Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World

 Upon reading the whole article by Bruno Latour, I got somehow confused with his arguments, and came to agree with the author on the one hand, but at the same time, disagree on the other hand.

In the article, Latour mainly insists that a laboratory works to destabilize the very difference between the inside and the outside. To support his claim, he gives an example of the laboratory of Pasteur.  

Even after reading the whole thing, I am still confused about how I should put my thoughts into words, because I guess this article was one of the hardest readings that I have come to read in college. Maybe this is just because I am not a science person at all or because this is my first time taking an advanced-level class related to sciences, but I think that the author makes the simple arguments very confusing and complicated. (I know nothing about any sort of sciences, so I hope you understand that I am writing from a layperson’s point of view).

So when it comes to the dichotomy of a laboratory (drawing a clear boundary between the outside and the inside), I agree with one of the author’s main points that it is meaningless to put a boundary between the outside and inside. But isn’t this what people normally think? I have never thought of a laboratory as a place that is separated from the real world. I always thought that a laboratory is the continuation of the real world, because what I think scientists do in their labs is always at some degrees related to what is happening in the world. They are just studying “small things” to find out its relation with “big things,” or to figure out how “small things” help us to understand “big things.” And how can they every time bring the real condition to the laboratory? They must do it under controlled conditions or in a smaller scale. A laboratory is a miniature of the real world.

I have never thought about a laboratory in a dichotomous way as the author does, so I found it hard to follow when the author makes such complicated arguments on the issue of dichotomy and lab positioning.

Also, I think the author should have given more convincing evidences or should have talked in more details when he says “it is useless to look for the profit that people can reap from being interested in Pasteur’s laboratory. Their interests are a consequence and not a cause of Pasteur’s efforts to translate what they want or what he makes them want.” I agree with the point that people’s interests are a consequence of Pasteur’s efforts, but I am skeptical of the former part. Is it really useless to look for the profit that people can get from his laboratory? Would people have shown the same level of interest if Pasteur’s laboratory had not seemed to give them something beneficial? Part of me thinks that people were mostly interested in his laboratories because they thought Pasteur could make a vaccine or help them to treat cattle with anthrax, a priori reason to be interested in Pasteur’s laboratory.