Between the 1930s and 1950s, life science had evolved into a sophisticated and expensive scientific enterprise. Under the influence of the Rockefeller Foundation's program of molecular biology, vital processes, especially the properties of proteins, were increasingly probed through systematic applications of tools from the physical sciences. This trend altered the nature of biological knowledge, the organization of research, and patterns of funding for the life sciences, transforming laboratory research into 'big science' — a team activity centered around massive apparatus. The (...) development of the Tiselius apparatus during the 1930s and 1940s serves as an example par excellence of these nascent intellectual and institutional trends. The paper shows that the Tiselius apparatus and the research it spawned represented one of the early collaborative projectes organized around a major laboratory technology. From its inception, design, construction, and early uses the new electrophoresis technology was a joint-effort between Svedberg's group at the University of Uppsala, the Rockefeller Institute, and a few other elite institutions. These collaborations reflected access to resources, and a commitment to a scientific agenda which stressed the physico-chemical approach to biological phenomena. The collaborations were based on the 'protein paradigm' — the view that proteins were the primary determinants of biological specificity. By examining the intellectual programs and the institutional network around the Tiselius apparatus, this paper also underscores the fruitfulness of studying the history of laboratory technology of the life sciences. (shrink)

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Like it or not, a big picture of the history of science is something which we cannot avoid. Big pictures are, of course, thoroughly out of fashion at the moment; those committed to specialist research find them simplistic and insufficiently complex and nuanced, while postmodernists regard them as simply impossible. But however specialist we may be in our research, however scornful of the immaturity of grand narratives, it is not so easy to escape from dependence – acknowledged or not – (...) on a big picture. When we define our research as part of the history of science, we implicitly invoke a big picture of that history to give identity and meaning to our specialism. When we teach the history of science, even if we do not present a big picture explicitly, our students already have a big picture of that history which they bring to our classes and into which they fit whatever we say, no matter how many complications and refinements and contradictions we put before them – unless we offer them an alternative big picture. (shrink)

(1992). A historical ethnography of a scientific anniversary in molecular biology: The first protein X‐ray photograph (1984, 1934) Social Epistemology: Vol. 6, The Historical Ethnography of Scientific Rituals, pp. 323-354.