Gago, Maria Do Mar (Author)
Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Volume: 57
Pages: 1-27
This article discusses the interaction between genetics and politics during the early phase of Salazar's regime. In particular it focuses on the work of the Portuguese biologist José A. Serra who investigated the genetics of hair pigmentation at the University of Coimbra. The first part of the article describes how Serra's research benefitted from the ideological and political context in Coimbra before and during WWII, and how his work on melanins was a clear response to a new project initiated at the German Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Anthropologie. The second part shows how his expertise in the inheritance and composition of hair colour was required by the regime in the post-war period, when wool became a priority of the corporatist State. The ‘things of darkness’ are melanins, dark biological pigments responsible for pigmentation in mammalian tissues, used in this historical investigation to connect Serra's rather obscure field of research to the political context of his time.
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