Reflecting on Laboratory Readings

With these articles focusing on laboratory cultures, what struck me as most interesting was how they all touched on how what happens in the lab is different, or even “staged,” as compared to what happens out in the real world. It is interesting to think about how much stock we put into science and scientists’ work inside a laboratory, when really we do not really know what all goes on inside. We see the finished product of what they have discovered during the course of their lab work, but we never really see what goes on inside.

Bruno Latour talks about staging in “Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World” and how scientists at the end of their experiment, simply show the public what has been practiced and rehearsed many times within the lab. But at the same time, Karin Knorr Cetina also talks about staging in her Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, but uses it in a different context. She talks about how the laboratory is staged to look like the real world so that the experiments can take place. She talks about how laboratories have to stage the action in order to decrease potential for error. There is this interplay between the laboratory and real-world where they are continually mirroring each other to try to look the same, but never can truly replicate the other. 

And Latour says that this is the agreement that scientists make. They settle for agreeing that the two different settings, inside the laboratory and outside the laboratory, are the same for the sake of progress and science. Without agreeing that we would treat those two situations as the same, even though they can never truly be the same, we would never be able to have scientific invention.

Fullwiley also touches upon these topics in “The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Human Difference in Pharmacogenetics Practice” by talking about how the categories for race differ between inside the laboratory and in the real world. One researcher told Fullwiley that she imaged race in two contexts: one for science and one for society, because she did not know how to reconcile the two. The terms used inside the lab just did not fully encapsulate all that race is in the real world.

Given this idea of staging, both in context of staging the laboratory to look like the outside world and staging results from laboratory work to show the public, I think it is interesting that laboratories remain the gold standard of completing science when there are so many inconsistencies. I think it will be interesting to see how laboratory work changes in the coming years as science and technology continue to evolve.