Global InformationScience and technology in Venezuela information
Science and technology in Venezuela includes research based on exploring Venezuela's diverse ecology and the lives of its indigenous peoples.
Under the Spanish rule, the monarchy made very little effort to promote education in the American colonies and in particular in those in which they had less commercial interest, as in Venezuela. The country only had its first university some two hundred years later than Mexico, Colombia or Peru.
The first studies on the native languages of Venezuela and the indigenous customs were made in the middle of the XVIII century by the Catholic missionaries. The Jesuits Joseph Gumilla and Filippo Salvatore Gilii were the first to theorize about linguistic relations and propose possible language families for the Orinoco river basin. The Swedish botanist Pehr Löfling, one of the 12 Apostles of Carl Linnaeus, classificated for the first time the exuberant tropical flora of the Orinoco river basin.
In the nineteenth century, several scientists visited Venezuela such as Alexander Humboldt, Aimé Bonpland, Francisco Javier de Balmis, Agostino Codazzi, Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, Mariano Rivero, François de Pons, José Salvany, Auguste Sallé, Robert Hermann Schomburgk, Wilhelm Sievers, Carl Ferdinand Appun, Gustav Karsten, Adolf Ernst, Benedikt Roezl, Karl Moritz, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Anton Goering, Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, Augustus Fendler, Federico Johow, Charles Waterton, Alfred Russel Wallace, Everard im Thurn, François Désiré Roulin, Jean Chaffanjon, Frank M. Chapman, Émile-Arthur Thouar, Jules Crevaux and many others, some of whom are buried in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC) founded on February 9, 1959, by government decree, has its origins in the Venezuelan Institute of Neurology and Brain Research (IVNIC) which Dr. Humberto Fernandez Moran founded in 1955.
Other major research institutions include the Central University of Venezuela and the University of the Andes, Venezuela.
Notable Venezuelan scientists include nineteenth century physician José María Vargas, the chemist Vicente Marcano and the botanist and geographer Alfredo Jahn (1867–1940). More recently, Baruj Benacerraf shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Augusto Pi Suñer (1955), Aristides Bastidas (1980), Marcel Roche (1987) and Marisela Salvatierra (2002) have been recipients of UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for promotion of the public understanding of science. On July 2, 2012, L. Rafael Reif – a Venezuelan American electrical engineer, inventor and academic administrator – was elected president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[citation needed]