Craft vs. commodity, mess vs. transcendence : how the right tool became the wrong one in the case of taxidermy and natural history / Susan Leigh Star -- A need for standard methods : the case of American bacteriology / Patricia Peck Gossel -- The tools of discipline : standards, models, and measures in the affinity/avidity controversy in immunology / Peter Keating, Alberto Cambrosio, and Michael Mackenzie
What tools? which jobs? why right? / Adele E. Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura -- The role of instruments in the generative analysis of science / James R. Griesemer -- The sociology of a genetic engineering technique : ritual and rationality in the performance of the "plasmid prep" / Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch -- Re/constructing socioecologies : system dynamics modeling of nomadic pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa / Peter J. Taylor -- Manometers, tissue slices, and intermediary metabolism / Frederic L. Holmes -- Whatever happened to Planaria? : C.M. Child and the physiology of inheritance / Gregg Mitman and Anne Fausto-Sterling -- Organisms and interests in scientific research : R.A. Emerson's claims for the unique contributions of agricultural genetics / Barbara A. Kimmelman -- Measuring nature : quantitative data in field biology / Yrjö Haila
0
0
[Publisher-supplied data] This volume examines scientific practice through studies of research tools in an array of twentieth-century life sciences. The contributors draw upon and extend the multidisciplinary perspectives in current science studies to understand the processes through which scientific researchers constructed the right--and, in some cases, the wrong--tools for the job. The articles portray the crafting or accessing of specific materials, techniques, instruments, models, funds, and work arrangements involved in doing scientific work. They demonstrate the historical and local contingencies of scientific problem construction and solving by highlighting the articulation between the tools and jobs. Indeed, the very "rightness" of the tools is contingently constructed, maintained, lost, and refashioned. The cases examined include evolutionary biology laboratory systems (James R. Griesemer), the plasmid prep procedure in molecular biology (Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch), models in the human ecology of African pastoralists (Peter Taylor), the micromanometer in metabolic studies (Frederic L. Holmes), genetics research and the role played by Planaria (Gregg Mitman and Anne Fausto-Sterling) and by corn (Barbara A. Kimmelman), quantitative data in field biology (Yrj Haila), taxidermy in natural history (Susan Leigh Star), technical standardization in bacteriology (Patricia Peck Gossell), and the discipline of immunology as the tool for stabilizing conceptual definitions in the field (Peter Keating, Alberto Cambrosio, and Michael Mackenzie)
Biological apparatus and supplies
Life sciences-- Research-- Methodology-- History-- 20th century