Roles of the Laboratory and the Scientist

This week our readings each took one of the two typical symbols of science, the scientist and the lab, and went into depth about them. Those pieces about the scientists themselves spoke to the social influences on and of these individuals, while those about laboratories seemed to focus on what aspects of the lab gave science its power.

Anthropology of microbes argued for the existence of a connection between something so small as a single microbe and something so large as human society. The authors noted that microbes can not only be affected by society, but can also be the agents of social impact in and of themselves. A strong argument for the use of microbes as indicators of the larger human experience came in the form of gut microbes and what they can tell us about food availability and preparation, the movement of populations, and the use of antibiotics (1). Beyond the gut, we know that an individual’s microbes are strongly affected by their life experiences. In this way, microbes provide the opportunity for mapping a person’s life.

In The Biologistical Construction of Race, Duana Fullwiley shows that efforts to represent minorities in medical studies requires showing that they are different from the white patients typically used in these studies. Although a powerful way to show this difference is to look to genetics, the results of these statements have impacts on the social perception and beliefs about race. Fullwilely calls into question the adequacy of the AIMs data used to back these claims of genetic difference, noting that one of the only reasons this data has been deemed useful is because the scientists studying these topics have a personal investment in gaining research interest for their “own community” (712). As a result, confounding factors in experiments are treated as support for hypotheses and problematic assumptions based on American definitions and concepts of race are not questioned (702 and 704).

Epistemic Cultures defined the three types of technology used in the scientific creation of knowledge. These were the technologies of correspondence, treatments and interventions, and representation. In technologies of correspondence the objects are imitations of the real world. Cetina notes, however, that as imitations of the real world they are, by definition, not that world itself and may therefore have unnamed factors that could influence results. Imitations of reality are just that, imitations (34). In the technology of treatments and interventions the objects are partially altered versions of their real world equivalents. Because the interventions are being performed on the objects that have been removed from reality, the results of such experiments cannot provide much information about how the real world would react (37). Technologies of representation are those objects that serve as indicators of scientific events and that are necessary for the ability to share results. Laboratories are responsible for creating events and experiments are charged with recognizing and interpreting them (42).

In Bruno Latour’s piece, Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World, the author argues that scientists are not intrinsically superior beings as was thought prior to the studies of laboratories themselves. Latour argues that the purpose of labs is to collapse the external and internal worlds by allowing communication between these two entities. He points out that, in many cases, the solutions produced by laboratories require the replication of lab conditions in greater society in order for these solutions to be successful. The lab is thus brought from the inside to the outside society. Labs are also said to eliminate the barriers between macro and micro objects by using scientific technologies to make micro objects visible and, therefore, macroscopic. Overall, Latour notes that a lab’s power comes from its ability to translate scientific phenomena into understandable language and minimize alternative explanations of these phenomena. In these ways a lab makes clear something society is not yet able to make sense of by allowing a space for mistakes to be made that are not subject to the scrutiny of the public because they are performed on the microscopic rather than macroscopic level.