Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World

Latour examines why the laboratory is such a tremendously powerful agent in transforming society, and that many sociologists of science are hampered in thinking about science by preconceptions. Latour examines how, through the example of Pasteur's lab, the work of the laboratory becomes of interest to and come to reshape the rest of society. The process is a series of transformations, first from the field to the lab, in this example from the complex phenomena of anthrax epidemics on the farm to a pure and isolated microbial culture. This is Knorr-Cetina's notion of the "laboratory as reconfigurations of natural and social orders." By isolating the causative anthrax agent, Pasteur was able to transform the previously microscopic anthrax into macroscopic cultures, visible to the naked eye. Thus, the elements of interest in the field are transformed in scale such that previously hidden relationships are exposed. Moreover, Pasteur's laboratory work allowed him to develop, through inoculation of animals first with weakened anthrax, an artificial vaccination. Finally, a transformation from the lab back into the field demonstrates the relevance and potential impact of these conclusions to wider society. And thus, artificial vaccination and the idea of the microbe reshapes wider society. Indeed, the very idea of microbes has been woven into the fabric of society, and thus becomes political without being political.

Latour argues three main points:

1) That the laboratory does not exist as a barrier between the inside and the outside and that such a distinction is counterproductive to sociological studies of the laboratory. The lab is a restriction of the phenomena of the field to the particular elements that are of interest, and that the applications of laboratory conclusions can only be achieved through an extension of the lab back into the field. Pasteur's artificial vaccination works only when we transform society itself into a Pasteurian laboratory, with its statistics and sanitation and etc. The lab both transforms and displaces many agents of society and cannot be separated from these transformed and displaced entities.

2) That the laboratory is an ordinary place with ordinary people except in that it plays with the concept of scale. An example is how anthrax, previously microscopic and part of a greater microbial community, becomes isolated and grown to macroscopic cultures. But more importantly, in that by limiting the scale of inquiry, statistical power is created because the laboratory allows for a larger scale of trials and mistakes to be made, and thus the conclusions of the laboratory become more convincing than that of hearsay or field work.

3) That the laboratory is characterized by processes of inscription. Bacterial colonies is such an inscription, and so is all of the tremendous amount of data that is produced. The laboratory thus transforms the previously invisible into readable form.