We were very disappointed by the publication of Julio Gonzalo’s letter, a mixture of half truths and distorted reality. Gonzalo wrote about communism, but he forgot to mention how Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini helped Francisco Franco, and how spain suffered the dictator for 40 years without help from the “free world.” He also mentioned Texaco’s president and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), but he forgot about the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (Study Extension and Science Research Board), created in 1907. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the 1906 Nobel laureate in medicine, was its president until his death in 1934. Within this group, the Instituto Nacional de Física y Química, (National Institute of Physics and Chemistry), established with grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, attained international recognition. In fact, the first third of the 20th century is known as the Silver Age of Spanish science.
The Junta para Ampliación de Estudios was dismantled by Franco’s new regime in 1939. Gonzalo mentioned several Spanish scientists, but he forgot the names of those who suffered repression or were exiled by the regime and, in many cases, were replaced by incompetent ones whose only scientific value was to be Franco’s henchmen. At least one of the people he cited, Julio Palacios, had been sent to interior exile after Spain’s civil war. He died in 1970, in fact several years before Gonzalo returned to Spain.
Here are some figures to show how Franco’s regime supported science: Spain’s spending for R…D was 0.29% of GNP in 1967 and 0.3% in 1975, if we are to believe the figures given by Spain to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. We are sure that if science in Spain during Franco’s regime had been carried out in the same way as it was in the rest of the world at the time, Physics Today would have known about it, and would never have published such a letter.