Corporations, universities, and instrumental communities: Commercializing probe microscopy, 1981-1996

Technology and Culture

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 56-80

  Mody, Cyrus C M ^a  

^a Chemical Heritage Foundation   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33645945906     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2006.0085     Document Type: Article

References (152)

1. All scanning probe microscopes bring a very small solid probe very close (usually to within a nanometer, which is one billionth of a meter) to a sample in order to measure the strength of different kinds of interactions between probe tip and sample to determine the height (and other characteristics) of the sample. The probe is then rastered much like the pixels on a television screen, and a matrix of values for the strength of the tip-sample, interaction is converted into a visual "picture" of the surface. Different probe microscopes use different kinds of tip-sample interactions to generate their images. The first - the STM - works by putting a voltage difference between the tip and a metal or semiconductor sample; when the tip is brought close to the sample, some electrons will "tunnel" between them. Tunneling is a quantum mechanical process by which particles near-instantaneously displace from one point to another across a barrier. The strength of the current of tunneling electrons is exponentially dependent on the distance between the STM tip and the sample; also, the stream of tunneling electrons is very narrow. Thus, an STM has ultrahigh resolution both vertically and laterally: most STMs can actually detect individual atoms on many samples. Today, the STM's younger cousin, the atomic-force microscope (AFM), is more commonly used. An AFM employs a very small but flexible cantilever as a probe; as the tip of this cantilever (usually weighted with a small pyramid of extra atoms) is brought close to the surface, the cantilever bends due to the attraction or repulsion of interatomic forces between tip and sample. The degree of bending is then a proxy for the height of the surface. Originally, this bending was measured by putting an STM on the back of the cantilever; today, however, the deflection is detected by bouncing a laser off the cantilever and measuring the movement of the reflected spot. Another common and industrially relevant tool, the magnetic force microscope (MFM), works in a similar way, but uses a magnetic tip to map the strength of magnetic domains on a surface rather than the surface height. Both the AFM and MFM have slightly less resolution than the STM (that is, they cannot usually detect single atoms); but because they (unlike the STM) can be employed on insulators as well as conductors, and in air and fluids as well as vacuum, they have become much more popular.
2. Some studies in this vein include Robert Kohler, Lords of the Fly (Chicago, 1994);
3. Boelie Elzen, "Two Ultracentrifuges: A Comparative Study of the Social Construction of Artefacts," Social Studies of Science 16 (1986): 621-62;
4. and Thomas P. Hughes, "Model Builders and Instrument Makers," Science in Context 2 (1988): 59-75.
5. See Joan Lisa Bromberg, The Laser in America, 1950-1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991),
6. and Michael A. Grayson, ed., Measuring Mass: From Positive Rays to Proteins (Philadelphia, 2002). Indeed, since there are now more than forty named types of probe microscopes, one could easily present the history of the field as an unending series of invented variations. My focus here is less on these variants, most of which have few users, and more on the mainly standardized, usually commercially available instruments. For an analysis of the dichotomies between builders and buyers in probe microscopy,
7. see Cyrus C. M. Mody, "How Probe Microscopists Became Nanotechnologists," in Discovering the Nanoscale, ed. Davis Baird, Alfred Nordmann, and Joachim Schummer (Amsterdam, 2004), 119-33.
8. Nicolas Rasmussen, Picture Control: The Electron Microscope and the Transformation of Biology in America, 1940-1960 (Stanford, Calif., 1997);
9. Timothy Lenoir and Christophe Lécuyer, "Instrument Makers and Discipline Builders: The Case of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance," Perspectives on Science 3 (1995): 276-345.
10. An excellent study of the transition from pre- to post-Cancun in several instrumental communities is Stuart Blume, Insight and Industry: On the Dynamics of Technological Change in Medicine (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
11. For analyses of the dispersion/dissemination of experimental tools, see Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch, "The Dissemination, Standardization, and Routinization of a Molecular Biological Technique," Social Studies of Science 28 (1998): 773-800. For a similar study of theoretical tools,
12. see David Kaiser, Drawing Things Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago, 2005).
13. I adopt the phrase "research technologies" from Terry Shinn, "Crossing Boundaries: The Emergence of Research-Technology Communities," in Universities and the Global Knowledge Economy: A Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations, ed. Henry Etkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff (London, 1997), 85-96.
14. For a sampling of the academic capitalism debate, see Norman E. Bowie, ed., University-Business Partnerships: An Assessment (Lanham, Md., 1994);
15. Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton, N.J., 2003);
16. Roger L. Geiger, Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace (Stanford, Calif., 2004);
17. and the essays in Donald G. Stein, ed., Buying In or Selling Out: The Commercialization of the American Research University (New Brunswick, N.J., 2004).
18. Steven Shapin, "Ivory Trade," London Review of Books 25 (2003): 15-19.
19. For disciplines/industries, see Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High-Tech, 1930-1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 2006),
20. and Martin Kenney, Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex (New Haven, Conn., 1986). For studies of MIT and Stanford University,
21. see Bernard Carlson, "Academic Entrepreneurship and Engineering Education: Dugald C. Jackson and the Cooperative Engineering Course, 1907-1932," Technology and Culture 29 (1988): 536-69;
22. David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Oxford, 1977);
23. Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York, 1993);
24. John Servos, "The Industrial Relations of Science: Chemical Engineering at MIT, 1900-1939," Isis 81 (1980): 531-49;
25. R. S. Lowen, "Transforming the University - Administrators, Physicists, and Industrial and Federal Patronage at Stanford, 1935-49," History of Education Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1991): 365-88;
26. C. Lécuyer, "Academic Science and Technology in the Service of Industry: MIT Creates a 'Permeable' Engineering School," American Economic Review 88 (1998): 28-33;
27. and Henry Etkowitz, MIT and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Science (London, 2002). For Silicon Valley, Route 128, and emulations thereof,
28. see Anna-Lee Saxenian, Regional Networks: Industrial Adaptation in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993);
29. Peter Hall and Ann Markusen, eds., Silicon Landscapes (Boston, 1985);
30. Manuel Castells and Peter Hall, Technopoles of the World: The Making of Twenty-First-Century Industrial Complexes (London, 1994);
31. Stuart W. Leslie, "Regional Disadvantage - Replicating Silicon Valley in New York's Capital Region," Technology and Culture 42 (2001): 236-64;
32. and Martin Kenney, ed., Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region (Stanford, Calif., 2000).
33. Klaus Hentschel, Mapping the Spectrum: Techniques of Visual Representation in Research and Teaching (Oxford, 2002);
34. Myles W. Jackson, "Buying the Dark Lines of the Spectrum: Joseph von Fraunhofer's Standard for the Manufacture of Optical Glass," in Scientific Credibility and Technical Standards in 19th and Early 20th Century Germany and Britain, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald (Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 1996), 1-22;
35. and David Pantalony, "Seeing a Voice: Rudolph Koenig's Instruments for Studying Vowel Sounds," American Journal of Psychology 117 (2004): 425-42.
36. The STM, for instance, was preceded by a very similar instrument called the Topografiner, built by Russell Young at the U.S. Bureau of Standards in 1969-70. But because Young never convinced any wider group of people to attach themselves to the Topografiner, it is fair to state that probe microscopy was not "invented" until Binnig and Rohrer came along. See John Villarrubia, "The Topografiner: An Instrument for Measuring Surface Microtopography," in A Century of Excellence in Measurements, Standards, and Technology - Selected Publications of NBS/NIST, 1901-2000, ed. David R. Lide and Dean R. Stahl (Boca Raton, Fia., 2001), 214-18.
37. Indeed, inventors of instruments (or those who take credit for having invented them) often seem to have troublesome positions within the firms that employ them. See, for instance, the description of Kary Mullis's antagonistic relationship with Cetus in Paul Rabinow, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (Chicago, 1996).
38. G. Binnig and H. Rohrer, "The Scanning Tunneling Microscope," Scientific American 253 (1985): 50-56,
39. and G. Binnig and H. Rohrer, "Scanning Tunneling Microscopy - From Birth to Adolescence," Reviews of Modern Physics 59 (1987): 615-25.
40. For descriptions of the big corporate laboratories and their relations with universities, see George Wise, Willis R. Whitney, General Electric, and the Origins of U.S. Industrial Research (New York, 1985);
41. Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age (New York, 1997);
42. Lillian Hartmann Hoddeson, "The Roots of Solid-State Research at Bell Labs," Physics Today 30 (1977): 23-30;
43. and Leonard Reich, The Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell, 1876-1926 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
44. Joe Demuth, interview with Cyrus Mody, Yorktown Heights, N.Y., 22 February 2001;
45. Joe Stroscio, interview with Cyrus Mody, Gaithersburg, Md., 28 June 2000;
46. John Villarrubia, interview with Cyrus Mody, Gaithersburg, Md., 28 June 2000;
47. Randy Feenstra, interview with Cyrus Mody, Pittsburgh, 2 May 2001;
48. John Foster, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 19 October 2001;
49. Jene Golovchenko, interview with Cyrus Mody, Cambridge, Mass., 20 February 2001.
50. Such races appear to be a recurring feature of young instrumental communities. They are especially visible in Bromberg (n. 3 above).
51. Paul Hansma, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 19 March 2001.
52. This is a more common phenomenon than has been recognized. For instance, some of today's academic nanotechnology centers can be traced back to efforts during the 1970s and '80s to build facilities in which electrical engineering and applied physics faculty could train students in the materials and methods used in the semiconductor industry. Since such facilities were never as well endowed as those in companies such as Intel and AMD, these faculty shifted focus by broadening their research for a multidisciplinary audience, hence giving current nanotechnology its interdisciplinary character. From Harold Craighead, interview with Cyrus Mody, Ithaca, N.Y., 26 May 2005.
53. Golovchenko interview;
54. Clayton Teague, interview with Cyrus Mody, Gaithersburg, Md., 6 June 2002.
55. Much recent history of technology has focused on the active role of users. For consumers' adaptations of artifacts for uses that manufacturers were ignorant of, or even opposed outright, see Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, "Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States," Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 763-95. For users' pressure on companies (often - as in instrumental communities - through threats to form their own cooperatives or companies),
56. see Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, Calif., 1992).
57. For an overview of different kinds of user activity, see the essays in Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, eds., How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
58. Dave Farrell, interview with Cyrus Mody, Rochester, N.Y., 29 May 2001;
59. Golovchenko interview (n. 13 above). For an analysis of a similar phenomenon in particle physics during the 1930s, see Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago, 1997), ch. 3.
60. For similar instances of negotiations between academic users of laboratory products and the products' manufacturers, see Michael Lynch, "Protocols, Practices, and the Reproduction of Technique in Molecular Biology," British Journal of Sociology 53 (2002): 203-20.
61. For treatments of the concept of tacit knowledge, especially as applied to instrument-building, see H. M. Collins, "The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the Replication of Experiments in Physics," Sociology 9(1975): 205-24;
62. Harry Collins, "Tacit Knowledge, Trust, and the Q of Sapphire," Social Studies of Science 31 (2001): 71-86;
63. and Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York, 1962).
64. Christoph Gerber, interview with Cyrus Mody, Zurich, Switzerland, 12 Novem ber 2001;
65. Rudd Tromp, interview with Cyrus Mody, Yorktown Heights, N. Y., 23 February 2001;
66. Virgil Elings, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 20 March 2001.
67. For similar instances of practices spreading throughout an experimental community by transmission of knowledge about particular brands, see Jordan and Lynch, "The Dissemination, Standardization, and Routinization of a Molecular Biological Technique" (n. 4 above).
68. Mike Kirk, interview with Cyrus Mody, Sunnyvale, Calif., 12 October 2001;
69. Dan Rugar, interview with Cyrus Mody, Almaden, Calif., 14 March 2001;
70. Foster interview (n. 13 above). See C. F. Quate, "Acoustic Microscopy - Recollections," IEEE Transactions on Sonics and Ultrasonics 32 (1985): 132-35, for a brief description of scanning acoustic microscopy at Stanford.
71. Quate's optimism for STM derived from its ultrahigh resolution and the fact that (ideally) the STM tip does not touch (and thereby mar) the sample surface.
72. Daniel Lee Kleinman, Impure Cultures: University Biology and the World of Commerce (Madison, Wise., 2003).
73. Andy Gewirth, interview with Cyrus Mody, Urbana-Champaign, 111., 26 June 2001.
74. The pedagogical roots of this split are analyzed in Cyrus C. M. Mody, "Instruments in Training: The Growth of American Probe Microscopy in the 1980s," in Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Producing Physical Scientists, 1800-2000, ed. David Kaiser (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 185-216.
75. Jane Frommer, interview with Cyrus Mody, Almaden, Calif., 14 March 2001;
76. Dawn Bonnell, interview with Cyrus Mody, Philadelphia, 26 February 2001.
77. Shinn (n. 5 above). By manufacturing the relevance of STM and AFM to these disciplines, the academic groups turned those fields into "relevant social groups," parties to the eventual shape of the technology; see Wiebe E. Bijker and Trevor Pinch, "The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other," in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 17-50.
78. Craig Prater, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 19 March 2001;
79. Jun Nogami, interview with Cyrus Mody, East Lansing, Mich., 28 June 2001.
80. This importation of credibility/knowledge through collaboration is apparent in many instrumental communities. It is best described in Rasmussen (n. 4 above). The coordination of different kinds of personnel and expertise around a common instrumental focus is nicely captured by the "trading zone" concept in Galison (n. 19 above), and the idea of circulating "boundary objects" described in Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, "Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939," Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 387-420.
81. Jan Hoh, interview with Cyrus Mody, Baltimore, 10 June 2002;
82. Barney Drake, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 18 October 2001;
83. Stuart Lindsay, interview with Cyrus Mody, Tempe, Ariz., 6 January 2003;
84. Carlos Bustamante, interview with Cyrus Mody, Berkeley, Calif., 17 October 2001;
85. Gewirth interview (n. 27 above);
86. Nogami interview. The propagation of a technique through the "cascade" of postdoctoral associates and collaborators away from one of the centers of an instrumental community is described in Kaiser, Drawing Things Apart (n. 4 above).
87. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital," in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson (New York, 1986), 241-58.
88. Joe Griffith, interview with Cyrus Mody, Murray Hill, N.J., 28 February 2001;
89. Demuth interview (n. 13 above);
90. Feenstra interview (n. 13 above).
91. See Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925 (Princeton, N.J., 1997), for an analysis of batch production.
92. Othmar Marti, interview with Cyrus Mody, Ulm, Germany, 16 November 2001;
93. Gimzewski interview (n. 17 above).
94. Bob Hamers, interview with Cyrus Mody, Madison, Wise., 9 May 2001;
95. Demuth interview;
96. Tromp interview (n. 22 above).
97. Bonnell interview (n. 29 above).
98. For the classic analysis of the instrument as "black box" (i.e., a technology that takes over epistemic responsibility from the experimenter by virtue of the inaccessibility of its workings), see Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, N.J., 1986). My point here is that the "blackness" of the black box is continually reshaped in order to draw boundaries or form networks within an instrumental community. Commercialization can be a gradual process of making the black box less open to intervention;
99. see Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch, "The Sociology of a Genetic Engineering Technique: Ritual and Rationality in the Performance of a 'Plasmid Prep,'" in The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in the Twentieth-Century Life Sciences, ed. Adele E. Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura (Princeton, N.J., 1992), 77-114. At the same time, the presentation of a commercial microscope architecture as "closed" (probe microscopists' term for a black box) or "open" (their term for translucent) is a political move designed to orient that microscope toward a particular market niche/subdisciplinary audience.
100. See Mody, "How Probe Microscopists Became Nanotechnologists" (n. 3 above).
101. For a similar analysis of how corporate culture at IBM sometimes kept innovations from percolating, see Ross Knox Bassett, To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-Up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology (Baltimore, 2002).
102. Likewise, attempts at spinning off small companies from Bell Labs' probe microscope research during the 1990s fell apart partly because of managers' inexperience in dealing with commercialization efforts by their subordinates. Moreover, the size and inward focus of both IBM and Bell Labs hindered these companies from cleanly patenting (and hence reaping profits from) their STM and AFM work. See Griffith interview (n. 35 above).
103. Bonnell interview.
104. Davis Baird, "Scientific Instrument Making, Epistemology, and the Conflict between Gift and Commodity Economies," Ludus Vitalis Supplement 2 (1997): 1-16. The "moral economy" of making gifts and exchanges in an instrumental community is described in Kohler (n. 2 above).
105. Miguel Salmeron, interview with Cyrus Mody, Berkeley, Calif., 9 March 2001;
106. Lindsay interview (n. 33 above).
107. Diamonds were used as tips because their sharp points were less likely than other materials to wear down from repeated use. The glass on the back of the cantilever acted as a small mirror, bouncing laser light into a photodiode; the position of the reflected beam in the photodiode indicated how much the cantilever was bending (i.e., a proxy for how much the surface was pulling or pushing on the diamond tip).
108. Tom Albrecht, interview with Cyrus Mody, Almaden, Calif., 14 March 2001;
109. Drake interview (n. 33 above);
110. Kirk interview (n. 24 above).
111. Nancy Burnham, interview with Cyrus Mody, Worcester, Mass., 20 February 2001;
112. Rich Colton, interview with Cyrus Mody, Washington, D.C., 27 June 2002;
113. Foster interview (n. 13 above).
114. Kirk interview.
115. Hansma interview (n. 15 above);
116. Elings interview (n. 22 above).
117. Matt Thompson, interview with Cyrus Mody, Chadds Ford, Pa., 26 February 2001;
118. Elings interview.
119. Don Chernoff, interview with Cyrus Mody, Indianapolis, Ind., 5 September 2001;
120. Elings interview.
121. This analysis resonates with Barry Dornfeld's Producing Public Television, Producing Public Life (Princeton, N.J., 1998),
122. and Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco's Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), which also describe producers' use of themselves as a template in imagining consumers. My thanks to Christina Dunbar-Hester and Trevor Pinch for their discussion with me on this point.
123. Similar markets are apparent among hobbyists and artists. See Kristen Haring, "Technical Identity in the Age of Electronics" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2002), for the former,
124. and Pinch and Trocco's Analog Days for the latter.
125. From FASEB Journal 4 (1990): 1.
126. This analysis draws on Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's concept of the "cycle of credit," but from the perspective of the instrument seller rather than the buyer. See Latour and Woolgar (n. 40 above).
127. In fact, DI tirelessly promoted Journal articles written by its favored customers, citing them in its advertising and even reprinting them as application notes.
128. There is a complicated relationship between "commercialization" and "stabilization" of a technology; for analyses of stabilization, see Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelite, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Trevor Pinch, and Geoff Bowker (Cambridge, Mass., 1995),
129. and Paul Rosen, "The Social Construction of Mountain Bikes: Technology and Postmodernity in the Cycle Industry" Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 479-513.
130. To give an idea of DI's success: when it was bought by Veeco Instruments in 1998, a dozen years after its founding, Dl was estimated to be a $54 million company, with some 2,500 units sold since 1987 and a net income of $16 million in 1996 and $13.7 million in 1997. 1998 Annual Report: The Future Is About to Surface (Plainview, N.Y., 1999), 4 and 27.
131. This was also true at other centers of commercialization (Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, and Caltech), although what constituted being peculiarly "California" took on decidedly local flavors; Scot Gould, interview with Cyrus Mody, Claremont, Calif., 27 March 2001;
132. Nogami interview (n. 31 above).
133. The same can be said for employees at the smaller start-up manufacturers in Los Angeles: Quanscan, Topometrix, Pacific Scanning, and Quesant.
134. Jerome Wiedmann, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 18 October 2001.
135. James Massie, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 18 October 2001;
136. Helen Hansma, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 19 March 2001;
137. Dan Bocek, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 23 March 2001;
138. Thompson interview (n. 51 above);
139. Drake interview (n. 33 above);
140. Paul Hansma interview (n. 15 above).
141. Pete Maivald, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 18 October 2001;
142. Bocek interview.
143. Jason Cleveland, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 20 March 2001;
144. Gould interview (n. 60 above);
145. Prater interview (n. 31 above). Personnel ties between the Hansma group(s) and DI were complex. Of Paul Hansma's graduate students, Scot Gould worked at DI for a summer, Craig Prater eventually became a senior executive in the company, and Jason Cleveland was there for a few years before starting another company, Asylum Research (double entendre intended), with other DI rebels; another, Mario Viani, went straight to Asylum. One of Paul Hansma's postdoctoral associates, Roger Proksch, was at DI before going on to Asylum; one of Helen Hansma's post-doctoral associates, Irene Revenko, moved to and stayed at DI. Paul Hansma's most important technician, Barney Drake, started a company, Imaging Services, that was housed within DI and acted as a clearinghouse for potential DI customers. Stuart Lindsay, an early collaborator of Paul Hansma's, started up a company, Molecular Imaging, that, early on, primarily made complementary hardware for DI's products (which DI marketed). Many more Hansma group personnel also had less formal consultative relationships with DI.
146. Drake interview;
147. Massie interview.
148. Hoh interview (n. 33 above).
149. Instrument manufacturers' use of researchers to produce articles and application notes is a prominent feature of both Rasmussen (n. 4 above) and Lenoir and Lécuyer (n. 4 above); Sergei Magonov, interview with Cyrus Mody, Santa Barbara, Calif., 21 March 2001;
150. Mike Allen, interview with Cyrus Mody, Alameda, Calif., 12 October 2001.
151. The copying of experimental/organizational style first from university to start-up, and then among a field of start-ups, is a classic example of "institutional isomorphism" the spread of innovations across organizations due to competition for personnel whose professional affiliations demand particular organizational forms or practices. See Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields," American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 148-60,
152. and Paul J. DiMaggio, "Constructing an Organizational Field as a Professional Project: U.S. Art Museums, 1920-1940," in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago, 1991), 267-92.