1. Biomedical sciences are fast-growing fields with unprecedented speed of research outputs, especially in the quantities of papers. Philosophers aiming to study ongoing biomedical changes face cha...

What sets someone on a life trajectory? This question is at the heart of studies of 21st-century neurosciences that build on scientific models developed over the last 150 years that attempt to link psychopathology risk and human development. Historically, this research has documented persistent effects of singular, negative life experiences on people’s subsequent development. More recently, studies have documented neuromolecular effects of early life adversity on life trajectories, resulting in models that frame lives as disproportionately affected by early negative experiences. (...) This view is dominant, despite little evidence of the stability of the presumably early-developed molecular traits and their potential effects on phenotypes. We argue that in the context of gaps in knowledge and the need for scientists to reason across molecular and phenotypic scales, as well as time spans that can extend beyond an individual’s life, specific interpretative frameworks shape the ways in which individual scientific findings are assessed. In the process, scientific reasoning oscillates between understandings of cellular homeostasis and organisms’ homeorhesis, or life trajectory. Biologist and historian François Jacob described this framework as the “attitude” that researchers bring to bear on their “objects” of study. Through an analysis of, first, historical and contemporary scientific literature and then ethnographic research with neuroscientists, we consider how early life trauma came to be associated with specific psychological and neurobiological effects grounded in understandings of life trajectories. We conclude with a consideration of the conceptual, ontological, and ethical implications of interpreting life trajectories as the result of the persistence of long-embodied biological traits, persistent life environments, or both. (shrink)

There is an ongoing and robust tradition of science and technology studies scholars conducting ethnographic laboratory studies. These laboratory studies—like all ethnographies—are each conducted at a particular time, are situated in a particular place, and are about a particular culture. Presumably, this contextual specificity means that such ethnographies have limited applicability beyond the narrow slice of time, place, and culture that they each subject to examination. But we do not always or even often treat them that way. It is beyond (...) common for us to speak about what one or another laboratory study reveals about the laboratory, or “science” much more broadly. Given the contextual specificity of our ethnographic laboratory studies, what justifies this presumed generalizability? Initially, this manuscript surveys typical responses to this question, but then it pursues an unusual one: the potential replicability of ethnographic results. This potential is hereby explored, via an ethnographic replication attempt—one designed and conducted in order to test the generalizability of a particular laboratory study, that of Latour and Woolgar’s classic Laboratory Life. The results of the ethnographic replication attempt are reported, and a remarkable degree of replicability is established. (shrink)

In his article on radical innovation, Shinn (2005) examined the role of scientific instruments in innovation. This paper continues to investigate this theme, but the main focus is on how scientists or engineers from one discipline may learn from another and produce new knowledge and new technology. The paper looks at the role that tools and instruments developed by one discipline, in one environment, can play in the development of knowledge in a new environment. The theoretical basis for this study (...) is Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of tool-mediated activity. The proposed conceptualisation views instruments as dynamic and suggests types of tool-mediated activities which may contribute to knowledge creation. The collaborative process of experimentation is examined and opportunities for knowledge creation are discussed in relation to the instruments used. Methods used are interviews and observations. The case study is a small multidisciplinary laboratory developing a new process for producing nanoreactors, with potential applications in pharmaceuticals and energy. (shrink)

In developing an "internal" sociology of science, the sociology of scientific knowledge drew on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to reinterpret traditional epistemological topics in sociological terms. By construing scientific reasoning as rule following within a collective, sociologists David Bloor and Harry Collins effectively blocked outside criticism of a scientific field, whether scientific, philosophical, or political. Ethnomethodologist Michael Lynch developed an alternative, Wittgensteinian reading that similarly blocked philosophical or political critique, while also disallowing analytical appeals to historical or institutional contexts. I criticize (...) these Wittgensteinian sociologies and argue for the historical and contemporary significance of methodological criticisms of scientific practice that conjoin epistemological and political categories. I consider two such cases briefly: the Baconian criticism of Scholastic science in the early Royal Society and the criticism of AIDS drug testing protocols by activists. Key Words: Wittgenstein • sociology of scientific knowledge • ethnomethodology • scientific method • interpretive sociology. (shrink)

Cancer—and scientific research on cancer—raises a variety of compelling philosophical questions. This entry will focus on four topics, which philosophers of science have begun to explore and debate. First, scientific classifications of cancer have as yet failed to yield a unified taxonomy. There is a diversity of classificatory schemes for cancer, and while some are hierarchical, others appear to be “cross-cutting,” or non-nested. This literature thus raises a variety of questions about the nature of the disease and disease classification. Second, (...) philosophers of science have historically taken the aim of science to be arriving at true theories. However, scientists studying cancer come from a variety of disciplines, with different scientific as well as practical aims. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that historians and philosophers of science do not seem to agree on how best to characterize the aim and structure of cancer research; it is far from clear whether the appropriate characterization of the aim is arriving at true theories, or even whether the proper units of analysis are “theories”, or instead, “models”, “explanatory frameworks”, “research programs”, “paradigms”, or perhaps, “experimental traditions”. With the rise of “big data” science—such as the Cancer Genome Atlas Project (or TCGA)—and “systems” approaches to the study of disease, both philosophers and historians of science are rethinking how best to describe and explain these distinctive kinds of scientific inquiry. -/- Third, cancer is in part a byproduct of our developmental and life history, as well as our evolutionary history. Cancer progression can be compared to a reversion of development, or, to the evolution of multicellularity. Thus, cancer raises intriguing questions about how we conceive of “functions”, “development”, and the role of our evolutionary history and particularly, selective trade-offs, in vulnerability to disease. -/- Last but not least, cancer research provides a case study for consideration of the roles of values at the science-policy interface. Epidemiological and toxicological research on cancer’s causes informs toxics law and regulatory policy, which raises a variety of questions about the nature of evidence and inductive risk in such contexts. (shrink)

Public bioethics bodies are used internationally as institutions with the declared aims of facilitating societal debate and providing policy advice in certain areas of scientific inquiry raising questions of values and legitimate science. In the United States, bioethical experts in these institutions use the language of consensus building to justify and define the outcome of the enterprise. However, the implications of public bioethics at science-policy boundaries are underexamined. Political interest in such bodies continues while their influence on societal consensus, public (...) debate, and science policy remains ambiguous. This article presents a theoretical discussion of public bioethics bodies as boundary organizations and examines them in terms of relationship to the moral and cognitive authority of science and other forms of expertise, mechanisms for public participation in controversial science policy, and the deployment of consensus models. The theoretical discussion is examined in the case of the U.S. Human Embryo Research Panel. (shrink)

This paper explores an empirical puzzle, namely, how inter-organizational relationships can be sustained between organizations that draw upon distinctive—and potentially conflicting—institutional logics under conditions of power asymmetry. This research analyses cases of these relationships and suggests some key conditions underlying them. Examining relationships between ‘Fair Trade’ organizations and corporate retailers, a series of contingent factors behind the dynamic persistence of such relationships are proposed, namely: the presence of pre-existing ‘hybrid logics’; the use of boundary-spanning discourses; joint tolerance of conflict; and (...) co-creation of common rules. These four elements are supported by a fifth mediating factor, i.e. the presence and use of a Fair Trade certification system in the collaboration. The latter appears as a central vehicle facilitating cross-logic relationships—it can be seen as a ‘boundary object’ embodying a series of narratives and discourses that are open to multiple interpretations corresponding to the dominant institutional logics of each partner organization. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the growing social science scholarship on organic agriculture in the global South. A “boundary” framework is used to understand how negotiation among socially and geographically disparate social worlds (e.g., non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foreign donors, agricultural researchers, and small-scale farmers) has resulted in the diffusion of non-certified organic agriculture in Kenya. National and local NGOs dedicated to organic agriculture promotion, training, research, and outreach are conceptualized as “boundary organizations.” Situated at the intersection of multiple social worlds, these (...) NGOs engage in “strategic bridge building” and “strategic boundary-work.” Strategic bridge building involves the creation and use of “boundary objects” and “hybrid forms” that serve as meeting grounds for otherwise disconnected social worlds. Strategic boundary-work involves efforts to “scientize,” and thereby legitimize, organic agriculture in the eyes of foreign donors, potential research collaborators, the Kenyan state, and farmers. Examples of strategic bridge building and boundary-work are presented in the paper. The Kenyan case illustrates that different social actors can unite around a shared objective – namely, the promotion and legitimization of organic agriculture as an alternative to the Green Revolution (GR) technological package. (shrink)

In recent times there has been a surge in interest on policy instruments to stimulate scientific and engineering research that is of greater consequence, advancing our knowledge in leaps rather than steps and is therefore more “creative” or, in the language of recent reports, “transformative.” Associated with the language of “transformative research” there appears to be much enthusiasm and conviction that the future of research is tied to it. However, there is very little clarity as to what exactly it is (...) and what criteria might be used to design policy instruments to make more of it happen. In this paper, we contribute to the construction of a framework within which some conceptual clarity might be gained. We develop four analogies, or metaphors, that are found in the discourse about “transformative research” and show what they imply for the meaning of the notion and, as a result, both the phenomena that might be associated with it and the levers that would be available to design policy instruments. The analogies serving as theoretical metaphors that we propose, and also document to be present either explicitly or implicitly in the discourse about “transformative research,” are the stock market highlighting risk; the process of evolution and its selection mechanisms; the process of popular culture and the power of “hot” events; and exploration of the frontier of the unknown. No single analogy covers all the relevant issues. Together they help identify a field of phenomena and the potential and challenges “transformative research” presents to policy. (shrink)

The hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to the natural sciences has a special interest in the interpretive phases of these sciences and in the circumstances, cognitive and social, that lead to divergent as well as convergent interpretations. It tries to ascertain the role of the hermeneutic circle in research; and to this end it has developed, over the past three decades or so, a number of adaptations of hermeneutic and phenomenological concepts to processes of experimentation and theory-making. The purpose of the present essay (...) is to show how appropriate these concepts are to an important current research program (solar neutrinos) and thus to point out what difference they make to our understanding of science as a whole. This goal is pursued by means of comparison. The program of social constructivism in natural science has produced alternative but parallel concepts, embodied in an alternative and parallel vocabulary. The contrast between this vocabulary and that of hermeneutics and phenomenology reveals, so I argue, the advantages of the latter. But actually it does more: It reveals as well the pre-understanding or prejudgment of science embedded in each approach. (shrink)

In evidence-based medicine (EBM), methodology has become the central means of determining the quality of the evidence base. The “gold standard” method, the randomised, controlled trial (RCT), imbues medical research with an ethos of disinterestedness; yet, as this essay argues, the RCT is itself a rhetorically interested construct essential to medical-professional boundary work. Using the example of debates about methodology in EBM-oriented research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), practices not easily tested by RCTs, I frame the problem of method (...) as a fundamentally rhetorical problem, situated within a boundary drama, and deeply rooted in the discursive practices of science and medicine. The genre of the RCT report, for example, idealises the research process and can tilt the course of arguments about CAM, while the notion of efficacy can function as a rhetorically mobile boundary object that can redefine the very terms of debate. I suggest herein that arguments about method in CAM debates can productively be read, metonymically, as expressions of more general anxieties in medicine about knowledge and evidence, community values, and professional boundaries; as such, these debates can illuminate some of the rhetorical dimensions of EBM. (shrink)

A recurrent theme in ethnomethodological research is that of instructed actions. Contrary to the classic traditions in the social and cognitive sciences, which attribute logical priority or causal primacy to instructions, rules, and structures of action, ethnomethodologists investigate the situated production of actions which enable such formulations to stand as adequate accounts. Consequently, a recitation of formal structures can not count as an adequate sociological description, when no account is given of the local production ofwhat those structures describe. The natural (...) sciences can be described as a domain of practical action in whichthe use of methods enables the intersubjective reproduction of naturalistic observations and experiments. As numerous sociological studies of laboratory practices have shown, the achievement of intersubjective order cannot be reduced to formal methods; instead, it arises from the work of custom-fitting relevant methods to the local circumstances of the research. In this paper we discuss a possible extension of this idea to cover two intertwined aspects of molecular biology: (1) the work of following instructions on how to perform routine laboratory procedures, and (2) the relationship between cellular orders and the encoded instructions contained in the DNA molecule. We suggest that a classic conception of scientific action is implied by the way formal instructions are treated as a primary basis, both for molecular biologists' actions and the cellular functions they study, and we envision an ethnomethodological alternative to those conceptions of social and biological order. (shrink)

Given their commitment to practices, science studies have bestowed considerable attention upon objects. We have the boundary object, the standardized package, the network object, the immutable mobile, the fluid object, even a fire object has entered the scene. However, these objects do not provide us with a way of understanding their historicity. They are timeless, motionless pictures rather than things that change over time, and while enacting ‘historical moments’ they do not make visible the histories they contain within them. What (...) kind of object could embody history and make that history visible? Inspired by Michel Serres, I suggest the folded object is a way to attend to the temporality and spatiality of objects. In this article I explore this new object by unravelling the history of a DNA reference sequence. I show how, ever since it was produced in the early 1980s, attempts have been made to filter race out of the sequence. That effort has failed due to what one could call ‘political noise’. Making and remaking the sequence have left traces that cannot be erased. (shrink)

This article argues that all knowledge is inherently local and that localness provides the basis for comparison between indigenous scientific traditions or knowledge production systems. As collective bodies of knowledge, many of the significant differences between knowledge production systems lie in the work involved in creating assemblages from differing practices. Much of the work can be seen in the social strategies and technical devices employed in creating equivalences and connections whereby otherwise heterogeneous and isolated knowledges are enabled to move in (...) space and time from the local site and moment of their production and application to other places and times. In this way contemporary technosciences are compared with the knowledge systems of the medieval mastermasons, the Anasazi, the Inca, the Australian Aborigines and the Pacific navigators. (shrink)

What has been called the new mechanistic philosophy conceives of mechanisms as the main providers of biological explanation. We draw on the characterization of the p53 gene in molecular oncology, to show that explaining a biological phenomenon implies instead a dynamic interaction between the mechanistic level—rendered at the appropriate degree of ontological resolution—and far more general explanatory tools that perform a fundamental epistemic role in the provision of biological explanations. We call such tools “explanatory frameworks”. They are called frameworks to (...) stress their higher level of generality with respect to bare mechanisms; on the other hand, they are called explanatory because, as we show in this paper, their importance in explaining biological phenomena is not secondary with respect to mechanisms. We illustrate how explanatory frameworks establish selective and local criteria of causal relevance that drive the search for, characterisation and usage of biological mechanisms. Furthermore, we show that explanatory frameworks allow for changes of scientific perspective on the causal relevance of mechanisms going beyond the account provided by the new mechanistic philosophy. (shrink)

Studies on ‘Big Science’ have shifted our perspective from the complexity of scientific objects and their representations to the complexity of sociotechnical arrangements. However, how scientists in large-scale research attend to this complexity to facilitate and afford knowledge production has rarely been considered to date. In this article, we locate organizational complexity on the level of organizing practices that follow multiple and divergent logics. We identify three strategies of managing organizational complexity, drawing on existing literature on large-scale research as well (...) as own empirical research. The three strategies are: segmenting research infrastructure, introducing elements of bureaucratic governance, and implementing standards and standardization. We illustrate these strategies with examples from our empirical case study on experimental particle physics research at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. While the strategies we identified help to cope with the complexity of some organizational tasks by dividing, ordering, or mediating between divergent organizational logics, we find that organizational complexity overall is not reduced but rather displaced. We argue that dealing with complexity is a dynamic and ongoing process, which inevitably generates novel organizational complexity. (shrink)

This paper uses Actor Network Theory to examine two cases of device-mediated educational change, one involving a computer-assisted interactive video module that provided a half-hour of instruction for a university course, the other an assistive communication device that proved a supposedly retarded pre-school child to be intelligent. The paper explores how device construction instigated by middle-level organizational workers can ramify into organizational change, and extends Actor Network theory by augmenting some of its conceptual tools. I argue that the organizational change (...) processes initiated by work on the devices played out in non-linear ways across the decades-long careers of their makers, and that to understand them we not only have to look across such extended time frames, but must also consider how agency and identity positions emerge and shift over time through the mediation of devices. (shrink)

Este artículo explora los artilugios conceptuales que utiliza la teoría de Bruno Latour para comprender y explicar la realidad natural y social. Asimismo, se exponen cuáles son los límites a su principio de “indeterminación radical” o principio de simetría generalizado. Este análisis muestra la posibilidad de un estudio normativo de la realidad social y tecnocientífica compatible con la evolución que se encuentra en el mismo Latour respecto del significado y funcíon políticos de la ciencia.This article explores the conceptual tools which (...) philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour uses to understand and also to explain natural and social realities investigated by the sciences and by the philosophy of science. This text also sets the limits to Labour’s principle of radical indeterminacy, also known as the principle of generalized symmetry. As a result of this, the possibility of a normative study of social and techno-scientific realities is emphasized as a type of technoscientfic and social research, which is compatible with Latour’s own evolution of thought concerning the meaning and function of the politics of science. (shrink)

This paper explores the laborious and intimate work of turning bodies of research animals into models of human patients. Based on ethnographic research in the interdisciplinary Danish research centre NEOMUNE, we investigate collaboration across species and disciplines, in research aiming at improving survival for preterm infants. NEOMUNE experimental studies on piglets evolved as a platform on which both basic and clinical scientists exercised professional authority. Guided by the field of multi-species research, we explore the social and material agency of research (...) animals in the production of human health. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s concept of “collaborative survival”, we show that sharing the responsibility of the life and death of up to twenty-five preterm piglets fostered not only a collegial solidarity between basic and clinical scientists, but also a transformative cross-fertilization across species and disciplines—a productive “contamination”—facilitating the day-to-day survival of piglets, the academic survival of scientists and the promise of survival of preterm infants. Contamination spurred intertwined identity shifts that increased the porosity between the pig laboratory and the neonatal intensive care unit. Of particular significance was the ability of the research piglets to flexibly become animal-infant-patient hybrids in need of a united effort from basic and clinical researchers. However, ‘hybrid pigs’ also entailed a threat to the demarcation between humans and animals that consolidates the use of animals in biomedical research, and efforts were continuously done to keep contamination within spatial limits. We conclude that contamination facilitates transformative encounters, yet needs spatial containment to materialize bench-to-bedside translation. (shrink)

This paper uses Actor Network Theory to examine two cases of device‐mediated educational change, one involving a computer‐assisted interactive video module that provided a half‐hour of instruction for a university course, the other an assistive communication device that proved a supposedly retarded pre‐school child to be intelligent. The paper explores how device construction instigated by middle‐level organizational workers can ramify into organizational change, and extends Actor Network theory by augmenting some of its conceptual tools. I argue that the organizational change (...) processes initiated by work on the devices played out in non‐linear ways across the decades‐long careers of their makers, and that to understand them we not only have to look across such extended time frames, but must also consider how agency and identity positions emerge and shift over time through the mediation of devices. (shrink)

This pragmatic study addresses the question of the plural realities that emerge from perception, based on an empirical analysis of the tasting activity of wine amateurs and olfactory experts. Though they share the same requirement of rooting taste in the product under scrutiny, they also significantly differ regarding the constraints with which their tasting results have to comply: repeatability for experts’ tasting results, and activity contiunuation for amateurs. Both therefore foster the emergence of two contrasting realities: a stabilized one for (...) experts; an ‘un-stabilized’ one for amateurs. Both happen to fit with the ‘fiction’ and the ‘reference’ modes of existence of Latour’s inventory, which extends and relaunches the analysis of the coexistence of activities initiated by the works on ‘boundary objects’ some decades ago. Finally, the notion of taste is reinterpreted as a translation operator between tasting realities. (shrink)

The historiography on the concept of race in the post-war sciences has focused predominantly on the UNESCO campaign against scientific racism and on the Anglo-American research community. By way of contrast, this article highlights the history of the concept of race from a thus far unexplored angle: from Swiss research centres and their global interconnections with racial researchers around the world. The article investigates how the acceptance, resonance, and prestige of racial research changed during the post-war years. It analyses what (...) resources could be mobilised that enabled researchers to carry out and continue scientific studies in the field of racial research or even to expand them and link them to new contexts. From this perspective, the article looks at the dynamics, openness, and contingency of the European post-war period, which was less stable, anti-racist, and spiritually renewed than retrospective success stories often suggest. The pronounced internationality of Swiss racial science and its close entanglement with the booming field of human genetics in the early 1950s point to the ambiguities of the period’s political and scientific development. I argue that the impact of post-war anti-racism on science was more limited than is frequently assumed: it did not drain the market for racial knowledge on a continent that clung to imperialism and was still shaped by racist violence. Only from the mid 1950s onwards did a series of unforeseen events and contingent shifts curtail the importance of the race concept in various sectors of the human sciences. (shrink)

In the last fifteen years, testing has attracted much attention in science and technology studies. Most researchers have focused almost exclusively on testing in the laboratory, specifically designed test locations, and, for medical technologies, the clinic. What counts as testing has largely been described in terms of the activities of scientific experts. This is not to say that science and technology studies have completely neglected other institutional discourses. Journalistic texts have been a favorite research site for scholars in science and (...) technology studies, particularly those seeking to understand the dynamics of public controversies on science and technology. Although most constructivist studies of science and media relations have treated journalistic texts as secondary to scientific texts, other scholars have dismissed this hierarchy. In this article, scientific texts and journalistic texts are considered equally important locations in which to analyze the testing of technologies. Based on a case study on the testing of a new contraceptive technology for men, the article shows that what counts as successful testing is not solely in the hands of scientific experts. In the case of male contraceptive technologies, journalists have contested the claims of scientific experts, particularly their claims about the cultural feasibility of the new technology. (shrink)

Medicine in a Neurocentric World: About the Explanatory Power of Neuroscientific Models in Medical Research and Practice Content Type Journal Article Category Editorial Notes Pages 307-313 DOI 10.1007/s12376-009-0036-2 Authors Lara Huber, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Institute for History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine Am Pulverturm 13 55131 Mainz Germany Lara K. Kutschenko, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Institute for History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine Am Pulverturm 13 55131 Mainz Germany Journal (...) Medicine Studies Online ISSN 1876-4541 Print ISSN 1876-4533 Journal Volume Volume 1 Journal Issue Volume 1, Number 4. (shrink)

This article draws attention to the production and circulation of genetic knowledge among three constituencies—laboratory researchers, clinicians, and health advocates— all of whom have a stake in research on a heritable connective tissue condition known as Marfan syndrome. National and international conferences provide a context that brings members of these groups together. Such meetings are performance settings, which include the display of visual images depicting various aspects of Marfan syndrome and of the bodies and lived experience of those who have (...) it. The article examines how these images are interpreted, appropriated, and exchanged and how their circulation is both grounded in local knowledge and the grounds for transformative translocal practice. (shrink)