Two botanists converse: Memory, science, and the Cold War

Published 10/10/2025 in Scholar Travel Stipend

Written by Kathleen Gutierrez | 10/10/2025

On an August morning on the patio of an Italian deli, two retired scientists met with me to talk of the past. Domingo Madulid, a historical botanist of the Philippines, and Hermes Gutierrez, expert on the Philippine Dipterocarpaceae family, have been colleagues since the 1960s. Over hot black coffee, the two detailed their experiences collecting plant specimens, their collaborations with foreign scientists, and their musings on the current state of genetic mapping and systematics.

I approached our conversation with a historian’s lens, intent on making their lives feel as consequential as they are and on tracing bits of their stories along grander social and political scales. I am trained as a historian of science and as a Southeast Asianist, and my career has led me to conduct oral history interviews. I’ve had the special opportunity to record a conversation with one of the most influential anthropologists of the Philippines, the late Harold Conklin (1926–2016), and to get to know the children of Filipino farmworkers based in California’s Pajaro Valley. Each interview is a gift, and my time with Domingo and Hermes was no exception.

To the two of them, their careers spanned what have seemed like multiple lifetimes, earning them repute among their colleagues and coveted seats as government researchers. To me, their stories reveal contours of the Cold War (1947–1991) and of widespread mid-twentieth-century decolonization in the Philippines and in broader Southeast Asia. 

For some newly independent Southeast Asian countries at the end of World War II (1939–1945) and throughout the Cold War, the process of decolonization—or the end of formal colonization by a foreign nation—was fragmentary, violent, and yearslong. For others, sanctioned policies swiftly created novel agreements that ushered neo-colonial arrangements with former metropoles. Nevertheless, across them all, heads of state touted the power and possibility of science. This was most especially the case for the Philippines, which had been leveraged as the “leader of the free world in Southeast Asia,” a position built upon U.S. foreign aid and technical assistance.[1]

In spite of the Philippines’ entrenched relationship with the United States, which had formerly colonized the archipelago for nearly fifty years, the decades following the war presented a moment of political experimentation and renewed relationships with nearby Southeast Asian states. The Philippine government, most infamously under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.—whose own son now sits as president—tested new forms of governance modeled, in part, by Indonesian dictator Suharto.[2] Marcos’s reign (1965–1986) aimed to establish a unique brand of Third Worldism, a “New Society” for the Philippines (branded from Suharto’s “New Order” regime) for which science played a decisive role.[3] Shared regional experiences of poverty and uneven national development further prompted his vision. A half-built nuclear reactor, the mass exodus of scientists brought upon by U.S. recruitment policy and Western-dominated structures of global science, and extrajudicial imprisonment of researchers revealed, however, what has been seen as the authoritarian modernity of the Marcos regime.[4]

Hermes could be considered a prime example of the unfortunate routes laid by the dictator, which many home-grown scientists followed—sometimes by force. He was a provincial kid, who got his start at the National Museum of the Philippines by sheer luck. The museum’s then-director hired him out of some frustration that his own son refused to take a scientific career for himself. A protégé from the start, Hermes became one with academic enrichment and dedicated decades of his life to learning about the Philippine Dipterocarpaceae family, a family of magisterial trees known to grown widely in tropical Asia.

While his ethnic Ilokano identity garnered him some cache with the Ilokano dictator, ethnic politics weren’t enough to keep him or his colleagues safe in the government halls. His research on ethnobotany, according to him, grew unpopular with an administration intent on keeping its populace poor and unwell. Family discord, the disappearance of subordinate researchers, and professional intrigue made it abundantly clear that he needed to leave. He left for the United States in 1985, one year before Marcos’s toppling. He had me—his daughter—in 1988 unknowing that I would someday take interest in his field of study.

Indeed, decolonization for the Philippines and the broader region was fraught. It was as much a power grab by landed elites, foreign elements, and political parties as it was an exuberant display of civil society envisioning fresh modes of being. Science—whether a colonial holdover or a reinvigorated set of now-national institutions—assisted in the path to fuller self-sufficiency and offered an arena upon which Southeast Asian countries could deliberate their shared futures and their engagement with global scientific discourse.

The plant sciences were consequential to the region and to Cold War politicking, particularly as states inched toward scientific infrastructure that could rival that of the so-called First and Second worlds. Analog developments occurred in Latin America, as plant scientists developed intra-regional working groups that disrupted bilateral partnerships that had once limited the region to Anglo-European collaborations.[5] Requiring relatively less equipment than physics and astronomy laboratories, the plant sciences facilitated investigations into already-available domestic resources, often with a cadre of colonial era-trained and young personnel at the ready.

Domingo, too, finds a critical place in this history. A student of the plant sciences and trained at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, he took it upon himself to return to the Philippines to be of greater service to the new nation. Other foreign institutions had offered him lucrative research opportunities. He had known, however, that his specializations could better advance the archipelago.

Making such a choice didn’t come without costs: government salaries have never been especially lucrative (that is, if you’re not from a political dynasty). Still, Domingo built a career that advanced what we know of Philippine science, acting as a conduit for international researchers to bring Philippine flora into dialogue with global systematics. He participated in field expeditions funded by extra-national entities, including the U.S. military and the United Nations. Such entities saw in the Philippines a possible ally during the Cold War. Domingo saw science. For him, plants were the order of the day and not cloying politics.

That August morning, I got a clearer sense of Hermes’s and Domingo’s satisfaction with the courses of their lives—lives committed to Philippine plants. More impactfully, Hermes, now 92, and Domingo, 79, connected as old friends. They chuckled over heroic details of their time as researchers: precariously hanging off the side of a cliff, harnessing only a branch as a fail-safe (for Domingo); seeing leeches ready to fall on an unsuspecting face (Hermes); sleeping on the forest floor with but a tarp covering their heads (both). A satisfaction came through these tales—one absent of the Cold War ponderings, thoughts of decolonization, or the Marcoses past and present. They reflected as people do: on the moments—mundane and grand—that comprise a life.

Author(s):

Kathleen Gutierrez

MS '06