The exile of several life science researchers cut short the advances achieved during the previous years. The biologist Enrique Rioja Lo Bianco combined his work at the Museo de Ciencias Naturales (Madrid) with his classes as a school teacher until the exile took him to Mexico, where he became a celebrated hydrobiologist. It was in that country where he met with another Spanish exile, the entomologist Cándido Bolívar, president of the Mexican Society of Natural History —former secretary of the president of the Spanish Republic Manuel Azaña— and co-founder of the journal Ciencia. Antonio de Zulueta, another entomologist, discovered the inheritance linked to sex in beetles. This geneticist, translator of Darwin´s works to Spanish, was a victim of the so called “internal exile.” He was purged by Franco’s cabinet, charged as an enemy of the nation and ostracized within the country. Even his death in 1971 was silenced by public institutions despite his achievements as a pioneer of Spanish genetics. We should also remember the geologist José Royo Gómez, exiled to Venezuela and a self-confessed Darwinist, one of the pioneers in the study of the dinosaurs in the Iberian Peninsula.
Pioneros de las ciencias naturales
