Bernardo Beiguelman, my father, passed away this Tuesday, the 5th.
We have received countless emails, telegrams, hugs, and comforting words that we are not yet able to answer or thank people for.
For now, here are a few memories of his incomparable creativity, unforgettable sense of humor, and, above all, his emotional and intellectual generosity.
Getting his Vemaguet stuck in the mud on what is now Avenida Ralph Tórtima, the only access to the Unicamp campus when it was being established in Barão Geraldo in the late 1960s, was small potatoes for professor and geneticist Bernardo Beiguelman. A few years earlier, things had been much worse.
Apart from the director of the School of Medical Sciences, Antônio Augusto Almeida, Beiguelman can be said to have been Unicamp’s second professor.
Beiguelman’s mission was so innovative for its time that it was met with disbelief: to create Latin America’s first Department of Medical Genetics.
It was a task that chroniclers of the time would call Herculean, given the adversities: improvised laboratories, books written at breakneck speed, chronic lack of money, and political skirmishes behind it all. Beiguelman sets part of the story straight.
In the interview that follows, my father talks about how genetics was viewed in the 1960s, as a kind of “esoteric branch of medicine,” about current prospects in neurobiology, and about Campinas, Santos, science, and politics. All of it, as always, seasoned with his clarity of exposition, irony, and intellectual boldness.
http://www.unicamp.br/unicamp/unicamp_hoje/ju/novembro2004/ju273pag06.html
