Contribuições Latino-Americanas para a Química Inorgânica
Latin American Contributions to Inorganic Chemistry
- Danielle Cangussu; Evgenia Spodine; Fabio Doctorovich and Ivan Castillo*
I norganic chemistry in the Americas, and especially in Latin America, has been historically linked to mining endeavors, in particular those of Spanish and Portuguese colonizers from the 16th to 17th centuries. Gold and silver are perhaps what first come to mind, although evidence of earlier mining activities by native civilizations has been documented and the extraction of metals and minerals is quite broad. Aztec and Maya uses of mineral pigments are representative examples, although earlier evidence exists of cinnabar (HgS) employment as a red dye.(1)
The information available is limited, because “... one finds description of the riches that the vanquished possessed, but not about the arts they used to acquire them.” (2) In this context, it has been proposed that iron ore was mined as early as 12000 BC on the Pacific Coast of South America. (3) Later, copper mining operations from around 500 AD became evident with the discovery of the mummified miner “Copper Man” near the Chuquicamata Mine in northern Chile, now on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. (4) Pre-Columbian human activities related to inorganic chemistry existed from the Río Bravo in the north (called the Rio Grande in the U.S.) to Patagonia in the south, in this overall region that is now referred to as Latin America─this includes part of North America and Central and South America as well as part of the Caribbean.
Mining activities of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America yieldd copious amounts of coinage metals that circulated in Europe. In the territory that is now Chile, copper mining began at the end of the 17th century to supply the viceroyalty of Peru for cannon manufacturing. In Brazil, in the territory called Cataguas,́ named after the indigenous people who lived there before and during the colonial period, the main economic activity was the exploitation of gold, iron, silver, bauxite, emeralds, diamonds, limestone, and quartz, among other minerals. Because of the huge variety of mines, the territory was renamed Minas Gerais (“General Mines”) in the 18th century.
Late colonial efforts to systematically extract the plentiful ore deposits in Mexico resulted in the foundation of the Real Seminario de Minas in 1792 in Mexico City, the first technical mining school established on the continent.5 Andreś Manuel del Rio`s, a Spanish-born member of the Seminario, discovered vanadium in 1801 as part of a vanadinite specimen [Pb5(VO4)3Cl] from Zimapan, ́ Mexico.6 The originally named eritronium was overlooked by French scientists in Paris, who analyzed Manuel del Rio’s sample and arrived at the erroneous conclusion that the metal was chromium.6,7 As a result, the discovery was later granted to Selfström in Sweden. The second half of the 19th century was marked by the mining of saltpeter (KNO3) in then independent Peruvian territory, which was claimed by Chile during the War of the Pacific (also known as the Saltpeter War, 1879−1884). Another source of “fixed” nitrogen for fertilizer and gunpowder is guano, bird droppings rich in ammonia, nitrates, and urea, which was extensively exploited off the coast of Peru since Inca times and well into 1880s.(8)
Key changes took place at the beginning of the 20th century, the first being the transition from the production of precious to industrial minerals, followed by others including the replacement of old refining processes based on mercury by separation using flotation and cyanide. Nationalization and union movements gained prominence in Bolivia, Chile, and Mexico, although Brazil took a different path when the military regime positioned the country as a major iron producer.9 Porphyry copper began to be extracted, and Chilean deposits along the Andes are the largest in the world. Brazil has the fifth largest iron reserves on Earth, with the highest purity in terms of iron content.10,11 Recent demand for lithium for batteries puts Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile in the spotlight as the countries with the largest reserves worldwide.12 These industrial developments have been slowly but surely accompanied by research efforts, mostly at public research centers and universities.
Nowadays, the field of inorganic chemistry is flourishing in Latin America in other ways beyond extraction of metals and mineral resources despite the challenges posed by the limited public and private investment in R&D in the region.13,14 The dissemination of knowledge and the sharing of expertise among
the members of the continental research community are crucial to increasing the impact of Latin American science in general. The creation of solid collaboration networks is key to these efforts. An early initiative to increase these international collaborations was organization of the International Conference on Coordination Chemistry (ICCC), which was held in 1997 in Santiago, Chile. ICCC waslater held in Merida, ́ Mexico, in 2004. More recently, the International Conference on Biological
Inorganic Chemistry (ICBIC) took place in Florianopolis, ́Brazil, in 2018.
At the regional level, the Latin American Symposium on Coordination and Organometallic Chemistry (SiLQCOM) has established itself as the main platform for inorganic chemistry networking within the continent and with the international community since its first edition in 2007 in Colombia; meetings have taken place in Venezuela, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia again, and the most recent virtual version organized by Spain with an upcoming event in Cuba. Another biannual specialized gathering is the Latin American Meeting on Biological Inorganic Chemistry (LABIC), which has consolidated since its inception in 2008, with Brazil playing a key role, and a rotation that has included Argentina, Mexico, a virtual version organized by Uruguay, and an upcoming one in Chile. Last but not least, the recently launched LatinXChem digital forum has further enabled the exchange of ideas within the inorganic chemistry community and broader chemistry community, even during the harsh times imposed by the COVID pandemic.
With this historical backdrop and modern momentum, it is our privilege to announce the opportunity provided by Inorganic Chemistry and the American Chemical Society to launch a Virtual Issue highlighting the current topics being explored within the broad field of inorganic chemistry in Latin America, defined as the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking territories within the region. This scientifically underrepresented part of the globe has been increasingly producing high-quality research, and this Virtual Issue of selected articles published since 2019 is an ideal forum to showcase the impact and increase the visibility (selected examples below are featured in Table 1).
Coordination chemistry has had a privileged role in the growth of Latin American inorganic chemistry over time (Paredes-García et al. and Pereira et al.) and naturally extends to bioinorganic chemistry (Alvarez et al., Ribeiro, Batista, et al., Páez-Hernández, Arratia-Pérez, et al., Murgida et al., Castillo et al., Pellegrino, Doctorovich, et al.), while the field of organometallic chemistry has seen rapid development in several countries (Moya-Cabrera et al. and Rojas et al.). Solid-state chemistry (Barahona, Galdámez, et al.) and applications in catalysis soon followed (Abarca, Morales-Verdejo, et al.,Tasso, Milani, et al., Rossi et al., Porcel et al., Neuman et al., García et al., and Signorella et al.), with recent developments in photoluminescence (Manzur, Costa de Santana, Spodine, et al.), magnetism (Spodine, Aravena, et al.), materials and nanotechnology (Rojas-Chávez et al., Camacho, Pineda, et al., Castillo et al., Botelho et al., and Soler-Illia et al.), metallosupramolecular chemistry (Ibarra, Percástegui, et al., Moreno-Alcántar et al., and Pereira Barros et al.), inorganic polymers (Terra Martins et al.), and theoretical chemistry (Menezes de Oliveira et al.). We are confident that readers will enjoy these mentioned examples and many other high-quality works published in American Chemical Society journals included in the Virtual Issue. We are also grateful to the authors and to Inorganic Chemistry for providing us with this opportunity to showcase Latin American science.
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