 1962 under the direction of the English zoologist and neurophysiologist John Zachary Young, recognized as one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century. In 2008, he was distinguished with the most important appointment of the national scientific system as Emeritus and Superior Professor of CONICET. He passed away in 2010 at the age of 83.

4 The Night of the Long Batons (La Noche de los Bastones Largos) was a historic day, July 29, 1966, in which the police forces of the military government of General Juan Carlos Onganía violently dislodged five UBA Faculties, among them the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, putting an end to university autonomy.

5 In Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas (IVIC) and in Stazione Zoológica Anton Dohrn.

6 An extended description of this recollection practice can be read in Ferroni 2018.

7 A bibliometric study shows that this crab is the sixth most studied crab species in the world and considers an “emerging animal model from emerging countries” (Spivak 2010). Other labs in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, countries in which these animals live, but also in Germany – due to bilateral cooperation projects – have studied these crabs, focusing their concern on other issues, such as their interaction in coastal ecosystems or their life story. Maldonado’s laboratory has provided extensive physiological and behavioral studies of Chasmagnathus.

8 The Argentine historian, sociologist and feminist Dora Barrancos wrote in an article on scientific evaluation: “I recall Héctor Maldonado. Who does not remember Héctor Maldonado in Biological Sciences? He was a great Argentinian biologist with left-wing thinking, who worked on the question of memory in a group of insects. We used to disagree and, also, reconcile positions on the CONICET Board, and he recognized: 'There is nothing more similar to History than Biology'” (2014).

9 For example, Charles Mactutus and David Riccio from the laboratory of J. M. Ferek published in Science.

10 I want to thank one of the reviewers for the question about whether the notion of "one's own path" refers to Virginia Woolf's 1928 lectures published under the title A Room of One's Own. Although it was not an intentional quote, I consider that the English writer's reflections on the conditions necessary for women to be able to write fiction were one of the references that inspired me to think about the conditions and efforts required to carry out creative scientific work in our societies.