sort of ritual practice: when science didn't make sense to me

Childhood memory sprung to my mind when reading this week’s articles. My earliest experience with laboratories happened over two decades ago when I slept on the workbenches and played with petri dishes and laboratory flasks in a microbiology lab where my father worked, dealing with terms like nitrogen fixation, which makes no sense to me. I seldom question the cultural authority of science because of my lack of scientific knowledge, and I never possess the sense of “reflexivity” as Latour and Woolgar mentioned. What my old memories, to some extent, matched the notions of laboratories in Cetina’s piece, that laboratories are “reconfigurations of natural and social orders”. As not only an outsider, but also a intruder as an annoying kid, my presence was integrated into the social life in the lab and provided “a particular setting”, researchers expected my naïve questions when doing simple experiments, or prepared to keep me out when participating in complicated or dangerous experiments. At the same time, lab coats, gloves, uses of specific vocabularies articulated the symbolic capital created within the lab.

Cetina mentions the change of location and medical gaze in emphasizing how labs upgrade social orders. And this new way of viewing the body in molecule level provides scientists the authority of presenting neutral result, as far as the biologistical construction of race through gene tests, as mentioned by Fullwiley. The production of knowledge on race in labs, which in fact mirrored the social-constructed knowledge of race, looks alike the production of the notion of race from the beginning, when European visited the New World, they rectified the Hellenic medical knowledge of the transformative body in order to distinguish them from the indigenous people. The creation of race because of practical needs, however, was due to the medical understanding of blood, which was an embodiment of both physical and moral values.

In terms of the outcome/ result of science, Latour and Woolgar mention that scientists “systematically conceal the nature of the activity”. I am curious about the relationship between the scientific writing (terminology, sentence structure, prompt, citation) and the lab itself, the actual natural and social setting which produces the outcome.