The institute that tried to abolish the boss
Oeiras e São Julião da Barra, Paço de Arcos e Caxias, in Oeiras, Portugal, is home to ground where the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation built a science institute in 1961 with no departments or chain of command, near the palace grounds of the Marquês de Pombal, who received the land from the crown in 1759.
A charity built a science institute with no bosses
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation had money meant for the arts. In 1961 its trustees decided to spend some of it on science instead. They wanted a research center with no university rules attached to it. It had to be free of committees and prior claims on what its scientists could study. They built it here, next to the Marquês de Pombal's own palace grounds in Oeiras. The marquess had carved this ground out of the Portuguese crown two centuries earlier.
The Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência opened its biology center in 1967. It had four small research groups and about twenty scientists. The first years were rough. Between 1966 and 1969, four of the institute's own founding leaders died. They were Delfim Santos, António Gião, Flávio Resende and Luís Quartin Graça. One came from each of the founding centers.
In 1968, a Jesuit priest named Luís Archer came back to Portugal. He set up a molecular genetics laboratory inside the institute's Department of Cell Biology. He is remembered as the father of molecular genetics in Portugal. He built that reputation on this ground. He did it in a lab a charitable foundation had built with no board of governors watching over his shoulder.
Small research groups shared equal footing for decades
In 1984 the foundation's trustees made a decision that set the institute's course for the rest of its life. It would do nothing but biology research and graduate training. This would be permanent. Two more institutes moved onto the same campus in 1989. They were the Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica and the Instituto de Biologia Experimental e Tecnológica.
The bigger change came in 1998, when António Coutinho became director. He had run an immunology unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. He rebuilt the institute around small, independent research groups. There was almost no hierarchy between them. Every group got equal access to the same equipment and facilities. This was true whether it was run by a veteran or a scientist just starting out. That structure held. Between 1998 and the institute's final years, 88 research groups worked under it. Researchers from 41 countries passed through its labs.
By 2010 and 2011 the institute was ranked among the ten best places outside the United States for young researchers finishing their doctorates. Mónica Bettencourt-Dias took over as director in February 2018. She was the last person to hold the job under the institute's own name.
In October 2024 the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência merged with the Instituto de Medicina Molecular. They became the Gulbenkian Institute of Molecular Medicine. Sixty-three years earlier, a charity built a science institute with no departments and no bosses. It stood on the ground where you are standing. Now it was folded into something else. Its name went with it.
A marquess ruled this ground on the crown's behalf
In 1759, King Joseph I handed the ground to his minister, the Marquis of Pombal. This was a reward for rebuilding Lisbon. The city had been struck by disaster four years earlier. A royal charter that June gave Pombal jurisdiction over the land. Within a month the village on it became a town, and weeks later a full municipality. Pombal answered to the crown, but on this patch of ground, the crown answered to him. The arrangement did not outlast him by much. Oeiras stopped being its own municipality in 1835, folded back into the ordinary structure of Portuguese local government.
An earthquake and tsunami struck this stretch of the Tagus
Four years before Pombal's charter, this stretch of the Tagus was struck by catastrophe. An earthquake near magnitude 8.5 to 9.0 hit the Lisbon region on the morning of November 1, 1755. A tsunami followed about forty minutes later, surging up the river past Oeiras. Fires burned for five or six days afterward. Between 60,000 and 100,000 people died in Lisbon and the towns around it. The disaster leveled the old order along with the buildings. It cleared the way for Pombal to remake Lisbon, and to remake this ground as a town that answered only to him.
A fortress built for defence became someone else's barracks
Near Carcavelos, a mile and a half from here, stands the Forte São Julião da Barra. It is the largest Vauban-style fortress in Portugal. It was built to defend the Tagus and answer to no one but the crown that armed it. In November 1807, French troops under General Jean-Andoche Junot occupied it during Napoleon's invasion of Portugal. They turned the fortress into barracks, stripping its original purpose. It stayed a flashpoint. During the Portuguese Civil War, a French fleet under Admiral Albin Roussin bombarded it in 1831. A fortress built to hold its own ground had become someone else's outpost.
Three parishes merged into a single civil parish
Administrative boundaries near the institute went through their own quiet consolidation. In 2013, the parishes of Oeiras e São Julião da Barra, Paço de Arcos and Caxias were merged into a single civil parish. Each of the three had governed its own patch of the coast. After the merger, none of them existed as a separate unit again. The new parish held nearly 34,000 people by the 2011 count, folded together under one name where three had stood before.
The lab where Luís Archer once worked without a boss now carries a different name on the door.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.
