Brazil's presence on the international stage is usually limited to its carnival, football players and more recently its super-models. Now the world is taking notice of its scientists.
Recent discoveries in genetics over the past four months have seen Brazil become the third-most important country working in the field - close behind the better-funded Britain and US.
Three months ago 200 Sao Paulo scientists announced that they had cracked the DNA code of a bacterial pest, Xyella fastidiosa, which destroys a third of Brazil's yearly orange harvest. The bacterium has cost growers an estimated £87 million annually.
Described in July as a "landmark achievement" by the science journal Nature, this research enabled Brazil quietly to join the premier league of nations working in genetics.
For a country whose research skills had long been written off, this feat was a source of considerable national pride. To mark the success, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso held a lavish state banquet in August in honour of the scientists working on the project.
After this initial breakthrough, the country's researchers then made another coup. They announced that they had mapped the structure of 500,000 human-expressed sequence tags (ESTs) in the study of malignant tumours. These tiny bits of DNA are used by scientists to make up the far longer sequence of base pairs that make up a gene.
The more ESTs that are known to make up a particular tumour, the easier it is to decode the entire structure of its genome and eventually find a cure. So far, only Britain and the US have identified more human ESTs. Dr Richard Klausner, president of the American National Cancer Institute, acknowledged: "The Brazilians are working at the leading edge. They have shown that emerging nations can participate as equals in cutting-edge research."
For a country where scientists are usually starved of resources, the accomplishment of these recent advances in genomics has been particularly sweet.
The seeds of this Brazilian success were sown three decades ago in an unusual fundraising policy linked to a Sao Paulo research foundation known as Fapesp. Since the 1960s, this body has been guaranteed a fixed 1 per cent share of all the taxes collected in the state and, most importantly, independence from the political interference that is endemic in many of Brazil's public institutions. It now has a large endowment and funds everything from research into aeroplane dynamics to weather prediction.
As a result of Fapesp's work, Brazil's contribution to scientific research has risen threefold in 15 years. The country now publishes 1.2 per cent of the world's scientific papers, more than the rest of Latin America combined.
In late 1997, the foundation decided that it would bring together its many disparate scientists working on genome research. It created a "virtual institute" of experts based in 62 laboratories scattered throughout Sao Paulo state, which is half the size of France.
Dr Andrew Simpson, a British scientist and the man responsible for co-ordinating the Fapesp genome project, said: "Building a bricks and mortar institute would have been costly and time-consuming. This way we divided the work between many laboratories and maximised the sharing of knowledge."
Now the Sao Paulo scientists are starting two new projects. One involves decoding genomes of sugar cane, which is still a major export product in Brazil. The other will look at deciphering the genetics of several types of human cancer. Fapesp's scientists also believe that they are close to producing a full genetic map of the breast cancer tumour.
The Ludwig Institute, a Swiss cancer foundation, recently gave Fapesp a further £4.2 million.