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Carmen Gil Fernández

Imagen mujer pionera

Carmen Gil Fernández graduated in Biological Sciences in University of Madrid and with a poor basic education, typical of the first Franco regime in Spain, managed to reach international standards thanks to pre and postdoctoral research stays in England (1956-1957) and United States (1961-1964) respectively. She worked as an integral part of the animal virus section or laboratory of Instituto Jaime Ferrán de Microbiología of CSIC, where she began as a trainee in 1952-1953, then scientific collaborator in 1958 and researcher since 1971 until her retirement in 1994. She belongs to the generation of microbiologists who increased the importance of virology, which decisively collaborated with her technical contributions.

During her career, she suffered from the inflexibility of the administrative and scientific cultures of Franco regime, reflected on the formation of very closed working groups who competed for resources, chronically scarce, through its capacity of institutional and political influence and with promotion criteria equally mediated by the will of the mentioned leaders and a remarkable gender bias.

According to her husband, Federico García Moliner (born in 1930), who she met during her English stay and with whom she married when she returned, Carmen lived restrained by the scientific position of her life partner, when, for him, Carmen’s scientific contributions had been more important than his own. Her attitude towards research was very selfless in terms of visibility of the results, at the same time that he highlighted her dedication and collaboration in team assignments. Between 1959 and 1969, her postdoctoral training, she published four works, two of them in international magazines, and her three sons were born, in 1960, 1962 and 1967 respectively. Between 1960 and 1964 she studied at Illinois University, with her husband, hired as a teacher, although she earned an American scholarship. Her most productive moments took place during 1970-1973 and 1983-1993, and it is significant in the history of the Spanish scientific construction that since she obtained the position of scientific researcher in CSIC, in 1972, she will only publish in English in international magazines.

Her postgraduate education allowed her to get familiar with cell culture and different immunological techniques with other figures such as Eduardo Gallardo (1879-1964), Robin Coombs (1921-2006), Michael Stoker (1918-2023) and Lindsay Black (1907-1997). In her doctoral thesis, she identified the pathogen microorganism which through ticks or avian chinchorros could transmit Q fever in Spain, which, according to what is already known since 1937, was rickettsia (today known as Coxiella) burnetiid. During her stay, she warned about the latency phenomenon of herpes virus in HeLa cells  cultivatedin vitro, as she published in a letter to the Nature editor (1960), thus confirming the possibility of working with human viruses under experimental conditions in the laboratory. Her thesis, published by the same institute in 1960, was awarded the Torres Quevedo Prize corresponding to 1957.

At the beginning, the CSIC group to which Carmen was a member, suffered from great institutional weakness. The funding director of Instituto Ferrán, Arnaldo Socías, who had scientifically sponsored her (these are Carmen’s own words in the “Acknowledgements” of her doctoral thesis) passed away the same year this was read and the head of the unit, Eduardo Gallardo, the true director of Carmen’s thesis, already retired from his post in Instituto Nacional de Sanidad, passed away when she just came back from the United States. The biologist Ángel García Gancedo, research professor in 1971 and CIB deputy director, was in charge, Carmen Gil added the cell culture with HeLa lines, since the end of the 1950’s decade. Provided the establishment of two own pig kidney cell lines and a modification for the formation of infective plaques that was henceforth widely used in almost all the groups’ work.

After participating in CSIC Action Programme research on toxic syndrome of colza oil, her last CIB stage was occupied in developing a line of virus multiplication inhibitors.

In general terms, a professional life devoted to establish new experimental protocol of wide use with which she helped to consolidate virology, not only with her personal and group activity, but also through organization of periodical courses within CSIC and in connexion with Biology and Pharmacy faculties. All of it inside a shortage framework, lack of recognition or, directly, women displacement. 

Esteban Rodríguez Ocaña

Science History Department (Universidad de Granada) 

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