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Science in Latin America has experienced vigorous growth in the past decade, as demonstrated by the fact that the Latin American share of the world's scientific publications increased from 1.8% in 1991 ‐ 1995 to 3.4% in 1999 ‐ 2003. Significant growth has also taken place in the numbers of PhDs in science and engineering (S&E) awarded in Latin American countries in recent years, including those in the natural sciences. Importantly, albeit at different rates, growth has been verified in almost all countries in the region, indicating a general effort to promote the development of S&E. In most research fields, however, the recognition or relative impact of Latin American science, as measured by the average number of citations received by published articles (CpP), is still below world averages and much lower than in developed nations. We show that average CpP values for a set of 34 representative developing and developed countries correlate significantly with gross expenditure in research and development (GERD), with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and with the number of researchers per million inhabitants (RpM). Among those countries, Latin American nations present some of the lowest average values of CpP (<6), GERD (≤1% of GDP) and RpM (<2,000). We also examined recent trends in scientific activity in Latin America, with focus on the natural sciences and on biochemistry and molecular biology (BMB). In terms of citation scores, publications in BMB compare favorably to those in other research fields within Latin America. At the same time, however, Latin American BMB is one of the areas for which relative impact ‐ compared to developed nations or normalized to world averages ‐ is lowest. These observations clearly indicate the need to establish effective policies to increase competitiveness in terms of the quality and international recognition of Latin American natural sciences in general, and BMB in particular, as opposed to merely increasing the absolute numbers of publications or the numbers of PhDs awarded in the region. IUBMB Life, 59: 199‐210, 2007

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Women have achieved great advances standing up for themselves in the last 100 years. Many important women were essential for the development of science but only a few (5% from total awarded individuals) have won Nobel prizes for their work. In this brief contribution, we would like to show that gender equality is in process and highlight the gaps that still have to be addressed. We also give an overview of the Brazilian scenario on this matter. In many countries, such as Brazil, women are already half of the researchers in Chemistry, but their representation become scarcer as their career advances, in coordination and direction positions.