Historia del vanadio, 1801-1831. Disputa por la autoria del descubrimiento

There are research topics and problems whose nature, structure and dynamics provide the analytical route and the methodological perspective to unravel its global dimension. This is the case of erythronium, a chemical element that was discovered in 1801 by the Spanish mineralogist Andrés Manuel del Río Fernández (1764-1849) in the laboratory of the Real Seminario de Minería in Mexico City, New Spain. The discovery went around the western world immersed in a controversy over its authenticity, until the European scientific community decided to close the case by granting paternity to the Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström (1787-1845), who 30 years later had rediscovered it, making its name official as vanadium in 1831. The 30 years that passed also revealed the dispute between France, Germany and the United States for the appropriation of nature and the gradual displacement that they experienced in their hegemony over chemical science, as a scientific tool of power and global control.