Biological Institute is an applied research center organised in 1924 in São Paulo

São Paulo

São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...

, Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

. It is a governmental organisation concerned with the prevention of zoonoses and foodborne animal pathogens such as rabies

Rabies

Rabies is a viral disease that causes acute encephalitis in warm-blooded animals. It is zoonotic , most commonly by a bite from an infected animal. For a human, rabies is almost invariably fatal if post-exposure prophylaxis is not administered prior to the onset of severe symptoms...

 and tuberculosis

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...

, sanitary advertisement campaigns, alternatives to the chemical control of diseases such as organic farming

Organic farming

Organic farming is the form of agriculture that relies on techniques such as crop rotation, green manure, compost and biological pest control to maintain soil productivity and control pests on a farm...

 and biological control.

Among its main achievements are the biological control of the coffee borer beetle in the 1920s in Brazil, the discovery of bradykinin

Bradykinin

Bradykinin is a peptide that causes blood vessels to dilate , and therefore causes blood pressure to lower. A class of drugs called ACE inhibitors, which are used to lower blood pressure, increase bradykinin further lowering blood pressure...

, and the production of vaccines that combat the Newcastle disease

Newcastle disease

Newcastle disease is a contagious bird disease affecting many domestic and wild avian species. First found in Newcastle, United Kingdom in 1926, then by Burnet in 1943 in Australia in connection with laboratory infection where the virus was isolated from a ocular discharge of a patient to show the...

, foot-and-mouth disease

Foot-and-mouth disease

Foot-and-mouth disease or hoof-and-mouth disease is an infectious and sometimes fatal viral disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals, including domestic and wild bovids...

 and the black plague in pigs.

History

Brazil used to be an important world coffee

Coffee

Coffee is a brewed beverage with a dark,init brooo acidic flavor prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant, colloquially called coffee beans. The beans are found in coffee cherries, which grow on trees cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia,...

 supplier in the international commodities

Commodity

In economics, a commodity is the generic term for any marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services....

 markets in the beginning of the 20th century. Especially in the state of São Paulo, coffee became a major source of income from exports, and newly-rich coffee barons were sprouting all over the state.

In the early 1920s, coffee farmers in the state of São Paulo were having a hard time in controlling the coffee borer beetle (Hypothenemus hampei), a bug that destroys coffee berries by perforating them (perforated coffee berries have no value in the commodities market). Gabriel Ribeiro dos Santos, the Secretary of Agriculture of the state of São Paulo at that time, has organised a commission of scientists in May 1924 to identify the coffee borer beetle and prevent further losses in the coffee fields. A report was delivered to the Secretary of Agriculture, and the actual research started in the same year with Arthur Neiva, Adalberto Queiros Teles and Edmundo Navarro, who worked in two chemistry

Chemistry

Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

 and entomology

Entomology

Entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of arthropodology...

 laboratories.

The goal of the Commission was to find out more information about the parasite, and hence discover effective ways of preventing its growth. The academic stidies in process were widely advertised among more than 1,300 coffee farms, or about 50 million farmers overall, in order to apply the results of the ongoing research. Arthur Neiva then ended the research at the end of the year, and the results from such a massive scientific and technical experiment soon arrived, and the damages caused by the beetle were finally under biological control. By importing the ectoparasitoid

Parasitoid

A parasitoid is an organism that spends a significant portion of its life history attached to or within a single host organism in a relationship that is in essence parasitic; unlike a true parasite, however, it ultimately sterilises or kills, and sometimes consumes, the host...

 Prorops nasuta from Uganda

Uganda

Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...

 and using it against the coffee borer beetle, the Commission was able to mitigate the losses in the coffee farms.

The catastrophic uprising of the coffee borer beetle, which caught both farmers and the government short and unprepared, and the subsequent fast control of the bug founded on scientific research have shown politicians that it was impossible to protect agriculture from parasites and diseases without a permanent fitosanitary organisation, based on active research and specialised technicians and scientists.

In 26 December 1927, a law enacted the creation of the Instituto Biológico de Defesa Agrícola e Animal (Biological Institute of Agricultural and Veterinary Defence) - its current Instituto Biológico denomination came in 1937.

The Institute

In 1928, an area of 239,000 square metres near Ibirapuera Park, known as "Campo do Barreto", was donated to the Institute for the construction of its research centre. The construction works took 17 years to be completed, and the building was finally inaugurated in 25 January 1945. Some of the construction materials were donated by private firms and wealthy individuals from the farming elites at that time.