Union of the Agriculture Research Institutes in the Czechoslovak Republic - the coordination institution of the agriculture research and some of its personalities
Abstract
The Union of the Agriculture Research Institutes in the Czechoslovak Republic was an institution that tried for 25 years to coordinate and carry out the agriculture research through the permanent committees. This makes it and its members a suitable facility to get to know this "thread" of continuity tied to science and its coordination.
This study should, therefore, clarify this up to now untreated institution and fates of some of its members. The Union followed in the row of older organisation and was a piece in a jigsaw of organisations focused on the agriculture research.
It organised the agriculture research through the committees that pursued both the sciences and the humanities research. It tried to be a coordination platform that put together the research institutions as well as individual experts.
On this ground, interesting comprehensive projects originated, e. g. the project pertaining to the geonomic maps. The Union also popularised and mediated scientifi c information both in a form of printed media and through the radio.
It came into being in the interwar Czechoslovakia and it enjoyed the support of the powerful agrarian Republican Party, yet, it also managed to survive in the Third Republic after 1945 as well as after February 1948. The post-war period, when the Slovakian agriculture research institutes merged with the Union and when the ministerial research activity developed, represented the maximum extent of the Union.
It also contributed importantly to the preparation of the two-year research plan after the war. The Union via its committee was also actively involved in the preparation of the agriculture research reform.
Its dissolution was a part of abolishment of older research institutes and their replacement in the framework of a new conception of research organisation.