Mexico is a developing society that only recently has begun to fully appreciate the importance of technology to economic success. It has had no clear vision of what the role of science is of how a scientific community can be formed. Understandably, in these circumstances, careers in science still do not have the status and recognition that such professions as medicine, engineering, and law have traditionally enjoyed.

A program to train students in biomedical research was launches at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in the early 1980s as an experiment in providing...