Science in The Philippines

Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints
Volume 55 Number 3 Article 2
5-10-2012
Science in the Philippines

Warwick Anderson
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Recommended Citation
Anderson, Warwick (2012) "Science in the Philippines," Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic
Viewpoints: Vol. 55: No. 3, Article 2.
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Science in the Philippines
Warwick Anderson
Philippine Studies vol. 55, no. 3 (2007): 287–318
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W a r wi c k Ande r s o n
Science in the
Philippines
This essay surveys the history of science and medical research in the
Philippines from the Spanish conquest through the 1970s. It touches
on the links between science, religion, the colonial state, and national
aspirations. In different periods the production of scientific knowledge
has been treated as an index of personal salvation, civilization, modernity,
and national development. More recently, science has functioned as a civic
conscience for the troubled nation-state. This essay is intended as a work
of synthesis and overview, providing a tentative framework for further
analysis.
KEYWORDS: science • research • Philippines • colonial • national
PHILIPPINE STUDIES 55, no. 3 (2007) 287–318

W
riting of nationalism, Benedict Anderson (1998, 227)
once noted “few countries give the observer a deeper feel-
ing of historical vertigo than the Philippines.” The his-
tory of science in the Philippines produces a similar giddy
sensation—indeed, one might easily substitute apparent
conundrums of scientific development for the historian’s strange political and
social juxtapositions. After three hundred years of Spanish clerical colonial-
ism, fewer than 10 percent of local inhabitants were literate in Spanish, yet
Catholic religious orders had supported pioneering natural history and as-
tronomical research, and from the seventeenth century even sponsored uni-
versities in the archipelago. Thus, in the 1880s, José Rizal (1886/1990, 318),
novelist, medical doctor, and nationalist, reflected that “the Jesuits, who are
backward in Europe, viewed from here, represent Progress; the Philippines
owe to them their nascent education, and to them the Natural Sciences, the
soul of the nineteenth century.” The withdrawal of Spain in the 1890s did
not do much to rectify such unconventional associations and oppositions.
After 1898 the United States established government laboratories and greatly
expanded secular science education, but many Americans continued to dis-
parage mestizo contributions to science and to question more generally Fili-
pino capacity for virile, modern research.1 Americans in the colonial service
often represented the Spanish colonial period as a howling wilderness for
science, yet the new American scientific order was built in part out of earlier
Jesuit institutions: the Manila Observatory, for instance, was simply renamed
the Weather Bureau. And then, in the 1920s and 1930s, as nationalist, Eng-
lish-speaking Filipinos took over the laboratories they often devalued their
American training and affiliations, preferring to find earlier mestizo models
for their work, even if these putative antecedents had written in a language
and a style now alien to them.
Science in the Philippines followed no straight line of development
from primitive to sophisticated, or from absence to mere backwardness, or
even from local to universal in orientation. Some sort of naturalistic inves-
tigation, some effort to order and classify the natural world, is found in the
archipelago from the beginnings of human settlement. After the arrival of
Miguel López de Legaspi and his small band of peninsulares in 1565, such
studies rapidly acquired a more formal cast, taking the shape of standardized
observations collected in portable texts, authorized and circulated through
religious orders, or accumulated by a few foreign sojourners on voyages of
288 PHILIPPINE STUDIES 55, no. 3 (2007)

investigation. The arrival of the laboratory late in the nineteenth century,
and its institutional development under the American regime in the early
twentieth century, tended to displace older natural philosophy and natural
history, although experimentalism never completely substituted for collec-
tion and classification. American scientists trained a cohort of Filipinos in
laboratory methods, and by the 1930s, in advance of national independence,
a largely secular local elite had gained control of scientific research in the
Philippines. Change abounds, certainly, but to describe this change simply
as progress, to imply a relentless improvement in knowledge and method,
would constitute a sundering of the complex and fragile local entanglements
of science and its circumstances.
I am not interested here in documenting how science in the Philippines
might gradually have transcended its colonial or national setting; rather, I
want to indicate what is at stake when one does science, or natural history,
in a specific location. My concern therefore is with the various meanings of
science in the Philippines, with the cultural force of certain ways of studying
and interacting with the body and its surroundings. In particular, I would
like to look at how local needs and commitments shaped the investigator’s
choice of subject and mode of investigation; and, conversely, how a commit-
ment to research, and a desire for external expert validation, informed and
helped to frame the understanding of the locale. Science should neither be
reduced to its local circumstances, nor represented as blithely transcending
them. Admittedly, it is likely that science has never meant anything much at
all to most people in the Philippines, as elsewhere, but those who engaged
in scientific study, or promoted it, evidently believed that science would, or
should, become as significant to others as it was to them. It is possible that
science, like poetry, has made nothing happen in the Philippines—nothing
that would not have happened anyhow—but clearly religious and secular
authorities expected that it would, or should, transform the archipelago and
its people. Throughout the vertiginous history of the Philippines, then, one
discerns at least a commitment to science, even if the form and the signifi-
cance of this interest have varied considerably.
An Apostolic Colonial Science

In 1521 Antonio Pigafetta (1969, 1:105), an Italian gentleman who accom-
panied the expedition of Fernando de Magallanes, observed that on the is-
land of Palawan:
ANDERSON / SCIENCE IN THE PHILIPPINES 289

Trees are found there making leaves which, when they fall, are alive
and walk. And these leaves are no larger or smaller than a mulberry,
but not so long. Near the tail, which is short and pointed, they have on
both sides two feet. They have no blood and if anyone touches them
they run away. I kept one for nine days in a cage, and when I opened it,
it went all around. They cannot, as I think, live on anything but air.
Pigafetta’s description of Palawan leaf insects illustrates the sense of

wonder that the natural world of the Pacific could elicit in European explor-
ers. Many of the voyagers, and a few of the first Spanish settlers in the islands,
were fascinated by grotesque creatures and sublime prospects. However, in
the records of Magallanes’s European discovery of the archipelago, and in
other sixteenth-century accounts of the islands, there is no indication of any
systematic investigation of the local inhabitants, flora, fauna, and geography.
It was not until 1543 that the Spanish were able to reach the archipelago
from the west coast of New Spain (Mexico), and it took another thirty years
or so before they found a safe, practical return route, and established the gal-
leon trade (Schurz 1939). In 1571 Legaspi founded Manila on the island of
Luzon as a trading center where Chinese silks were exchanged for Mexican
silver and then sent through the Americas to be sold in Europe. Spanish of-
ficers and traders clustered in the walled city and, after the shock of the first
encounter had waned, their interest in the surroundings soon diminished
(Phelan 1959; Cushner 1971; McCoy and de Jesus 1982).
In the provinces, the Spanish clergy assumed control over the indig-
enous population, with Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Recollects,
and Jesuits acting as both religious and secular authority. The religious or-
ders sought to convert the largely animist inhabitants to Christianity, and
they did so through use of a profusion of local languages, not Spanish. But
even if spiritual matters received more emphasis than things material, effec-
tive proselytization required some knowledge of the people and the place.
In the seventeenth century a few priests began to document the frequent
earthquakes and to study volcanic eruptions. Some of the clergy reported
on the more unusual Philippine animals and plants and, attired in heavy
Spanish vestments, described the tropical conditions that they found so dis-
comforting. In 1611 Fr.
��
Blas de la Madre de Dios��
, a Franciscan, listed local
plants of presumed medical value, but it remained unpublished; Fr. ��
José de
Valencia��
(1669), another Franciscan, and Fr. ��
Francisco Ignacio Alcina��
, S.J.
(1668), put together similar manuals, but these too were never published

(Merrill 1936). In general, the Catholic Church’s interest in nature during
this period was subordinated to its apostolic mission, and the products of its
peculiar secular interest rarely circulated beyond the religious orders.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the same religious
orders established many of the institutions that would shape the study of
nature during the Spanish period. The San Francisco Corporation founded
the San Lazaro Hospital in 1578, initially for the poor, but after 1631 for the
increasing number of lepers. In Manila the Hospital de San Juan de Dios,
for the care of poor Spaniards, opened in 1596; and in Cavite the Hospital de
San Jose was established in 1641. For a century or more, these institutions re-
mained religious refuges rather than secular medical workplaces. The major
religious orders also set up colleges and universities for the small criollo and
mestizo community. The Jesuits, prompted by Fr��
. Diego ��
García��
, the visitor
of the order in the Philippines, opened the Colegio
��
de San José��
in 1601, and
retained control of its teaching until their expulsion from the archipelago
in 1768. The Dominican Corporation established the University of �� Santo
Tomás��
in 1611, and it soon became the major institute of higher education
in the islands. The teaching emphasized theology and philosophy, but the
order added a law faculty in 1737, and eventually permitted the organization
of faculties of medicine and pharmacy in 1871. In 1875 the Colegio de San
José��
was incorporated into the University of Santo Tomás as the College of
Medicine and Pharmacy (Bantug 1953).
Despite the institutional dominance of Santo Tomás, the Society of Je-
sus led the meager efforts to study nature in the Philippines. The Jesuits
introduced mathematics and physics into the curriculum at their college,
and many of the more influential natural historians of the Philippines were
associated with the order. In general, Dominicans continued to focus on the
vita contemplativa, regarding study as a means of preparation for reflection
on divinity, and they enforced strict adherence to theological doctrine. For
the Jesuits, however, education had become a means of gaining influence,
of building confessions, and for them study might represent a separate path
toward salvation. The Society of Jesus had come to favor an active engage-
ment with the world, giving it a special respect for practicality and diligence
(Feldhay 1987; Harris 1989). Until their expulsion from the Philippines, Je-
suits often demonstrated openness to local experience, unusual industry in
collection and observation, a tendency to find a divine order in nature, and
distrust of more skeptical or heretical explanations. Their studies of man

and the natural world became a node in a long-distance scientific network,
permitting their observations to be collated and used to impress the order’s
European friends and patrons and to demonstrate, ultimately unconvinc-
ingly, their usefulness to secular authorities in Spain and the Philippines
(Harris 1996). When they returned to the archipelago in 1859, having lost
their curacies in the provinces, the Jesuits redoubled their educational and
investigatory efforts (de la Costa 1959). Perhaps the most striking illustration
of renewed Jesuit dominance in Philippine scientific work was the establish-
ment of the Manila Observatory in 1865.
Until the nineteenth century, priestly studies in Philippine anthropol-
ogy, botany, zoology, and geography remained scattered and unsophisticat-
ed. Fr. Pablo Clain (Paul Klein), S.J., put together some botanical descrip-
tions and a guide to medicinal plants early in the eighteenth century (Clain
1712/1857); and Fr. J. G. Kamel, S.J., for whom Linnaeus named the ca-
mellia, undertook the most extensive analysis of Philippine material to date
(Kamel 1693–1704). However, in his Species Plantarum Linnaeus derived
few binomials from Philippine references, and it was not until the early nine-
teenth century that Philippine material, by then circulating more commonly
in Europe, began to figure in botanical works of a systematic character, such
as A. P. de Candolle’s Prodromus (1824). Studies in zoology were even more
rare, apart from occasional descriptions of distinctive local fauna and ca-
sual observations on the acclimatization of horses and cattle (Bankoff 2001).
Pigafetta’s account of the leaf insect may be the most detailed entomological
investigation in the islands until the twentieth century.
The authors of the Encyclopédie commented that, while the Philippines
was one of the more beautiful archipelagos of the Orient, the Spanish had
shamefully neglected to examine and report on its features (Anon. 1765).
An Englishman visiting Manila early in the nineteenth century complained
that, with “jealousy of foreigners exceeding even the bounds of credibility,
she [the Philippines] invariably refused them admittance, whether for scien-
tific or commercial purposes” (Piddington 1828, 68–69). The liberal coffee
planter lamented that, “while the torch of science has blazed in the western
hemisphere, from Greenland to the Antarctic, bearing with it light and life,
and hope, and blessings, few are even aware how very much it has yet to il-
lumine in the East!” (ibid., 104). Most visitors found the Spanish residents
“exceedingly indolent,” and deplored the lack of books in the archipelago
(MacMicking 1967, 47). Sir John Bowring (1859/1963, 118), visiting from

Hong Kong in the 1850s, was amazed that the University of Santo Tomás was
still concentrating on philosophy, Latin, and rhetoric, giving no attention
at all to the natural sciences. Even in the 1870s Fedor Jagor (1917, 26) la-
mented that in the Philippines “the pompously celebrated religious festivals
were the only events that sometimes chequered the wearisome monotony.”
According to Jagor, the botanical gardens, established in a perfunctory man-
ner in 1858, had “soon faded away”—though in fact they had simply moved
to a new site in Santa Mesa. The visiting critic described a few thousand
“uneducated, improvident, and extravagant Spaniards” (ibid., 29) mixing
promiscuously with locals who “imitate everything that passes before their
eyes without using their intelligence to appreciate it” (ibid., 35). Existing in
the easiest of natural conditions, Filipinos seemed passive to resist education
and science.
Science and the Spanish Colonial State

Jagor’s wry orientalism misrepresented a more complex engagement with
science in the Philippines from the late eighteenth century onward. Al-
though religious orders continued to dominate the sciences, and indeed they
conducted more investigations of natural history than ever before, tensions
between secular and religious authorities, recurrent in Spain, had begun to
exert an influence on the Philippines. In particular, there were glimmer-
ings in the Pacific of la Ilustración, the Spanish Enlightenment, with its
distrust of well-worn doctrine, emphasis on observation, and embrace of
Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. In Spain the scientific work
of scholars such as Gerónimo
��
Feijoo��
, a Benedictine and Lockean empiri-
cist, had received support from the Bourbon monarchy; but the Society of
Jesus denounced such “Jansenist” deviations, regarding the monarchy and
Ilustración as challenges to the authority of the pope (Herr 1958). In 1767
Carlos III expelled the Jesuits from Spain, and soon afterward they were also
forced out of the Philippines. The British had occupied Manila between
1762 and 1764, but after the restoration of Spanish control a succession of
liberal governors-general reflected the new mood in Spain and attempted
to promote education, agriculture, and commerce in the archipelago. �� José
Raón��
(1765–1770) coined the first copper money, expelled the Jesuits, and
attacked Moro pirates. His successor, Simón
��
de Anda y Salazar��
(1770–1776),
criticized abuses by the friars, began the secularization of curacies, and con-
demned the medieval teachings at Santo Tomás.

José Basco y Vargas��
(1776–1788) was perhaps the most energetic and
enlightened of the late-eighteenth-century governors-general. During his
unusually long occupancy of the post, he reorganized the schools, checked
Moro piracy, and tried to develop agriculture through the establishment in
1780 of the ��
Real Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País.��
Based on the eco-
nomic societies, also called amigos del país, which had cropped up through-
out Spain and the empire since the 1760s, the Manila amigos del país aimed
to foster research and development in agriculture, mining, and manufactur-
ing. The society’s record was mixed. By the end of the century it was dor-
mant; in 1819 it was reestablished, but was soon nearly paralyzed by the 1820
cholera epidemic. By the middle of the century it was quiescent again, yet it
resumed work, feebly, in 1860. Still, the society contributed to the support
of Fr. Manuel Blanco’s Flora de Filipinas (1837), perhaps the major Philip-
pine botanical publication of the nineteenth century (though discounted by
American botanists in the following century). It gave rewards for successful
innovation in farming; introduced Chinese martins in the 1850s to control
locusts; compiled a library of 3,500 volumes in arts, sciences, and agricul-
ture; as well as established a museum of natural history. The society also
maintained an interest in the monitoring of plant and animal introduction,
such as the success of tobacco and cacao in the late seventeenth century,
coffee and sugar in the early nineteenth century; and the failure of mulberry
bushes and silkworms in the late eighteenth century (Lopez Rizal 1936).
Communication with Spain and the rest of the world improved slowly
during the nineteenth century. In 1785 the Real Compañía de Filipinas
was chartered to expand commerce between Manila and Spain and pro-
vide an alternative to the galleon trade with the Americas, which was finally
abandoned in 1815 with the fall of Acapulco to Mexican insurgents. The
government opened the port of Manila to foreign commerce in the 1830s,
and granted access to Iloilo, Zamboanga, and Sual in 1855, and to Cebu
in 1863. The first steamships arrived in Manila harbor in 1848. From 1868
vessels could use the Suez Canal, reducing the journey between Europe
and the Philippines from four months to one month by steamer. In 1880
cable linked Manila more closely to Europe than ever before. Improved con-
nections with Spain reduced the influence of foreign traders in Manila and
encouraged Spaniards to move to the islands. In 1810 there had been fewer
than 4,000 peninsulares and Spanish mestizos in the archipelago, mostly
clustered in Manila (compared with many million indios throughout the

archipelago). Four thousand peninsulares and more than 10,000 mestizos
and criollos lived in the Philippines in 1876; but by 1898 the numbers had
swelled to more than 34,000 Spaniards, including 6,000 government offi-
cials, 4,000 army and navy personnel, and 1,700 clerics (LeRoy 1907).
The conditions in the capital were changing during this period. During
the 1850s, the government put sewers underground in Manila. In 1882 the
Carriedo��
waterworks opened, and the first telegraph lines appeared in 1873,
which was followed by the installation of telephone lines in 1890 and an
electric light system in 1895. In addition, the school reforms of 1863 had
established a framework, still grossly inadequate, for a state system of primary
education (Alzona 1932). The Jesuits at the Ateneo de Manila were giving
instruction in natural philosophy, and the colleges and universities, still few
in number, began to teach natural sciences and medicine. By 1870 improve-
ments in education and in communication had encouraged a new genera-
tion of mestizos and criollos to take an interest in the sciences.
Until this generation expressed its enthusiasm for science in the late nine-
teenth century many of the more significant nonreligious contributions to
knowledge of the Philippines still came from visitors to the islands. Le Gentil
had passed through the archipelago in the course of making astronomical ob-
servations and showed some interest in local features. Predictably, he too not-
ed the antagonism of Spanish authorities toward scientific workers (Le Gentil
1964).2 A few years later, in 1789 an expedition left Cadiz, Spain, under the
command of Capt. Alejandro Malaspina, with the goals of collecting botanical
and zoological specimens, and studying meteorology and other factors affect-
ing navigation (Kendrick 1999; Palau Baquero 1991; Mallan 1988). Inspired
by the voyages of James Cook and Jean François de Galaup de la Pérouse to
the Pacific, the Spanish government hoped that the findings of Malaspina’s
expedition might contribute to Spanish prosperity as well as give useful infor-
mation about the new British colonies in the region (Engstrand 1981; Frost
1996). When the corvettes Descubierta and Atrevida arrived in the Philippines
in 1792, the naturalists from the ships—especially Thaddeus Henke and Luis
Née—ventured into the interior of Luzon to collect plants and animals, while
those who stayed on board conducted hydrographic surveys and gravitational
experiments. However, on his return to Spain, Malaspina, a naïve yet ambi-
tious ilustrado who was familiar with the theories of Galileo and Newton and
admired the works of Descartes and Voltaire, so irritated the government that
he was imprisoned and therefore unable to circulate the results of the voyage.

Many other collectors would follow in the nineteenth century. Eugène
Perrottet in 1818 collected and studied Philippine botanical material of eco-
nomic value, preserving some of it in Paris (Perrottet 1824; Robinson 1909).
In 1843 the Wilkes United States Exploring Expedition botanized widely
in Luzon and sent a major collection of specimens to the United States
National Herbarium (Gray 1854; Merrill 1908). Hugh Cuming, a British
conchologist, was perhaps the most assiduous collector of all. He roamed
the Philippines between 1836 and 1840, sending more than 2,200 Philip-
pine plant specimens, and a greater number of duplicates, back to Europe.
Until the end of the nineteenth century most European botanists came to
know Philippine flora through these collections; most general taxonomic
works from the 1840s onward referred to Cuming’s specimens (Melvill 1895;
Merrill 1936).
From the 1870s local scientists, most of them not in religious orders
(although many were peninsulares), took over the analysis of Philippine
material. The arrival of ��
Sebastián Vidal y Soler��
in 1871 marked the begin-
ning of reliable local taxonomic work in botany, and of scientific forestry
(Bankoff 2004). As chief of the Comisión��
��
de la Flora de Filipinas, Vidal
was responsible for major classificatory and comparative studies, and was
among the first to recognize the need for a local botanical library and her-
barium (Vidal y Soler 1883). However, after his death in 1889 taxonomic
investigation in the islands slowed down, and the herbarium he had es-
tablished burned in 1897, so that “at the beginning of the American ad-
ministration the assembled equipment for botanical work in Manila, both
literature and specimens, had been destroyed, lost, or rendered inacces-
sible” (Merrill 1936, 511–12). After 1870 some attention also was belatedly
given to zoological investigations, resulting in the publication of the Ca-
tálogo sistemático de toda la fauna de Filipinas (Elera 1895–1896). At the
Mining Bureau, José
��
Centeno y ��
García��
(1885) and others studied the Taal
and Mayon volcanoes (Abella y Casariego 1885) and performed mineral
analyses; and in the Municipal Laboratory (established in 1888) ��
Anacleto
del Rosario��
(1895) and ��
León Ma. ��
Guerrero��
investigated the chemical com-
position of the waters of Negros and Luzon. Scientific and medical jour-
nals proliferated: the Boletín de medicina de Manila (1886), the Revista
Farmacéutica de Filipinas (1893), the Crónicas de ciencias médicas (1895),
and others. At Santo Tomás the College of Medicine and Pharmacy began
to train students to use a microscope in the 1890s (previously they had

examined drawings of germs), and a Faculty of Science, with courses based
on those in Madrid, opened in 1895 (Rodriguez 1936).
The most impressive research took place at the Jesuit Observatory. From
the 1870s the observatory concentrated on the forecasting of typhoons, using
meteorological instruments designed by an Italian Jesuit, Fr. Angelo Secchi
(Bankoff 2006). Under the direction of Fr. Federico Faura, S.J., it added a
magnetic section in 1887, which produced the first maps of the terrestrial
magnetism of the archipelago; a seismic section in 1890, which gave one of
the earliest accurate tracings of an earthquake; and an astronomical section
in 1899 (Schumacher 1965).3 The outbreak of the revolution curtailed most
of these research and educational activities.
A growing number of mestizos and criollos in the archipelago began to
call themselves Filipinos and to represent themselves as ilustrados, as they
increasingly became committed to nationalism, science, anticlericalism, and
political reform (Schumacher 1973; Ileto 1979). In part, the reform sentiment,
expressed first in the Propaganda movement, derived from Spanish liberal
and secular agitation, which had culminated in the revolution of 1868—just
as the conservative reaction in Spain was echoed in the Philippines after the
1872 Cavite rebellion. But local factors also contributed. Improved commer-
cial opportunities allowed the expansion of the middle class; ambitious and
progressive Filipinos began sending their sons to France and Spain for higher
education; talented local candidates resented the peninsulares who took most
of the top government posts; and more efficient communication had helped
to break down regional feelings in the islands. Furthermore, racial distinc-
tions became especially marked toward the end of the century, and there
emerged “a tendency to thrust the native aristocracy into a secondary place, to
compel them to recognize ‘white superiority,’ to a degree not so noticeable in
the earlier years of Spanish rule” (LeRoy 1907, 98). Initially, local ambitions
and resentments found expression in moderate groups such as José Rizal’s
Liga Filipina, founded in 1892. A little later, Andres Bonifacio organized the
Katipunan, an anticlerical and anti-Spanish brotherhood that in 1896 led
an insurrection against Spanish control. The friars attributed disaffection to
“Franc-Masonería,” for them the epitome of everything troubling in modern
life; the Spanish army attempted to suppress the rebellion with such brutal-
ity that even moderates turned against Spanish rule (LeRoy 1907). However,
by the time Emilio Aguinaldo was able to declare the Philippine Republic
in 1899, the United States had claimed the archipelago.

José Rizal was one of the leaders of the rising generation of nationalists.
From the Jesuits at the Ateneo de Manila Rizal had received a solid ground-
ing in the sciences—indeed, one of his teachers, Faura, later directed the ob-
servatory—even if he subsequently argued that Jesuit education had seemed
progressive only because the rest of the Philippines was mired in medieval-
ism. At Santo Tomás, studying science, he found that the walls “were entirely
bare; not a sketch, nor an engraving, nor even a diagram of an instrument of
physics” (Rizal 1891/1991, 141). A mysterious cabinet contained some mod-
ern equipment but the Dominicans made sure that Filipinos admired it from
afar. The friars would point to this cabinet, according to Rizal, to exonerate
themselves and to claim that it was really “on account of the apathy, laziness,
limited capacity of the natives, or some other ethnological or supernatural
cause [that] until now no Lavoisier, Secchi, nor Tyndall has appeared, even
in miniature, in this Malay-Filipino race!” (ibid.). Still, it should be recalled
that nowhere else in Southeast Asia was education available at such an ad-
vanced level (Schumacher 1975). In 1882 Rizal traveled to Spain to study
medicine, and he later visited France and Germany. He was astonished and
embarrassed by the political and scientific backwardness of the imperial
power. In Europe medicine, political activism, and the writing of his bril-
liantly sardonic novels occupied most of his time, but after Rizal returned
to the Philippines, and was confined at Dapitan, he also began collecting
plants and animals, and discovered new species of shells (Bantug 1961).
During this period, Rizal engaged in a copious, self-consciously enlightened
correspondence with Ferdinand Blumentritt, the Austrian ethnologist, and
translated into Spanish many of his works on the Philippines (Schumacher
1954). For Rizal a commitment to science and reason informed patriotism,
and patriotism implied a scientific orientation to the world. Unimpressed,
the clerical-colonial authorities executed the “First Filipino” in 1896.
The Gospel of American Colonial Science

Adm. George Dewey’s victory over the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on 1 May
1898, a few days after the outbreak of the Spanish-American war, signaled
the entry of a new colonial power in Southeast Asia. Pres. William McKinley
hurriedly arranged to send a military expedition to take possession of the
Philippines but, by the time the United States army arrived later in 1898,
Spanish authority had collapsed and Aguinaldo’s rebel forces had taken con-
trol of most of the provinces. The commander of the Spanish garrison in

Manila surrendered to the expeditionary forces, and the opposing Filipino
troops proceeded to dig in around the city. In the Treaty of Paris, signed on
10 December 1898, Spain formally handed sovereignty of the archipelago to
the United States. For the next five years or more, American forces engaged
in a bitter and brutal campaign against the Philippine “insurrectos” in order
to secure the new possessions (Gates 1973; Miller 1983).
Americans were inclined to represent themselves as more reforming,
progressive, and scientific than other colonialists (Stanley 1974; Owen 1971).
Victor G. Heiser, the harshly efficient director of the Bureau of Health from
1905 until the end of 1914, recalled that, once American authority was as-
serted, “the microscope supplanted the sword, the martial spirit gave place to
the research habit” (Heiser 1906, 245; Anderson 1999a). When touring the
archipelago in 1909, governor-general W. Cameron Forbes (1909) reflected
on the need to understand the territory:
There is a fascination about unknown uninhabited islands off in these

tropic seas. I feel, however, the lack of scientific knowledge. I’d like in
these cases really to add something to the scientific knowledge, and
want to bring with me experts on fish, trees, and birds, that I may be
able to learn what the significance of these places be.
Later still, a vice-governor of the islands claimed that “one of the great
achievements of this period was [that] within the Philippine government an
essentially scientific attitude should have been substituted for the unscientif-
ic ways of Spanish days” (Hayden 1942, 644). (W. E. Musgrave [1911, 123],
a leading American medical researcher in the Philippines, once claimed
that under the Spanish “an attempt to practice and develop the principles of
scientific medicine would have led to the starvation of anyone bold enough
to undertake such an experiment.”) If the Spanish had regarded the archi-
pelago as one great confessional, the Americans hoped to transform it into a
vast laboratory.
As early as 1899, the army established a biological laboratory under the
direction of Lt. Richard P. Strong, a medical graduate of the Johns Hopkins
University and a votary of the new tropical medicine (Anderson 1999b). A
few months later the new Board of Health opened a municipal laboratory for
Manila. As civil government was organized, Dean C. Worcester, the secre-
tary of the interior in the Philippine Commission, urged the establishment
of a Bureau of Government Laboratories that would consolidate all the re-

search activities of the colonial state.4 In 1901 Paul C. Freer, a professor of
chemistry at the University of Michigan, arrived in Manila to direct the bu-
reau; a year later Strong took charge of its biological laboratory (Freer 1902;
Cox 1918). The American colonial state had then become actively involved
in acclimatizing the laboratory in the tropics. Shortly after, in 1905, the Bu-
reau of Government Laboratories was reorganized and expanded: renamed
the Bureau of Science, it encompassed research and service units in tropical
medicine, botany, zoology, entomology, chemistry, and geology. The omni-
bus Philippine Journal of Science, first issued from the bureau in 1906, soon
became the leading science journal in the tropics. In 1907 the government
founded a medical school, which reproduced the Johns Hopkins’s emphasis
on laboratory instruction, and a new hospital with modern laboratory facili-
ties. The medical school became part of the new University of the Philip-
pines in 1910.
Although the government favored laboratory work, especially if it had
an experimental tone, the older descriptive and classificatory projects also
received support. The Bureau of Forestry (1900), a successor of the Spanish
Inspección General de Montes��
, and later the Bureau of Science began to
rehabilitate Philippine botany (Tucker 1992). Elmer D. Merrill built up
the largest herbarium in Asia, with more than 250,000 mounted specimens.
He managed exchanges with over eighty institutions and individuals, and he
supervised the botanical exploration of the archipelago. At the end of the
nineteenth century, botanists had described 2,500 species in the Philippines,
and by the 1930s they knew 8,120 species of flowering plants, 1,000 species
of ferns, and 3,000 species of algae, lichens, and mosses (Merrill 1936). The
Bureau of Mines (1900), which merged in 1905 with the Bureau of Science,
demonstrated similar industry in investigating the geological resources of the
islands. Albert E. Jenks, based at the Bureau of Ethnology—a special inter-
est of Worcester’s—surveyed the “non-Christian tribes” of Luzon and estab-
lished a museum of local types, which in the 1930s, along with the holdings
of the Bureau of Science, was incorporated into the National Museum of the
Philippines (Galang 1936).
At the Manila Observatory, renamed the Weather Bureau in 1901, Jesuit
scientists continued to make meteorological observations and predictions,
and to conduct seismological research. Unlike other scientists in the Philip-
pines during this period, the Jesuits kept apart from the American univer-
sity and medical networks, preferring to maintain contact principally with

Jesuit observatories in Shanghai, China, and in Havana, Cuba. José ��
Algué��,
S.J. (1904), the director of the observatory from 1897 to 1925, studied the
nature of the typhoon and investigated climatic influences on crop produc-
tion in the islands; the meteorological department produced the first Philip-
pine weather map in 1907; and the magnetic department concentrated on
documenting variations in magnetic declinations. Ironically, the Jesuits in
the astronomical department had the responsibility of taking observations of
star transits in order to set the correct time in the most modern of colonies
(Doucette 1936; Repetti 1948; Schumacher 1965).
However, even as it was getting to know the territory and realize the
economic potential of the land, the new colonial government was investing
most heavily in biomedical research so that it might get to know more inti-
mately the bodies of Filipinos and displaced Americans. Just as early Spanish
science in the Philippines had given priority to a search for medicinal plants
that would possibly prove useful to the colonizers, Americans first took care
to track down and isolate tropical pathogens that might imperil alien domi-
nance of the archipelago. Newly identified germs were traced over the land,
in food and water, and, most dangerously, among insects and native hosts
(Anderson 2006). Initially most medical research took place in the biologi-
cal laboratories of the Bureau of Science, but the locus of investigation soon
shifted to the new Philippine General Hospital and the Medical School of
the University of the Philippines. Filipino and American physicians orga-
nized themselves into professional societies in which members could pres-
ent research findings and discuss clinical problems. The mestizo elite formed
the Colegio
��
Médico-Farmacéutico in 1899. However, the American-domi-
nated Manila Medical Society was established in 1901, and merged into
the new Philippine Islands Medical Association (a branch of the American
Medical Association) in 1903. From 1908 the government sponsored the Far
Eastern Association for Tropical Medicine.5 The army investigated tropical
diseases through a succession of special Boards of Study, in which Weston P.
Chamberlain and E. B. Vedder were central figures. Such support for medi-
cal research was unparalleled in the colonial world. In 1909 Freer (1909, 72)
proudly announced to a new class of Filipino medical students that:
In Manila we now have a scientific library which gives access to all

the recent literature, laboratories which subject the existing diseases
to the search light of exact investigation and which give certain diag-
nosis and accurate statistics, hospitals in which careful studies can

be carried on, medical associations which bring us into contact with
members of the profession in contiguous countries, and a journal by
means of which the results of the work accomplished may be placed
in the hands of our colleagues throughout the world.
So great were these opportunities, according to Freer (ibid., 73), that a

diverse collection of “ambitious and well-trained investigators” had come
to the islands to transform the conventional understanding of the tropics.
In the Philippines there was “pre-eminently a position for the higher type
of educated American investigator, not only for the actual material results
which he may obtain, but also for the benefit which will accrue by his very
presence in the community” (Freer 1905, 7).
In fact, it proved difficult to attract good American scientists to the
Philippines, and to retain the few who did venture to the colony long after
arrival. Overwhelmed by service work, scientists found the routine dreary
and arduous, and the social life in Manila stultifying. The bacteriological
laboratory soon became a factory for diagnosis: in 1909 it made 14,494 mi-
croscopic examinations to diagnose gonorrhea, and studied 700 specimens
of blood, over 900 urine specimens, and over 7,000 fecal specimens. When
cholera broke out in 1914, the laboratory staff had to cope with an influx
of over 126,000 fecal specimens (Freer 1910, 16; Cox 1915, 11). Wearied
by the climate, isolated from colleagues in the United States, few scientists
stayed longer than a couple of years. Still, many of them did find time for
useful research. Even routine testing could be reframed as original research,
either as an investigation of occult germ carriage or a refinement of bac-
teriological methods. From “routine” tests, Richard Strong had helped to
clarify the distinction between the causes and character of amoebic and bac-
illary dysentery (Anderson 2006). Physicians at the Bureau of Health and at
the hospitals studied the treatment of yaws, beriberi, and leprosy. The Army
Board conducted extensive physiological and hematological investigations
of American acclimatization in the tropics (ibid.). W. E. Musgrave (1911,
125) recalled that, for a while, “the field was so virgin and the practicable
problems, which looked easy of solution to the mind of the investigator, were
so numerous that often it was difficult to select that which was most impor-
tant and easiest of solution.” For a number of expatriate scientists, their early
Philippine research served as the basis for a successful career back in the
United States.6

For a few scientists, colonial opportunities for human experimentation
nearly ruined their careers. Certainly they cost some Filipinos their lives. In
one of the earliest American efforts to use prisoners for medical research,
Richard Strong inoculated twenty-four inmates of Bilibid prison with an
experimental live cholera vaccine in 1906 (Chernin 1989). Unfortunate-
ly, the cholera cultures had become contaminated with plague organisms,
and thirteen of the research subjects died. An investigation determined that
Strong had conducted the inoculations “in the convalescent ward [where]
he ordered all the prisoners to form a line . . . without telling them what he
was going to do, nor consulting their wishes in this matter.” The investigating
committee suggested that Strong had forgotten “the respect due to every hu-
man being in not having asked the consent of the persons inoculated” (U.S.
National Archives 1907). Strong was reprimanded; he suffered a breakdown;
but he later salvaged his career, becoming the first professor of tropical medi-
cine at Harvard.
Before long, it seemed that the laboratory might reshape the lives of Fili-
pinos as effectively as any religious ritual performed during the Spanish era.
American and Filipino elites soon accepted that they needed a laboratory to
understand health and disease, just as laboratory workers conceded that they
were obliged to address issues of local concern in a manner appealing to
colonial patrons. But the impact of the laboratory was not limited to the elite.
Some ordinary Filipinos came to observe a facile coincidence of laboratory
and church in their daily lives. Medical science and religious doctrine at
least shared goals and rhetoric, although their methods differed and medical
salvation would always be somatic, not spiritual. The laboratory told Filipi-
nos that even apparently healthy or clean compatriots might carry the tropi-
cal germs among which they had evolved, especially if they had engaged in
unsanitary—or sinful?—habits. As colonial subjects, they were expected to
acknowledge their potential for disease carriage—to confess their sins—and
accept the laboratory into their lives, allowing it to extract and examine what-
ever secretions or bodily fluids it deemed necessary. While Christ’s blood
and flesh might transsubstantiate into wine and wafer, the bodies of Filipinos
kept disappearing into germs on agar plates. In order to keep Filipinos pure
and free from such sin, the Bureau of Health, relying on the intelligence of
the laboratory, exhorted them to reform personal habits and domestic hy-
giene. The rituals of washing hands, eating with knife and fork, regular and
fastidious toilet, careful diet, vigorous exercise, and so on promised to allow

them, in time, to transcend tainted native embodiment and to acquire the
fastidious body of the citizen, a body just like the one the Americans thought
they possessed (Anderson 2006). The “gospel of hygiene” preached by the
Bureau of Health was written in the lexicon of the laboratory. “The distinc-
tive achievement of the American administration in the Philippines,” wrote
David P. Barrows (1914, 59), a director of education in the islands, “is in
the social and spiritual transformation of the Filipinos themselves: the pains
taken to make better men.” But, as with the church, it is likely that not all
those touched by the word of the laboratory in the Philippines were utterly
transformed by it.
From the beginning of American occupation, many ilustrados wel-
comed a more progressive and scientific colonial government, even if it
required them to pretend to need further supervision and tutoring. T. H.
Pardo de Tavera, for example, was a leading physician and politician who
readily moved into the senior ranks of the colonial administration. For prag-
matic technocrats like Pardo de Tavera, independence might be delayed
indefinitely (Anderson 2006). Others resented the foreign disparagement of
Filipino achievement and the persistent preference for European or North
American scientists on colonial tour. Many of the frustrated Filipino intel-
ligentsia, previously confined in the lower ranks of the government bureaus,
supported the rapid “Filipinization” policy of Francis Burton Harrison, gov-
ernor-general between 1914 and 1920. However, the Bureau of Science,
where most “advanced” work took place, was the last government body to
Filipinize; when it did slowly begin to promote Filipino scientists Worces-
ter, Heiser, and Forbes protested to the American authorities, claiming that
the civilizing mission had been betrayed. The first generation of American
scientists and officials in the Philippines worried that Filipinization policies
were premature and would lead to the degeneration, or contamination, of
scientific work in the archipelago. They feared that, despite all recent efforts
to instill Filipinos with the “spirit of research,” the local type remained “a
copyist, an imitator [with] no constructive genius or initiative” (Musgrave
1912, 166). Worcester (1914, 685) was convinced that “the Filipinos are
where they are today only because they have been pushed into line, and if
outside pressures were relaxed they would steadily and rapidly deteriorate.”
“Shall they,” he asked, “be left to stagger along alone, blind in their own
conceit?” (ibid., 695). The Spanish had always distrusted mestizo and indio
priests; until the 1920s many Americans continued to regard Filipinos as
unqualified for science.

Converting to National Science
In 1936 Camilo Osias (1936, 624–25), the president of the National Univer-
sity, observed that “under the new order, there is a special call to men and
women of science. More men and women need to be yoked for science.”
He went on:
If we as a people are to surmount the difficulties ahead we must ap-

ply to our life the ways and methods of science. We need to follow the
careful laboratory method of fact finding, the scientific way of con-
ducting research and sifting the facts, and the relentless procedure of
science without partisanship or prejudice. (ibid., 625–26)
Despite protests from the old guard, the process of Filipinization con-
tinued apace and the achievement in 1935 of Commonwealth status, under
the leadership of Manuel L. Quezon, officially signaled the increasing au-
tonomy of the Philippines. In 1903 Filipinos had constituted half the colo-
nial bureaucracy, appointed mostly at lower levels. In 1921 90 percent of the
14,000 public servants were Filipino, and in the 1930s Americans occupied
only 1 percent of government posts, mostly at senior levels or in research
positions (Agoncillo 1969; Friend 1965). During the 1930s science was con-
ventionally linked to nation building and the earlier American emphasis on
its role in a more general civilizing mission seemed redundant and insult-
ing. Leopoldo B. Uichanco (1936, 190), from the University of the Philip-
pines, welcomed “the greater extension of science-consciousness in Filipino
life.” Others, such as Eulogio B. Rodriguez (1936, 91), the director of the
National Library, endorsed this optimism, claiming “the future is bright be-
cause our people are becoming scientific-research-minded.” But Rodriguez
(ibid., 92) echoed older American concerns when he observed “one of the
great handicaps of inventors and scientists in tropical countries is a warm
climate, which is not conducive to continuous mental effort.” More com-
monly, national self-assertion substituted for such outdated environmentalist
pieties. Angel S. Arguelles (1936, 29), the Filipino director of the Bureau of
Science, declared “a nation dedicated to science, that applies it in various
complex national activities, can look forward with confidence to its future
and is bound to survive through the vicissitudes of time.” Applied science, he
believed, “would evolve a virile and progressive nation” (ibid., 28).
American claims for priority in science became ever less compelling
as the United States began to loosen its hold on the archipelago. Rizal had

come to represent a more attractive model and guide than Worcester. For
Victor Buencamino (1936, 108), a Cornell-trained veterinarian and the un-
dersecretary of agriculture and commerce in the 1930s, “scientific progress
in the Philippines is one of the outstanding achievements of American occu-
pation of the islands,” but it was “the product of American-Filipino coopera-
tion,” and not simply imposed from abroad. Others continued to give special
credit to Americans, especially for the development of medical research.
Thus, Antonio G. Sison and Agerico B. M. Sison (1936, 277, 278) admit-
ted, “pioneer Filipino physicians were not duly prepared to master scientific
diagnosis” and the “scientific teaching of medicine was started only at the
time of the American occupation.” Increasingly, though, Filipino scientists
regarded Americans as supervening upon an older scientific tradition. At the
Bureau of Science, Arguelles (1935, 32) recognized Spain as “one of the
torch bearers of Western civilization.” “The Spanish regime in the Islands,”
he wrote, “served as a splendid foundation for a national structure conceived
and developed along modern lines” (Arguelles 1936, 17). Americans may
have accelerated the development of science in the Philippines, but they
did not begin it.
By the late 1920s Filipino scientists dominated the Bureau of Science.
Arguelles and his colleagues emphasized the nexus of economic progress
and scientific research, promoting studies of ceramics, insecticides, vegetable
oils, sugar production, leather tanning, quinine extraction, and forestry and
soil surveys. The Bureau of Science continued its service functions, testing
foods, examining pathology specimens, manufacturing vaccines and sera,
and producing tiki-tiki extract from rice husks as a treatment of beriberi. The
scientific library at the Bureau had swelled to more than 160,000 volumes
and it attracted researchers from China, Japan, Malaya, and the Dutch East
Indies (Arguelles 1935). William H. Boynton at the Bureau of Agriculture
developed a vaccine against rinderpest, a devastating introduced bovine dis-
ease, but it took Filipino veterinarians M. M. Robles and J. D. Generoso to
adapt the vaccine so it was practicable in the field. At the Bureau of Health
a number of committees were established in the 1920s to study the more
common diseases of the archipelago, and Filipino scientists dominated these
too.7 Conversely, the transfer of the Philippines to the Maryland-New York
province of the Society of Jesus in 1921 meant that more Americans began to
do research at the Manila Observatory during this period. Fr. Charles Dep-
perman, S.J., conducted major studies of the genesis and paths of typhoons

and his colleagues continued their astronomical and seismic research (Hen-
nessy 1957).
The government still preferred to sponsor scientific research directly
through the bureaucracy, not through the universities. Some original in-
vestigation did take place at the University of the Philippines, but academ-
ics complained bitterly of heavy teaching loads and inadequate grants for
research. Senior professors frequently were lured to the United States be-
fore they could train suitable successors. In the Medical School scientists
performed useful investigations of the causation and treatment of leprosy,
typhoid, dysentery, and beriberi; the relations of nutrition and growth; the
effect of radiotherapy on malignant growths; and the pharmacology of local
medicinal plants (Salcedo 1957). At private universities scientific research
received very little support, except at Santo Tomás, where some studies of
bacteriology and clinical medicine occurred. In 1932 G. Singian (1932,
372) reported “a new spirit of research and scientific investigation” on the
wards of the San Juan de Dios Hospital, where the Santo Tomás students
trained, yet the new spirit was but weakly manifest in later years.
Between 1922 and 1935 the Rockefeller Foundation was a major spon-
sor of scientific and public health projects in the Philippines. Victor Heiser,
the director for the East of the International Health Board, guided Rock-
efeller involvement in the islands. Still decrying the Filipinization policy
that had ousted him, the former Philippine director of health used the
foundation to reassert control over local scientific and health activities. In
the 1920s Heiser sent out emissaries to conduct hookworm and malaria
research, supervise medical education, and support the establishment of
a School of Hygiene and Public Health (1927). Rockefeller scientists in
the Philippines frequently contrasted their “original” investigations with
the imitative routine work of Filipinos; among their colleagues they spread
the gospel of efficiency and basic research; and they circulated within the
foundation extensive reports on the local institutional and political condi-
tions that seemed to impede their investigations (Anderson 2006). Dr. W.
S. Carter, the Rockefeller man at the University of the Philippines Medical
School, in 1923 complained that he did “not understand, as yet, the orien-
tal mind or the ways of the Dominicans. It is discouraging to try to do some-
thing for people who will not do anything for themselves and I am free to
say that the inertia of these people passeth all understanding” (Rockefeller
Archive Center 1923).

The homology of the Rockefeller and the earlier Jesuit scientific net-
works is striking: both combined a commitment to transcendent basic re-
search with practical engagement; both developed complex mechanisms
of long-distance communication; and neither could avoid accusations of
political intrigue. Rockefeller scientists in the Philippines came to occupy
the organizational and apostolic niches that the Jesuits had largely vacated.
Science might represent a common path to salvation and civilization. “If a
large research institution, free from politics, and under pure science control,
could be developed in Manila,” Heiser (1926) argued, “it would not only be
a great aid to the Philippines, but it would also serve as a light house for that
part of the world.”
By the 1930s most leading political figures agreed that there was a press-
ing need to reorganize the support of science in the Philippines and to gen-
erate work in less applied fields of research. For many years the Philippine
Islands Medical Association and the Colegio Médico-Farmacéutico had
urged the creation of a medical research council. During the 1930s other
scientists joined them in suggesting the establishment of a more eclectic
body to investigate a broader range of technical problems. In 1933, at the
second Philippine Science Convention, Quezon endorsed a proposal for
a National Research Council, which would resemble those in the United
States, Japan, and Australia. The council would improve the organization of
science, support special research projects, train talented personnel, and en-
hance relations with foreign scientists. “We feel the time has come,” Quezon
declared, “for the government to utilize to full advantage our scientific men
and women, make them come out of their shell, so to speak, and advise us
on matters pertaining to their respective fields” (quoted in Valenzuela 1936,
36). Indeed, the constitution of the Philippine Commonwealth, written in
1934, provided that “the State shall promote scientific research and inven-
tion,” an extraordinary national commitment to science, at least on the level
of rhetoric.8 But continuing economic stringency meant that support for sci-
ence did not increase significantly in the 1930s.
In 1941 the Japanese invasion caused the disintegration of Philippine
research and educational activities, and the destruction, yet again, of scien-
tific collections and libraries. After the Japanese were forced out in 1945,
Filipinos had to rebuild local institutions of science, often from the ground
up (McCoy 1980; Steinberg 1967). The Manila Observatory, for example,
was utterly destroyed during the Japanese retreat, and its library, including

unpublished manuscripts, perished in the flames. As the new Republic of
the Philippines, founded in 1946, set up its own Weather Bureau, the Jesuit
scientists after their release from internment planned a new observatory that
would leave aside meteorological work and concentrate on seismological
and ionospheric research. By 1952 the new observatory was recording earth
tremors and bouncing high frequency waves off the ionosphere, and in 1957
it began a program in solar physics, focusing on the study of sunspots. While
the old observatory was devoted to the investigation of the earth and its atmo-
sphere, the revived institution extended basic geophysical studies to include
the sun (Depperman 1953; Hennessey 1955). As Fr. John N. Schumacher,
S.J. (1965, 286), put it, “these Jesuit scientists work to further man’s knowl-
edge and mastery of the physical universe, so that it too may enter into the
consumption of Christ’s Redemption by man’s mind and hands.”
More typically, postwar Philippine science was justified in secular and
economic terms. “Scientific research,” according to Miguel Ma. Varela
(1954, 366), “does pay off in terms of pesos and centavos, in terms of higher
efficiency and reduced man-hours of work, in terms of richer harvests and
healthier citizens.” Support for science was “part of our contribution for the
blessing we enjoy of Filipino citizenship” (ibid., 363). In the 1950s such
civic enthusiasm allowed the Philippines to publish twice as many scientific
and technical journals, including the Philippine Journal of Science, as any
other Southeast Asian country (UNESCO 1953). In addition, an Institute
of Science and Technology was performing many of the functions of the
old Bureau of Science. The National Research Council continued to guide
science policy, and universities began to assert the value of original investiga-
tion (Quisumbing 1957; Velasco and Baens-Arcega 1984). The Philippine
Association for the Advancement of Science was organized in 1951. In 1956
the government created a National Science Board to provide support for
research projects, but the Science Act of 1958 replaced this with a more
powerful National Science Development Board.
Financial limitations meant that most investigation was still closely tied
to local, practical concerns. A Bureau of Soils Conservation, created in 1951,
investigated fertilizers and soil capabilities. The Philippine Sugar Institute
tried to improve sugar production, while the Philippine Tobacco Adminis-
tration studied the tobacco industry. Postwar scientists screened the Philip-
pine flora in search of antibiotics and other useful drugs. Their nutritional
studies pointed to deficiencies in Philippine diet; they sought the cause of

kadang-kadang, a coconut disease; and they resumed the study of agricul-
tural, marine, and forest resources. At the new Philippine Atomic Energy
Commission, scientists investigated shielding against gamma rays and the
use of radioactive iodine in treating thyroid disorders (Valenzuela 1960). The
state provided virtually all research funding, while private industry, largely
foreign owned, did virtually nothing.
In general, research in the Philippines was starved of funds. It was
always a struggle to attract promising students to poorly paid careers in sci-
ence and many of the best investigators who received fellowships to study
or work in the United States never returned. From the beginning of the
American period, a few students, called pensionados, had been awarded
government scholarships to study in the United States. In the 1920s and
1930s many more received Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, and after
the Second World War hundreds of scientists trained in the Philippines
were exported abroad.9 The prospects at home remained dim. In 1956
a senate committee had reported that scientific work on the Philippines
was badly coordinated; research was poorly funded; science teachers were
scarce; and science was not a popular topic (Senate Committee on Scien-
tific Advancement 1956). For many the deficiency in scientific research
represented a failure of the nation. Gode B. Calleja (1987, 118–19), an
expatriate biologist, asserted that “Philippine science is in a very wretched
state,” despite a high literacy rate and a large enrolment in higher educa-
tion. By 1977 Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore had each
surpassed the Philippines in the production of scientific papers. The three
Philippine journals covered by Current Contents received a total of six cita-
tions that year, and most of the feeble efforts at science were in applied bi-
ology, not physics or any “abstract” field. The Philippine Journal of Science
had become, in Calleja’s words, “an embarrassment” (ibid., 140). The only
decent research laboratories were at the International Rice Research Insti-
tute, established by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in 1960 at Los
Baños—elsewhere “the autoclave represents the most sophisticated gad-
getry” (ibid., 141). According to Calleja (ibid., 145), “the failure in science
is just a symptom of a far more serious wrong,” an index of political failure:
he felt that the dictatorial presidency of Ferdinand Marcos was stifling any
critical inquiry, regardless of the régime’s supportive rhetoric or funding
for technocratic solutions. Not until a responsible citizenship emerged in
the Philippines would research thrive. While Calleja drew an exaggerated

picture of the demise of Philippine research, his remarks also reflected a
widespread belief that science now was as closely linked to citizenship as it
had once been to salvation and civilization (Pertierra 2003)
Conclusion
The “specter of comparisons,” to use Rizal’s haunting phrase, can exert an
irresistible attraction but in so doing it draws attention away from impor-
tant local meanings and contingencies. For three hundred years religious
orders wondered if the Philippines was “saved” in comparison with other
parts of the world. During the past century or more, American colonialists
and Filipino nationalists have attempted to assay, to slightly different ends,
the progress of science in the Philippines relative to other nations. To un-
derstand why so much time and energy has been expended on apparently
futile and specious comparison, one must reflect for a moment on the local
significance of “doing science” or “becoming scientific.”
It should be evident by now that science has had many different mean-
ings in the Philippines. For some it was a way to observe bodies and territo-
ries; for others it suggested an experimentalism that licensed intervention
and transformation. Knowledge of the natural world might lead to salvation;
or it might make things grow; or it could help to put goods together; or it
might prevent or treat disease; or it could seem a worthwhile goal in itself.
For the Jesuits scientific research was subordinated to confession building
and to achieving personal salvation; for many Americans in the archipelago
scientific ability indicated the level of civilization, and whether there was
any need of further training; for Filipino nationalists, scientific achievement
was intimately linked to national development. In the twentieth century, the
laboratory functioned as both index and generator of civic responsibility. The
more laboratory-like, or scientifically-minded, the Philippines became, the
more elevated in civilization Filipinos might appear to Americans and the
more modern and responsible Filipinos might appear to themselves. Con-
versely, Americans, in detecting a failure in local science, often affirmed a
continuing need for colonial supervision and training, while Filipinos might
regard the same alleged deficiency as a sign of political neglect or imperial
exploitation, suggesting a need for more, not less, national self-assertion. By
the end of the twentieth century, then, science in the Philippines had be-
come a sort of civic conscience, nagging away at the nation-state.

Notes
For comments on earlier versions of this essay I am grateful to Dan Doeppers, Ronald Numbers,
Vince Rafael, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, and two anonymous reviewers. Judy Kaplan provided valu-
able research assistance.
1 Under the Spanish regime, mestizo meant a person of mixed Spanish-local ancestry or mixed
Chinese-local ancestry; peninsulares were Spaniards from Spain; criollos were persons
of Spanish ancestry born in the Philippines; and indios were descendants of the original
inhabitants.
2 Le Gentil (1964, 74) claimed that “all the ancient prejudices of the schools would appear to
have been abandoned in Europe only to take refuge in Manila, where they will probably survive
for a long time; for the ancient doctrine is too well supported there to be displaced by the sane
doctrine of physics. Don Feliciano Marquez has often told me frankly that Spain is a hundred
years behind France in science, and that Manila is a hundred years behind Spain.”
3 The work of the Jesuits in the Philippines casts doubt on Ashworth’s (1986, 160) claim that,
by the end of the seventeenth century, Jesuit science was “irretrievably isolated from the main
currents of the scientific revolution.”
4 Worcester, a graduate of the University of Michigan, was a keen zoologist and ethnologist who
had visited the Philippines on scientific expeditions in the Spanish period. He dominated the
colonial government until his retirement in 1913, protesting against the increasing trust in
Filipino expertise. When he returned to the islands in 1915 he developed a successful business
career, while doing some ornithology and archaeology on the side. See Worcester 1898, 1914;
Sullivan 1991; Stanley 1984. Sullivan (1991, 4) writes that Worcester “was ambitious, tireless,
‘scientific,’ unscrupulous in pursuit of what he considered right, and ruthless in riding over those
who opposed him. . . . Notably self-righteous, he was vehemently critical of Filipino society, its
values, and its traditions, yet America and its institutions he held sacred.” Paul C. Freer was
Worcester’s brother-in-law.
5 The Manila Medical Society published a quarterly bulletin from 1909; and the Journal of the
Philippine Islands Medical Association began in 1921 (Fernando 1953). Other scientific journals
founded in the early twentieth century include Revista Filipina de Medicina y Farmacia, Philippine
Agriculturalist, Philippine Journal of Agriculture, and the University of the Philippines Natural
and Applied Science Bulletin.
6 For example, Gilbert N. Lewis, a chemist, later led the chemical service of the U.S. expeditionary
forces in the First World War; Warren D. Smith, the chief of the Bureau of Mines, became head
of geology at Oregon State; Jenks went on to the chair of anthropology at Minnesota; H. N.
Whitford, a botanist at the Bureau of Forestry, became professor of tropical forestry at Yale; W.
J. Calvert, a bacteriologist, became professor of medicine at Missouri; J. W. Jobling, the head
of the serum laboratories, became director of the Morris Research Laboratories in Chicago; W.
B. Wherry and Paul G. Woolley of the Bureau of Government Laboratories became professors
of pathology and of bacteriology, respectively, at the University of Ohio; Maximilian Herzog was
appointed professor of pathology at Northwestern; H. T. Marshall became professor of pathology
at the University of Virginia; and Musgrave later taught at the University of California at San
Francisco.

7 The committees included infant mortality (1912–1914); typhoid fever (1916–1922, 1922–1925);
leprosy (1927); malaria control (1926–1936); beriberi (1923–1925, 1926); and mental hygiene
(1932–1933). See Lopez Rizal 1936.
8 Article XIII, section 4. See Hayden 1942, 543.
9 At least 5,500 Filipino professionals, especially physicians, went to the United States to live
between 1952 and 1966. See Bello 1969 and UNESCO 1970.
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Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints

Volume 55 Number 3 Article 2

Science in the Philippines

Follow this and additional works at: https://archium.ateneo.edu/phstudies

Science in the Philippines

Philippine Studies vol. 55, no. 3 (2007): 287–318

Copyright © Ateneo de Manila University

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Please contact the publisher for any further use of this

KEYWORDS: science • research • Philippines • colonial • national

PHILIPPINE STUDIES 55, no. 3 (2007) 287–318

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An Apostolic Colonial Science

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Pigafetta’s description of Palawan leaf insects illustrates the sense of

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Science and the Spanish Colonial State

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The Gospel of American Colonial Science

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There is a fascination about unknown uninhabited islands off in these

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In Manila we now have a scientific library which gives access to all

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So great were these opportunities, according to Freer (ibid., 73), that a

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If we as a people are to surmount the difficulties ahead we must ap-

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8 Article XIII, section 4. See Hayden 1942, 543.

Alzona, Encarnacion. 1932. A history of education in the Philippines��, 1565-1930.

ANDERSON / SCIENCE IN THE PHILIPPINES 313

Buencamino, Victor. 1936. Promotion of science by the Philippine government. In Encyclopedia of

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. 2005. Iberian colonial science. Isis 96:64–70.

———. 1918. The Philippine Bureau of Science. Manila: Bureau of Printing.

Del Rosario, Anacleto. 1895. Análisis

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Le Gentil de la Galaisière, Guillaume . 1964. A Voyage to the Indian

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Rockefeller Archive Center. 1923. S. Carter to G. E. Vincent, president of Rockefeller Foundation, 28

Schurz, William L. 1939. The Manila galleon. New York: Dutton.

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United Nations Educational, . 1953. Scientific and