The Dissemination, Standardization and Routinization of a Molecular Biological Technique

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 28, Issue 6, 1998, Pages 773-800

  Jordan, Kathleen ^a   Lynch, Michael ^b  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b BRUNEL UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039164035     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631298028005005     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. See Peter Keating, Camille Limoges and Alberto Cambrosio, ‘The Automated Laboratory: The Generation and Replication of Work in Molecular Genetics’, in Everett Mendelsohn and Michael Fortun (eds), The Practice of Human Genetics, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, No. 19 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999, in press)
2. Stephen Hilgartner, ‘The Human Genome Project’, in Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald Markle, James Petersen and Trevor Pinch (eds), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA, London & New Delhi: 4S/Sage, 1994), 302–15; and
3. Alain Kaufmann and Francesco Panese, ‘Cartographier le Genome Humain: Quelques Notes sur la Construction Socio-Technique de l'Universel et le Particulier’, La Construction et la Communication des Faites Scientifiques, International Seminar at University of Lausanne (9 December 1994).
4. Walter Gilbert, ‘A Vision of the Grail’, in Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood (eds), The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 83–97, at 93.
5. This vision interestingly compares to Latour's conception of the expansion of the laboratory regime into other fields: see Bruno Latour, ‘Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World’, in Karin Knorr Cetina & Michael Mulkay (eds), Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science (London: Sage, 1983), 141–170.
6. For an interpretation of Gilbert's vision, which partly relies upon Latour's approach, see Joan Fujimura, Crafting Science, Transforming Biology: The Case of Oncogene Research (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
7. Striking examples of such advertisements are exhibited in Donna Haraway, Modest_ Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse”: Feminism and Technoscience (New York & London: Routledge, 1997), Chapter 2.
8. National Research Council, DNA Technology in Forensic Science (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1992)
9. National Research Council, The Evaluation of Forensic DNA Evidence (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996).
10. For examples from a much larger literature: on the question of replication, see H.M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London & Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985), esp. 29–33
11. on questions of expert authority, see Sheila Jasanoff, Science at the Bar: Law, Science and Technology in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), passim
12. on the development of metrical standards, see Simon Schaffer, ‘Late Victorian Metrology and its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms’, in Robert Bud and Susan E. Cozzens (eds), Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions, and Science (Bellingham, WA: SPIE Optical Engineering Press, 1992), 23–56
13. Joseph O'Connell, ‘Metrology: The Creation of Universality by the Circulation of Particulars’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 1993), 129–173
14. Paul Rabinow, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).
15. For a criticism of the version of biology portrayed in the novel and popular film, see letter by Russell Higuchi, Ancient DNA Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 2 (December 1992), 4–7.
16. Our conception of'following the technique around’ borrows from Latour's idea of ‘following scientists around’, with the significant difference that the subject of such inquiry is a practice rather than a person: Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
17. Collections of relevant studies include: Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (eds), The Social Shaping of Technology (Milton Keynes, Bucks. & Philadelphia, PA: The Open University Press, 1985)
18. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes and Trevor Pinch (eds), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987)
19. Bijker and John Law (eds), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociological Change (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992)
20. Adele Clarke and Joan Fujimura (eds), The Right Tools For the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
21. For an alternative, more ethnomethodological, approach, see Graham Button (ed.), Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction and Technology (London: Routledge, 1993).
22. For a comparable treatment, see Joan Fujimura, ‘The Molecular Biological Bandwagon in Cancer Research: Where Social Worlds Meet’, Social Problems, Vol. 35, No. 3 (June 1988), 261–283.
23. For an example of how another biotechnical innovation became problematic, see Alberto Cambrosio, Peter Keating and Michael MacKenzie, ‘Scientific Practice in the Courtroom: The Construction of Sociotechnical Identities in a Biotechnology Patent Dispute’, Social Problems, Vol. 37, No. 3 (August 1990), 275–293
24. also see Cambrosio and Keating, Exquisite Specificity: The Monoclonal Antibody Revolution (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Chapter 5.
25. The relevant type of'invisibility’ in this context is elaborated in Steven Shapin, ‘The Invisible Technician’, American Scientist, Vol. 77, No. 6 (November-December 1989), 554–563
26. see also Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), Chapter 8.
27. We have been able to draw on the interviews and other fieldwork generated in the NSF-funded team project represented in this Special Issue: for further details, see the ‘Introduction’ by Michael Lynch and Sheila Jasanoff, ‘Contested Identities: Science, Law and Forensic Practice’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 28, Nos 5–6 (October-December 1998), 675–86, esp. 681–82.
28. For a study that investigates a core set of members in a scientific field involved in a contemporary controversy, see G. Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay, Opening Pandora's Box: An Analysis of Scientists' Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
29. The idea of a ‘centre of calculation’ is featured in many books and papers by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and others: see, for example, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-Structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So’, in Karin Knorr-Cetina and Aaron Cicourel (eds), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 277–303.
30. The image of a ‘raisin in a pudding’ is used in a different context by Ulric Neisser, ‘John Dean's Memory: A Case Study’, Cognition, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1981), 1–22
31. at 13. J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 15, draws a similar analogy when he says that ‘[c]ultural studies do not see the context of a cultural artifact as a passive, stable, and timeless background. … The work is not just embedded in its context, as a rock is embedded in the earth or a precious stone in a ring’.
32. This list covers some of the properties Durkheim ascribes to ‘social facts’: Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (New York: Free Press, 1964 [1865]), 1–13.
33. Harold Garfinkel extended the list of Durkheimian properties of social facts by emphasizing how they are known, used, and taken for granted by the members of the social orders who accomplish them. Garfinkel presented his critical supplement to Durkheim in lectures in the Department of Sociology at UCLA in the late 1980s. Brief reference to this argument is presented in Harold Garfinkel and D. Lawrence Wieder, ‘Two Incommensurable, Asymmetrically Alternate Technologies of Social Analysis’, in Graham Watson and Robert M. Seiler (eds), Text in Context: Contributions to Ethnomethodology (London: Sage, 1992), 175–206, at 203–04.
34. The conception of the object of scientific investigation as a cultural object is introduced in Harold Garfinkel, Michael Lynch and Eric Livingston, ‘The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 11, No. 2 (June 1981), 131–158.
35. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 88.
36. Alfred Schutz, ‘The Problem of Rationality in the Social World’, in Schutz, Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 64–88, at 71–72
37. originally published in Economica, New Series, Vol. 10, No. 38 (May 1943), 130–149.
38. The reference to ‘the freezer’ is an example of what Schegloff calls a ‘members’ reference’. Other examples would be uses of'home’, ‘the office’, and ‘the club’ as references to singular places in a speaker and/or recipient's life-world. See Emanuel A. Schegloff, ‘Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place’, in David N. Sudnow (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction (New York: Free Press, 1972), 75–119.
39. See Amann and Knorr Cetina for a detailed account of the work of reading gels as a record of lab work and molecular processes: Klaus Amann and Karin Knorr Cetina, ‘The Fixation of (Visual) Evidence’, in Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 85–122.
40. Kary B. Mullis, Henry A. Erlich, Norman Arnheim, Glenn T. Horn, Randall K. Saiki and Stephen J. Scharf, ‘Process for Amplifying, Detecting, and/or Cloning Nucleic Acid Sequences’, United States Patent No. 4,683,195 (28 July 1987), 2.
41. Alfred Schutz, ‘Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences’, in Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 48–66.
42. Greg Myers informed us (personal communication) that the length of the sentences in patent documents has to do with a legal requirement to state each ‘claim’ in one sentence. For a detailed study of how patents are written, see Greg Myers, ‘From Discovery to Invention: The Writing and Rewriting of Two Patents’, Social Studies of Science,Vol. 25, No. 1 (February 1995), 57–105.
43. For accounts of the role of tacit knowledge, and references to ‘magic’ in molecular biology, see Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating, ‘“Going Monoclonal”: Art, Science, and Magic in the Day-to-Day Use of Hybridoma Technology’, Social Problems, Vol. 35, No. 3 (June 1988), 244–260
44. See the article in this Special Issue by Arthur Daemmrich, ‘The Evidence Does Not Speak for Itself: Expert Witnesses and the Organization of DNA-Typing Companies’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 28, Nos 5–6 (October-December 1998), 741–772.
45. We are grateful to Christine Hine of Brunei University for calling our attention to internet exchanges on a biotechnology news group in which problems of implementing commercialized kits are frequently discussed. A preliminary discussion of such exchanges can be found in Christine Hine and Michael Lynch, ‘Bionet Newsgroups: A Hybrid of Formal Protocols and Tacit Knowledge’, paper presented at the Summer Conference of the International Society for the History, Philosophy & Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) (Seattle, WA, 16–19 July 1997).
46. This phrase is used in Harold Garfinkel, Eric Livingston, Michael Lynch, Doug Macbeth and Albert B. Robillard, ‘Respecifying the Natural Sciences as Discovering Sciences of Practical Action (I and II): Doing so Ethnographically by Administering a Schedule of Contingencies in Discussions with Laboratory Scientists and by Hanging around their Laboratories’ (unpublished paper, Department of Sociology, UCLA, 1989).
47. Considered from the point of view of a goal-oriented ‘diffusion’ of PCR, particular laboratories and fields may act as (in Hughes' terms) ‘reverse salients’, offering pockets of resistance to the advancing front of an innovation. The divide between innovation and resistance to innovation is not clearly drawn, however, as we encounter different conceptions of innovation and resistance as we move from one site to another along the hypothetical battlefront. See Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, MD & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 80.
48. Baudrillard uses the term ‘radiative’ to describe both the conception in contemporary molecular biology of how the genetic code produces the organism, and the dissemination of information from centralized media sources: Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (NewYork: Semiotext[e], 1983), 112ff.
49. For a relevant use of the ‘gerrymandering’ metaphor, see Steve Woolgar and Dorothy Pawluch, ‘Ontological Gerrymandering: The Anatomy of Social Problems Explanations’, Social Problems, Vol. 32, No. 3 (February 1985), 214–227.
50. See Leslie Roberts, ‘Genome Patent Fight Erupts’, Science, Vol. 254 (11 October 1991), 184–186
51. Roberts, ‘Science in Court: A Culture Clash’, Science, Vol. 257 (7 August 1992), 732–736.
52. Controversies having to do with visual matches, contingencies of evidence collection, and statistical estimation are discussed in the papers in this Special Issue by Saul Halfon, ‘Collecting, Testing and Convincing: Forensic DNA Experts in the Courts’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 28, Nos 5–6 (October-December 1998), 801–828
53. Chains of custody are discussed in Michael Lynch and Ruth McNally, ‘Enchaining a Monster: The Production of Representations in an Impure Field’, paper presented at a Science and Culture lecture series sponsored by the Portuguese Ministry of Technology and the Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon, 21 March 1997).
54. Kary Mullis, Testimony in CA v. Mcintosh & Schlaepfer, Case No. 33026, at 2420, lines 1–24, quoted in Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld, ‘Motion to Exclude DNA Evidence’, Dept. 103, Los Angeles County Superior Court (5 October 1994), 85.
55. See Sheila Jasanoff, ‘What Judges Should Know About the Sociology of Science’, Jurimetrics Journal, Vol. 32 (1992), 345–59, and
56. Jasanoff, ‘Judicial Construction of New Scientific Evidence’, in Paul Durbin (ed.), Critical Perspectives in Nonacademic Science and Engineering (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1991), 215–238.