Science in Context --- Session 08.01.

2020

Experiments
Laboratory Studies
Praxeological Approaches
What‘s the relationship between theory and experiment?
„Experiments have a life of their own“ (Ian Hacking)

Laboratories aim at success, not truth: working experiments,

reliable procedures, desired products
Experiments in laboratories:
the most respected way of producing scientific knowledge

Different types of HPS/STS studies:

- Historical studies of how this dominance developed
- Studies emphasizing the societal situatedness and symbolic relevancy
of exp./labs
- Ethnographic/microsociological studies of laboratories and
experiments

Some findings:
 Different experimental cultures, experimental systems
 Experiments are about natural order and about social order
 Experiments are not isolated
 Experiments are attempts to escape the messiness of nature
Robert Boyle‘s air pump experiments in the Royal Society

Hobbes-Boyle controversy (Schaffer/Shapin 1985)

- not only about how to produce knowledge (causes; usefulness)
- not only about technological aspects of the apparatus
- but also about how to make facts known to others
- and about how to maintain an intellectual community (a form of life)
- And about whether science and politics shall be two separate realms
(1) The polity of the intellectual community
(2) The solution to the problem of making and justifying
knowledge
(3) the polity of the wider society
The form of life in which we make our scientific knowledge will
stand or fall with the way we order our affairs in the state. (344)

What sort of society is able to sustain legitimate and authentic

science? And what contribution does scientific knowledge make
to the maintenance of liberal society?

We regard our scientific knowledge as open and accessible in

principle, but the public does not understand it. Scientific
journals are in our libraries, but they are written in a language
alien to the citizenry.
 Praxeological Approaches
In the 1970s, four researchers from the social sciences decided for a new
approach towards studying science:

Observing scientists at work in laboratory settings; plus interviews

Asking questions such as:

„How are scientific facts produced/constructed?“

„How can work in the laboratory give stability and strength to claims, so
that they come to count as pieces of knowledge?“
Laboratory Studies:
- are sceptical about the ready-made-facts scientists present in their publications.

- do not claim that nature plays no (significant) role in the process of

constructing a scientific fact.

Rather, they claim that

- there is no direct access to nature;
- access is always mediated through the scientific work and its components
(decisions, selection, purification, manipulation...);
- what comes to be scrutinized in the lab is not nature, but its reconfiguration
(Knorr-Cetina).

This reconfiguration is neither purely natural nor purely social.

Reality, then, is being produced and constructed in the lab.
The focus of lab studies is on the conditions of this construction.
• Michael Lynch (*1948): 1975-76: university lab for neuro-biology; „Art and Artifact in
Laboratory Science“, 1985

• Bruno Latour (*1947): 1975-1977: biochemistry/

• neuroendocrinology lab; „Laboratory Life“, 1979

• Karin Knorr-Cetina (*1944): 1976-1977: plant protein lab; „The Manufacture of

Knowledge“, 1981; high energy physics, molecular biology; „Epistemic Cultures“, 1999

• Sharon Traweek: 1976-1981: high energy physics labs in Japan and the US; „Beamtimes
and Lifetimes“, 1988

• Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (*1946): 1982-1990: molecular genetics lab; „Towards a History

of Epistemic Things“, 1997
Working in a lab is about intervention

Laboratory work cannot be planned step-by-step but involves a

tremendous amount of tinkering and bricolage.

Scientific facts cannot be separated from their context of

construction.

And yet, scientific results are presented as independent from their

production context.

This makes the decision-ladenness and the situatedness of their

construction invisible.
l Substance X exists.
l Experiment B demonstrates the existence of substance X.
l Experiment B claims to be able to demonstrate the existence of X.
l Researcher A claims to have conducted an experiment B that
l demonstrates the existence of X.
l Researcher A claims that by apparatus Z delivered by company Y one
l can demonstrate the existence of a substance that might be called X.
Lab ethnographers focus on:

- Instruments
- Inscriptions
- Tacit Knowledge
- Daily routines (rather than controversies)
- Choices and decisions
- Tinkering and Bricolage
- Negotiations
- Shared cultural and social community
Choices and decisions

„In analyzing a problem, a biologist [a scholar] is constrained to focus on a

fragment of reality, a piece of the universe which he arbitrarily isolates to
define certain of its parameters. In biology [Wissenschaft], any study thus
begins with the choice of a ‚system‘. On this choice depend the
experimenter‘s freedom to maneuver, the nature of the question he is free to
ask, and, even, often, the type of answer he can obtain.“

Francois Jacobs, molecular biologist, 1988

Local circumstances:
Some exemplary reasons for using a specific instrument, animal model or
substance (instead of another):

- Available in large enough quantities

- Cheaper
- Easier to handle
- Others are damaged or dysfunctional
- Not used by rival groups
- The group has experience with this one
- The group has come to favour this one over another one
- There is somebody with specific skills in the lab
- .....

 Tinkering, bricolage (Knorr-Cetina)

 Experiments: not a step-by-step-programme, no recipe (Lynch)
 Spatial and temporal situatedness/contextualisation
 Contingency („it could have been different“)
Decisions and common sense

Laboratory daily routine entails a long series of decisions: try and error, decide
what is a significant result, decide what is a good representation, evaluate,
compare, discard, include and exclude, select ....

To sort it out, scientists rely on their common sense – rules, practises, beliefs
that remain unquestioned in their peer group. These have been acquired in a
process of training and socialisation.
 „Nothing scientific is happening here“
(Knorr-Cetina 1981)

• Reasoning and actions are tied to circumstances and unpredictable in

advance.
• Decisions about claims are negotiated, a matter for different actors to
decide through microsociological or political interactions.
• Conversations decide the scientists are looking at; decide what is
significant, and what is not; what is merely an artifact, and what is a truly
interesting sign; what belongs to noise, and what to result.
• Negotiations decide what can be written into manuscripts.
• Rhetorical maneuvers help shape what other scientists will accept.
Negotiations
Negotiations

Electro phoresis gel blot

Learning to see
 Belonging to a cultural and social community

Traweek:
In gossip – oral communication – scientists negotiate who is a good
experimenter; what a good instrument is; what counts as a fact; who is
successful and why; who comes to construct new instruments and new facts.

highly gendered communities

locality
 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

- Epistemic things – instrumental objects

- Experimental Systems  ensembles
Local
Individual
Social
Technical
Instrumental
Epistemological
 
- differential reproduction – finding difference
Large experimental systems:
e.g. Drosophila experiments, T.H. Morgan
An Experimental System?
Why all this?
Is it anti-scientific?
Does it deny nature/reality/objectivity?
It‘s not about discrediting scientists for the distortion of
objectivity.

It‘s rather about how objectivity/knowledge/the object of

curiosity is being produced and maintained in daily, arduous,
routine work.
 „Tasteblindness“
Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) Taste Sensitivity
„’TASTEBLINDNESS’ is the only term that can be found to
describe the reaction of a fortunate forty per cent. of folk
who cannot taste para- ethoxy-phenyl-thio-urea. For the
other sixty per cent. find it intensely bitter- bitter as gall,
bitter as quinine, bitter enough to make them go round
sticking out their tongues and making wry faces for an
hour.“

Anonymous, 1931, SCIENCE News Letter, April 18th

30
„Some time ago the author had occasion to prepare a quantity of
phenyl thio carbamide, and while placing it in a bottle the dust flew
around in the air. Another occupant of the laboratory, Dr. C. R.
Noller, complained of the bitter taste of the dust, but the author,
who was much closer, observed no taste and so stated. He even
tasted some of the crystals and assured Dr. Noller they were
tasteless but Dr. Noller was equally certain it was the dust he tasted.
He tried some of the crystals and found them extremely bitter.

Fox, Arthur, 1932, The relationship between chemical constitution and taste, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 18,
115-120

31
„With these two diverse observations as a starting point, a
large number of people were investigated and it was
established that this peculiarity was not connected with age,
race or sex. Men, women, elderly persons, children, negroes,
Chinese, Germans and Italians were all shown to have in
their ranks both tasters and non-tasters.“

Fox, Arthur, 1932, The relationship between chemical constitution and

taste, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 18, 115-120

32
Albert Blakeslee using a voting machine to tabulate results
of taste tests at the AAAS Convention, 1938. (Courtesy
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Research Archives)
33
Blakeslee, A. F., 1932, Genetics of sensory thresholds; taste for phenyl-
thio-carbamide, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 18, 120-130 34
„Evidence is thus given for the belief that humans
are born with innate differences in respect to all
their senses and that different people live in
different worlds, therefore, so far as their sensory
reactions are concerned.“

Blakeslee, A. F., 1932, Genetics of sensory thresholds; taste for phenyl-thio-carbamide, Proc.
Nat. Acad. Sci., 18, 120-130.

35
Parr, L., 1934, Taste Blindness and Race, Journal of Heredity, 25, 187

36
When comparing populations, sex differences were noticed!

37
„The discovery of this sex difference, of course, puts a different
complexion on the question of the anthropological application of
‚taste blindness‘, and suggests that two factors, each varying with
racial group, are involved, i.e. the percentage of tasters, referred to
one sex, the female preferably, and the degree of sex difference in
the taste results. The former value is apparently the more constant,
and this suggests that a considerable part of the racial variation
found by Parr would disappear if tests were made on females only.“

Boyd, W. / Boyd, L., 1937, Sexual and racial variations in ability to taste phenyl
thiocarbamide, with some data on the inheritance, Annual of Eugenics, 8, 46-51.

38
„With any method, evidently, a number of indefinite or ‚borderline‘
results will be obtained. These raise an interesting problem in
genetics, but do not detract much from the anthropological value of
the test, since they are few in number. The value of the test for
anthropology seems to be established by the definite variation of the
percentage of ‚tasters‘ with ethnic origin [...]. The anthropological
significance would be enhanced if the mode of inheritance were
known, so that gene frequencies could be calculated for different
racial groups [...].“

Boyd, W. / Boyd, L., 1937, Sexual and racial variations in ability to taste phenyl
thiocarbamide, with some data on the inheritance, Annals of Eugenics, 8, 46-51.

39
40
„[...] it appears, therefore, that the distribution of thresholds
must be determined not only for each new population studied,
but also for each sex separately, if comparisons of gene-
frequencies in different populations are to be made reliable.“

Falconer, Douglas, 1947, Sensory Thresholds for solutions of phenyl-thiocarbamide, Annals

of Eugenics, 13, 211-222.

41
„A summary of the extensive investigations by interested scientists
is given in Table 1. Unfortunately, no ordering seems to result.
Indeed the data themselves are internally inconsistent. Witness the
range of American Caucasians from 60% to 82%. This indicates
that the experimental procedures are weak, and some standard
method of administration of P.T.C. should be agreed upon. Almost
all of the studies [...] merely describe populations and give results;
there is little discussion of experimental technique.“

Cohen, J. / Ogdon, D., 1949, Taste blindness to PTC and related compounds,
Psychological Bulletin, 46, 490-498, p.495

42
Harris, H / Kalmus,
H., 1946, Sensory
Thresholds for
solutions of phenyl
thiocarbamide,
Annals of Eugenics,
15, 24-31.

43
Harris, H / Kalmus, H., 1946, Sensory Thresholds for solutions of
phenyl thiocarbamide, Annals of Eugenics, 15, 24-31.

44
Ethical aspects

Lethal dose – investigated in 1942

„We also assured the patients in advance that no stigma, clinical or

otherwise, attached to the ability or lack of ability to taste the
substance.“

Boyd, W. / Boyd, L., 1937, Sexual and racial variations in ability to taste phenyl
thiocarbamide, with some data on the inheritance, Annual of Eugenics, 8, 46-51.

45
Population Studies Listed in: Guo, S. /Reed, D., 2001, The
genetics of PTC perception, Ann. Human Biology, 28, 111-142

1930-1939: 24 groups
USA, Japan, Near East, Soviet Union

1940-1949: 18 groups
India, USA, Japan

1950-1959: 54 groups
Europe, South America, South Asia, Oceania

1960-1969: 101 groups

India, Israel

1970-: ..... 46
Garn, S., 1974, Human Races, 3rd ed., 45.
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