“Becoming a Scientist” Readings

The three readings this week all described experiences within the culture of a specialized scientific field, with emphasis on tracing the process of entering and participating in that community. Because they were written for different publications and audiences, I thought these articles were successful to varying degrees in fairly and realistically characterizing their respective subjects.  

In “Coming of Age in a Weapons Lab,” Gusterson explores the very insulated and secretive world of nuclear weapon science. Gusterson, like many people in the early 1990s when this was published, had his own opinions about the development of nuclear weapon before he met with the scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. As he becomes a participant-observer in the community, he both confirms and reconstructs some of his assumptions: for example, he thought that nuclear scientists would be deeply conflicted about the nature of their work, which he ultimately concludes is somewhat true--though with some caveats. The scientists he interviewed did wrestle privately with the complex consequences of their field, but they and the proximal community did not discuss them openly--instead distancing their work with abstract language and using nuclear testing in a ritualistic way to feel in control. I thought that his characterizations were well-reasoned and nuanced enough to seem believable.

Both Traweek’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Good’s “How Medicine Constructs its Objects” were more detailed studies of different scientific communities. Good, being an anthropologist, has a more objective and academic lens through which he looks at the practice of medicine and in particular the initiation of new medical students into the culture. He describes the highly biological and mechanical ways in which medicine constructs bodies and disease, but makes a distinct effort to not judge whether these practices are right or wrong. He is more interested in accurately describing the phenomenon and I think he was successful by extensively quoting his research and tying all his conclusions to observations in the environment.

Traweek’s “Piligrim’s Progress,” about the overwhelmingly (and not accidental) male field of particle physics, is arguably the piece with the strongest sense of bias on the subject at hand. While she does allow that there are some rare exceptions, for the most part Traweek describes a single “male tale” of a life in physics: one that is characterized by anxiety caused by ego and constant misogyny. Although many of her observations did sound intuitively true, I couldn’t emerge from the article feeling like I had a full and complex understanding of the experience of being a physicist. Since this was excerpted from a less academic source, I think it is expected that Traweek will have more of an agenda and a strong point of view, however I found it difficult to accept her value judgments when there was so little room given to counterarguments.