Robert E. Kohler,Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab–Field Border in Biology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002 (original) (raw)
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History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2021
, have always centered on the history and sociology of science, predominantly on the social studies of biology. His new book Inside Science is in line with his previous writings, which have helped contextualize-and even demystifyscience as a social enterprise. Kohler pursued laboratory studies in his classic book on constructing the standard object of genetics out of a fruit fly, and he discussed American field biology and its 'practices of place' in a subsequent monograph. Now he has turned his attention further afield. To explain the intellectual innovations of
Bottled Understanding: the role of lab-work in ecology
It is often thought that the vindication of experimental work lies in its capacity to be revelatory of natural systems. I challenge this idea by examining laboratory experiments in ecology. A central task of community ecology involves combining mathematical models and observational data to identify trophic interactions in natural systems. But many ecologists are also lab scientists: constructing microcosm or 'bottle' experiments, physically realizing the idealized circumstances described in mathematical models. What vindicates such ecological experiments? I argue that 'extrapolationism', the view that ecological lab work is valuable because it generates truths about natural systems, does not exhaust the epistemic value of such practices. Instead, bottle experiments also generate 'understanding' of both ecological dynamics and empirical tools. Some lab-work, then, aids theoretical understanding, as well as targeting hypotheses about nature.
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 1998
The programme of investigating science by its own methods, once called the 'science of science', is now more often called 'naturalism'. Through a subjective turn this intuitively appealing modernist research programme has bred a paradoxical situation in today's postmodern science studies. The cultural revolution of 1968 gave momentum to a 'new wave': on the one hand, the new subjectivist type of naturalism pretends to have inherited the very essence of the scientific enterprise; on the other, it tends to reject the intuitive theoretical realism of working scientists as a naive misunderstanding.~ Today's subjective variety of naturalism is sociological and psychological in content and has moved a long way from its 19th Century ancestry in the study of man as part of living nature. The new naturalism is focused on the subjective side of science, and neglects the role of the objects under study. In this paper I will take a look at the striking discrepancy between this postmodern subjective approach and a traditional common sense or scientists' view of science. I will examine three examples of so-called laboratory studies and reflect on their epistemological presuppositions. However obsessive this recent interest in the subjective side of science may appear to both scientists and lay people, it does express a deep and legitimate worry about our ability to control the impact of science on human life. Another associated but more trivial worry is that the great resources which governments use to support scientific research may be more or less wasted. These problems cannot be lightly set aside. The paradoxes and dilemmas of science studies echo central themes in the present cultural critique of science. When the new wave of science studies started, around 1970, it was spearheaded by the Strong Programme of the Edinburgh School. A main target for
The Laboratory: A Place to Investigate (1972)
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The Matter of Practice in the Historiography of the Experimental Life Science
Handbook of the Historiography of the Life Sciences, 2018
This chapter reviews the trajectory of the practice turn in histories of experimental biology. With a focus on “how to do things with practice,” the methodological implications of a focus on material practice are discussed. A map of the overlapping territories of experimental systems, epistemic things, biomedical platforms, visualization practices, and experimental bodies is traced out together with the source materials that are central to these approaches, such as gray literature,protocol manuals, and laboratory notebooks. The argument is presented that studies of literature, rhetoric, narrative and concept are not opposed to studies of material practice, and indeed present opportunities going forward for new syntheses and integration of approaches.
Journal of Experimental Zoology, A, 2015
Founded in Vienna in 1903, the Institute for Experimental Biology pioneered the application of experimental methods to living organisms maintained for sustained periods in captivity. Its Director, the zoologist Hans Przibram, oversaw until 1938, the attempt to integrate ontogeny with studies of inheritance using precise and controlled measurements of the impact of environmental influences on the emergence of form and function. In the early years, these efforts paralleled and even fostered the emergence of experimental biology in America. But fate intervened. Though the Institute served an international community, most of its resident scientists and staff were of Jewish ancestry. Well before the Nazis entered Austria in 1938, these men and women were being fired and driven out; some, including Przibram, were eventually killed. We describe the unprecedented facilities built and the topics addressed by the several departments that made up this Institute, stressing those most relevant to the establishment and success of the Journal of Experimental Zoology, which was founded just a year later. The Institute’s diaspora left an important legacy in North America, perhaps best embodied by the career of the developmental neuroscientist Paul Weiss.
An Instructive Return to Laboratory Ethnography
Symbolic Interaction, 2016
Whatever became of “lab ethnographies”? In the 1980s, these ethnographic studies of scientific work in laboratories—exemplified most famously by Latour and Woolgar’s (1979) Laboratory Life (henceforth L&W)—have attracted much attention for their finding that scientific facts are (socially) constructed, and as such do not represent Nature in any straightforward sense, but are shaped also by actors’ diverse interests and group affiliations and by material configurations that are in many ways contingent. In Respecifying Lab Ethnography, Philippe Sormani notices that the “constructedness of scientific facts” was accepted often uncritically in science and technology studies (STS). He reiterates Doing’s (2009) observation that none of the classic “lab ethnographies” had consistently demonstrated the construction of a single enduring scientific fact. This discontentment is one starting point of Sormani’s book. (...)