Science and technology in Argentina

The most important aspects of science and technology in Argentina are concerned with medicine, nuclear physics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, space and rocket technology and several fields related to the country's main economic activities. According to the World Bank, Argentine exports in high-technology are products with high R&D intensity, such as in aerospace, computers, pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments, and electrical machinery. Benefiting from Latin America's highest literacy rates since shortly after President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento made primary education universally available in the 1860s and 1870s, Argentine researchers and professionals at home and abroad continue to enjoy a high standing in their fields. Argentine Bernardo Houssay was the first Latin American awarded with a Nobel Prize in sciences. Educated in a National University, Houssay went on to establish Argentina's National Research Council, a centerpiece in Argentine scientific and technological development, fifty years on. Many other Argentines have contributed to scientific development around the world, though sometimes having to emigrate to do so. Probably for that, the Argentine education is referred as the Latin American docta (in Spanish: La docta Latinoamericana), which originates from the Latin docta (learned).

Despite its modest budget and numerous setbacks, academics and the sciences in Argentina have enjoyed an international respect since the turn of the 1900s, when Dr. Luis Agote devised the first safe and effective means of blood transfusion as well as René Favaloro, who was a pioneer in the improvement of the bypass surgery . Argentina is the Latin American country with the most Nobel Prize laureates; and has three Nobel Prize winners in the sciences: Bernardo Houssay in Physiology or Medicine in 1947, Luis Federico Leloir in Chemistry in 1970, and César Milstein in Physiology or Medicine in 1984. Argentine scientists are still on the cutting edge in fields such as nanotechnology, physics, computer sciences, molecular biology, oncology, ecology, and cardiology, where Dr. Domingo Liotta created the first artificial heart in 1969, revolutionizing the heart transplant field.

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