ABSTRACT This essay presents an alternative to interpretations of laboratories as institutions for controlled investigation of nature that are either placeless or “set apart.” It historicizes the claim by showing how the meaning of “laboratory” has both changed and diversified over the last two centuries. Originally a laboratory could be a site of organic growth or material manufacture, but it can now be a specialized domain for technological development, educational training, or quality testing. The essay then introduces some contingencies of (...) geography and gender by showing how boundaries between laboratories and other spaces—especially domestic kitchens—could be permeable or nonexistent; importantly, some spaces served as experimental laboratories without ever being designated as such. A key corollary, however, is that there were limits to this permeability: not all social spaces could be turned consensually into laboratories, and laboratory users could be intolerant of certain imported technical cultures. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungNach zwölf Jahren intensiver Forschung etablierte der Ophthalmologe Theodor Leber (1840–1917) am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Entzündungsforschung die Chemotaxis der Leukozyten. Obwohl sich seine Theorie damals reibungslos in die immunologische Forschung einschrieb, wird sein Name jedoch bis heute nur in der englischsprachigen Fachliteratur mit der Chemotaxis verknüpft. In seinem Experimentalsystem hatte Leber zwar schon Anfang der 1880er Jahre eine Theorie der chemischen Attraktion der Leukozyten beim Entzündungsprozess entwickeln können. Aber seine unkonventionelle Methodik—die Einführung von chemisch indifferentem Fremdmaterial zur (...) Auslösung einer Entzündung am Kaninchenauge—widersprach schon vom Ansatz her dem zu diesem Zeitpunkt dominant bakteriologischen Denkstil der Entzündungsforschung. In diesem Forschungsfeld hielt Leber an einer Forschungspraxis fest, die aus einer engen Verzahnung von experimenteller und theoretischer Arbeit bestand. Erst als eine Öffnung des bakteriologischen Denkstils eingetreten war, gelang es Leber seine auf losen Protokollseiten festgehaltenen Versuchsbeobachtungen in überzeugende Belege seiner Entzündungstheorie zu transformieren. Die mikrohistorische Rekonstruktion von Lebers experimenteller und schriftlicher Arbeit anhand seiner Laborprotokolle erschließt die Forschungspraxis eines Wissenschaftlers, der in der damals etablierten mikrobiologischen Entzündungsforschung kaum Anerkennung fand. Durch Verbindung der mikrohistorischen Rekonstruktion mit einer makrohistorischen Analyse lassen sich außerdem Beharrungsfaktoren im Prozess der Wissensentstehung offenlegen. Leber entwickelte eine spezifische Papiertechnik, durch die er seine experimentellen Erkenntnisse zwar mobilisierte und stabilisierte, aber nicht mit dem Fortschreiten der Wissenschaft mithalten konnte. (shrink)

This essay explores the aesthetic sensibilities of the French physiologist Claude Bernard . In particular, it analyzes the Cahier Rouge , Bernard's acclaimed laboratory notebook. In this notebook, Bernard articulates the range of his experience as an experimental physiologist, juxtaposing without differentiation details of laboratory procedure and more personal queries, doubts, and reflections on experimentation, life, and art. Bernard's insights, it is argued, offer an aesthetic and phenomenological template for considering experimentation. His physiological point of view ranges from his own (...) bodily aesthesis or sensory perception, through personal reflections on scientific discovery as an artistic process, to a broader metaphysical conception of life as an artistic creation. Such an aesthetic approach to physiology enables Bernard to reconcile his empirical methodology and his romantic idealism; it offers the history of laboratory science a framework for considering the individual, bodily, and emotional labor inherent in physiological experimentation. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article uses four historical case studies to address epistemological issues related to the animal model of human diseases and its use in medical research on human diseases. The knowledge derived from animal models is widely assumed to be highly valid and predictive of reactions by human organisms. In this contribution, I use three significant historical cases of failure (ca. 1890, 1960, 2006), and a closer look at the emergence of the concept around 1860/70, to elucidate core assumptions related to (...) the specific practices of animal-human knowledge transfer, and to analyze the explanations provided by historical actors after each of the failures. Based on these examples, I argue that the epistemological status of the animal model changed from that of a helpful methodological tool for addressing specific questions, but with precarious validity, to an obligatory method for the production of strong knowledge on human diseases. As a result, there now exists a culture of biomedical research in human disease that, for more than a century, has taken the value of this methodological tool as self-evident, and more or less beyond question. (shrink)

In the early years of Mendelism, 1900-1910, William Bateson established a productive research group consisting of women and men studying biology at Cambridge. The empirical evidence they provided through investigating the patterns of hereditary in many different species helped confirm the validity of the Mendelian laws of heredity. What has not previously been well recognized is that owing to the lack of sufficient institutional support, the group primarily relied on domestic resources to carry out their work. Members of the group (...) formed a kind of extended family unit, centered on the Batesons' home in Grantchester and the grounds of Newnham College. This case illustrates the continuing role that domestic environments played in supporting scientific research in the early 20th century. (shrink)

Existing accounts of the early history of Alzheimer’s disease have focused on Alois Alzheimer’s (1864–1915) publications of two ‘peculiar cases’ of middle-aged patients who showed symptoms associated with senile dementia, and Emil Kraepelin’s (1856–1926) discussion of these and a few other cases under the newly introduced name of ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ in his Textbook of Psychiatry. This article questions the underpinnings of these accounts that rely mainly on publications and describe ‘presenility’ as a defining characteristic of the disease. Drawing on archival (...) research in the Munich psychiatric clinic, in which Alzheimer and Kraepelin practised, this article looks at the use of the category as a diagnostic label in practice. It argues that the first cases only got their exemplary status as key referents of Alzheimer’s disease in later readings of the original publications. In the 1900s, the published cases rather functioned as material to think about the limits of the category of senile dementia. The examination of paper technologies in the Munich psychiatric clinic reveals that the use of the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease was not limited to patients of a certain age and did not exclude ‘senile’ cases. Moreover, the archival records reflect that many diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease were noted in the medical records as suspicions rather than conclusions. Against this background, the article argues that in theory and practice, Alzheimer’s disease was not treated as a well-defined disease entity in the Munich clinic, but as an exploratory category for the clinical and histopathological investigation of varieties of organic brain diseases. (shrink)

Often the truth value of a scientific claim is dependent on our faith that laboratory experiments can model nature. When the nature that you are modelling is something as large as the tallest terrestrial mountain on earth, and as mysterious as the reaction of the human body to the highest point on the earth's surface, mapping between laboratory and ‘real world’ is a tricky process. The so-called ‘death zone’ of Mount Everest is a liminal space; a change in weather could (...) make the difference between a survivable mountaintop and a site where the human respiratory system cannot maintain basic biological functions. Predicting what would happen to the first human beings to climb that high was therefore literally a matter of life or death – here inaccurate models could kill. Consequently, high-altitude respiratory physiology has prioritized not the laboratory, but the field. A holistic, environmentally situated sort of science used a range of expertise to prove the laboratory wrong time after time. In so doing, Everest was constructed paradoxically both as a unique field site which needed to be studied in vivo, and as a ‘natural laboratory’ which could produce generalizable knowledge about the human body. (shrink)

ArgumentThis essay places some therapeutic vaccines, including particularly the diphtheria antitoxin, into their larger historical context of the late nineteenth century. As industrially produced drugs, these vaccines ought to be seen in connection with the structural changes in medicine and pharmacology at the time. Given the spread of industrial culture and technology into the field of medicine and pharmacology, therapeutic vaccines can be understood as boundary objects that required and facilitated communication between industrialists, medical researchers, public health officials, and clinicians. (...) It was in particular in relation to evaluation and testing for efficacy in animal models that these medicines became a model for twentieth-century medicine. In addition, these medicines came into being as a parallel invention in two very distinct local cultures of research: the Institut Pasteur in Paris and the Institut für Infektionskrankheiten in Berlin. While their local cultural origins were plainly visible, the medicines played an important role in the alignment of the methods and objects that took place in bacteriology research in France and Germany in the 1890s. This article assesses the two locally specific regimes for control in France and in Imperial Germany. In France the Institut Pasteur, building on earlier successful vaccines, enjoyed freedom from scrutinizing control. The tight and elaborate system of control that evolved in Imperial Germany is portrayed as being reliant on experiences that were drawn from the dramatic events that surrounded the launching of a first example of so-called “bacteriological medicine,” tuberculin, in 1890. (shrink)

SummaryAt the end of 1910, when the Qing dynasty was on the verge of collapse and the whole Chinese empire in a process of transformation, North Manchuria was devastated by a large pneumonic plague epidemic. The Russian and Japanese governments wanted to use the outbreak of the disease as a pretext to invade north-east China, making plague an issue of international politics. At this dramatic moment the empire relied on the skills of the young Chinese doctor Wu Lien-teh, the first (...) Chinese medical graduate from Cambridge. Wu investigated the disease on the spot, chaired an international plague conference in Shenyang (Manchuria) in April 1911, and, later on, became the figurehead of fundamental public health reforms in Republican China. Highly ambitious, striving for personal fame and international renown for China, supported by an excellent network of personal connections, and equipped with a medical training considered the best in the world at the time, he launched on a startling career as one of China's key medical reformers and international representatives. His history is an example of the inseparable links between personal fate and historical events, and between the interests of scientists, medical men, politicians, and businessmen on the national and international stages. (shrink)

ArgumentGlass vessels such as flasks and test tubes play an ambiguous role in the historiography of modern laboratory research. In spite of the strong focus on the role of materiality in the last decades, the scientific glass vessel – while being symbolically omnipresent – has remained curiously neglected in regard to its materiality. The popular image ortoposof the transparent, neutral, and quasi-immaterial glass container obstructs the view of the physico-chemical functionality of this constitutive inner boundary in modern laboratory environments and (...) its material historicity. In order to understand how glass vessels were able to provide a stable epistemic containment of spatially enclosed experimental phenomena in the new laboratory ecologies emerging in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, I will focus on the history of thematerialstandardization of laboratory glassware. I will follow the rise of a new awareness for measurement errors due to the chemical agency of experimental glass vessels, then I will sketch the emergence of a whole techno-scientific infrastructure for the improvement of glass container quality in late nineteenth-century Germany. In the last part of my argument, I will return to the laboratory by looking at the implementation of this glass reform that created a newoikosfor the inner experimental milieus of modern laboratory research. (shrink)

This very short introduction to the bibliography of modern epidemiology aims to achieve two modest goals. First, the works presented will be separated into two bodies of historical scholarship, to distinguish the history of the field as told by epidemiological practitioners from the work developed in the history of science, medicine, and public health. Second, this essay focuses on a modern history of epidemiology spanning the later nineteenth and twentieth century. These distinctions aim to capture the contours of the history (...) of epidemiology as it became a field of knowledge production and to some extent an academic discipline, a history told in part by those involved in the field themselves. The enclosed bibliography further distinguishes between geographic contributions to this historiography to capture the historical distribution of the scientific field and its associated histories. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article adopts a historical perspective to examine the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine, an auxiliary field which formed to facilitate the work of the biomedical sciences by systematically improving laboratory animal production, provision, and maintenance in the post Second World War period. We investigate how Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine co-developed at the local level (responding to national needs and concerns) yet was simultaneously transnational in orientation (responding to the scientific need that knowledge, practices, objects and animals (...) circulate freely). Adapting the work of Tsing (2004), we argue that national differences provided the creative “friction” that helped drive the formation of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine as a transnational endeavor. Our analysis engages with the themes of this special issue by focusing on the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine in Norway, which both informed wider transnational developments and was formed by them. We show that Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine can only be properly understood from a spatial perspective; whilst it developed and was structured through national “centers,” its orientation was transnational necessitating international networks through which knowledge, practice, technologies, and animals circulated. (shrink)

Like it or not, a big picture of the history of science is something which we cannot avoid. Big pictures are, of course, thoroughly out of fashion at the moment; those committed to specialist research find them simplistic and insufficiently complex and nuanced, while postmodernists regard them as simply impossible. But however specialist we may be in our research, however scornful of the immaturity of grand narratives, it is not so easy to escape from dependence – acknowledged or not – (...) on a big picture. When we define our research as part of the history of science, we implicitly invoke a big picture of that history to give identity and meaning to our specialism. When we teach the history of science, even if we do not present a big picture explicitly, our students already have a big picture of that history which they bring to our classes and into which they fit whatever we say, no matter how many complications and refinements and contradictions we put before them – unless we offer them an alternative big picture. (shrink)

Laboratory experimentation was once considered impossible or irrelevant in economics. Recently, however, economic science has gone through a real ‘laboratory revolution’, and experimental economics is now a most lively subfield of the discipline. The methodological advantages and disadvantages of controlled experimentation constitute the main subject of this thesis. After a survey of the literature on experiments in philosophy and economics, the problem of testing normative theories of rationality is tackled. This philosophical issue was at the centre of a famous controversy (...) in decision theory, during which a methodology of normative falsification was first articulated and used to assess experimental results. In the third chapter, the methodological advantages of controlled experimentation are illustrated and discussed with examples taken from the experiments on the so-called ‘preference reversal’ phenomenon. Laboratory testing allows to establish with a high degree of certainty that certain phenomena lie behind the experimental data, by means of independent testing, elimination of alternative hypotheses, and the use of different instruments of observation. The fourth chapter is devoted to a conceptual analysis of the problem of ‘parallelism’. This is the problem of inferring from the occurrence of a phenomenon in the laboratory, to its instantiation also in non-laboratory environments. Experimental economists have discussed parallelism at length, and their views are presented and criticised. Eventually, it is argued that parallelism is a factual matter and as such can only be established on empirical grounds. The fifth chapter provides an example of how one can argue for parallelism, focusing on the case of experimentation on the ‘winner’s curse’ phenomenon. The role of experiments as ‘mediators’ between theoretical models and their target domain of application is illustrated, and the structure of parallelism arguments analysed in detail. Finally, in the last chapter, economic experiments are compared to simulations, in order to highlight their specific characteristics. (shrink)