Summary
Laboratory Life argues that scientific facts are constructed through the social processes within a laboratory, treating laboratory science as an anthropological study of scientist culture. The book examines how the social environment of the laboratory generates scientific texts and how a scientific vision of reality is established as a set of statements that are deemed too costly to alter at a given time. It links the sociology of modern sciences with historical studies of laboratory practices.
The authors employ an anthropological lens to observe the culture of scientists, analyzing how laboratory interactions and dynamics lead to the production of scientific papers and other forms of textual representation. Readers learn how statements become accepted scientific facts through this process, becoming resistant to change due to their entrenched status within the scientific community.
Key concepts
- Anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist — Viewing scientific practices and beliefs through the methods and perspectives of anthropology.
- Construction of scientific facts — The process by which scientific knowledge and truths are actively created and established through social and practical means.
- Social world of the laboratory — The network of interactions, relationships, and power dynamics that influence the work and outcomes within a scientific research setting.
- Texts as scientific products — The understanding that papers and other written or graphical outputs are key results and agents in the scientific process.
- Statements too expensive to change — Refers to scientific propositions that have become so embedded and costly to challenge that they are accepted as fact for the time being.
From the book
Description: This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of science.
Snippet: This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist.