Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

While reading the assigned papers for this week, one major theme that I deduced was that the fields of medicine and science have a culture of compartmentalization in response to a need to prioritize their work. This is in part due to this overarching idea that the advance of science is always ultimately “for the greater good”, and in part due to the sterile way in which the scientific method is carried out in these fields.

In Hugh Gusterson’s “Coming of Age in a Weapons Lab”, he investigates the culture in a nuclear weapons development lab. He expects that he will see that the scientists are guilty or ashamed of their work, but instead he observes that they believe in the morality of it. They rationalize what they do into something that is necessary for the defense of their country, and that nuclear weapons are intended to prevent killing. My reaction mirrors that of the evangelical physicist’s statement “What scares me more than the weapons themselves is that my colleagues think they’ll never be used. That’s a form of denial. That’s worshiping the human race.” While I don’t know these scientists and I do not presume to know their thoughts, from the readings, it seemed like they were justifying their actions to themselves on the (shaky) basis of trust in those who would use their products. I thought it was interesting that Gusterson asserted that they also used weapons testing as a ritual to simulate human control over the weapon. It seems to me that this serves as an analogy for their justification of their work. It is an illusion.

In Byron Good’s “How Medicine Constructs its Objects”, he illuminates how illness has been separated from the person who carries that illness in a way that ignores the person behind the body. Doctors focus on the physiological problems of the body, and, while not completely dehumanizing, a medical gaze identifies the body as a reconstruction of biological and anatomical parts. I thought that this paper on how biomedicine is taught shows that when we are taught science from a young age, we don’t feel that we need to learn anything else in order to treat patients. I see this especially as a pre-med student, in that med schools look especially at our GPA and our MCAT scores in order to determine our placement. We also see this in situations where doctors are baffled by issues such as phantom limbs and disorders where there are no clear physiological issues. We hunt down clues with MRI scans, looking at differences in brain activity and hormone levels, desperately trying to find a clean cut cause and effect. I think, in terms of this class Culture of Science and Technology, it’s most interesting to see that this culture is expounded by technological advances. As we become able to quantify and graph our bodies, through measurements of devices and machines, it has become our obsession.