Reading Reflection: Becoming a Scientist

The three readings for this week’s class focused on science and the culture that surrounds the scientific field, workplace, and the workers that employ this field. More specifically, it focused on what it means to become a scientist in different areas of the modern world and how the culture of science and its active participants (the scientists) shape each other.

Out of the three readings, however, I, as an aspiring pre-med student, found Byron Good’s “How Medicine Constructs Its Objects” the most interesting. In this article, Good observes the way in which new American medical school students are inducted into the medical field. Once medical school begins, the students are taught to think, see, and speak in a completely different way from what they knew before. The bodies they deal with and the patients they see are now regarded in a highly mechanical and biological way. The article also goes on to talk about some of the other aspects of the medical field that students must learn to navigate correctly in order to become a successful and respected member of the field, such as how to conduct medical interviews with their patients and the correct way of giving case presentations. The indoctrination of these medical students are very specific to the medical community and fits well into the needs and demands of the occupation. 

I thought this reading as a whole was interesting because many times, people view biomedicine, or Western medicine, as “hard science” based on empirical data in which culture seems to have no place in. I have had conversations with peers who view science and culture as two different spheres with no overlap between them. But this ethnographic account, along with the two others on the physics community and the nuclear workplace, shows that science, and specifically biomedicine in this case, is a rich culture hub itself.

I think it is important to remember that science is subject to social and cultural construction, and the scientists who make up the field are humans themselves—cultural beings who together have, and are still continuing to, form communities of their own with its unique rules and norms.