By the 1960S Many Biologists Affiliated with North American Institu
The Americas 58:4 April 2002, 537-575 Copyright by the Academy of American Franciscan History AT HOME IN THE FIELD: SMITHSONIAN TROPICAL SCIENCE FIELD STATIONS IN THE U. S. PANAMA CANAL ZONE AND THE REPUBLIC OF PANAMA* y the 1960s many biologists affiliated with North American institu- tions were intent upon establishing a new kind of field station within Btropical America. Conditions at such new stations contrasted with those at tropical medicine research centers, commodity-oriented agricultural research stations like those run by the United Fruit Company, or established botanical centers such as the Atkins Garden and Research Laboratory in Cuba.1 Absent were the arboreta, the crop demonstration plots, full-scale expa- triate residences and most home comforts. Absent too were the nearby planta- tions served by the economic botany practiced at the agricultural stations. Location, in isolation, was everything. Convenient daily access to remote and relatively undisturbed tropical environments was essential to the scien- tific undertaking of these new stations. In the 1953 first edition of his pio- neering ecology textbook, Eugene P. Odum had written, “Field work is the * The author thanks the Smithsonian Institution for supporting this research through a Smithsonian postdoctoral fellowship and a STRI research grant. Thanks also to the many Smithsonian personnel in Washington, D.C., and Panama who have facilitated this research, especially at the Smithsonian Institu- tion Archives and at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Special thanks to Marshall Eakin, Judith Ewell, Pamela Henson, and Peter Leimgruber for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts, and to those who commented on related draft papers at an Autumn, 1997, History of Science, Medicine & Technology Department Colloquium at The Johns Hopkins University, at a Smithsonian Institution Archives Research in Progress in Spring 1998, and at the Program on Tropical Science Roundtable lec- ture, “Natural Places, Unnatural Ideas?” organized by Hope Hollocher and Ben A.
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