Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the ways of describing and drawing conclusions on laboratory work and
the objects analysed diverge, there seems to be a general agreement among
social scientists that important knowledge is produced in laboratories. Knorr
Cetina (2001: 8232) claims that the laboratory 'epitomizes modern science
and knowledge'. In a postscript to the second edition of the pioneering topic
Laboratory Life, the Construction of Scientifi c Facts
(Latour and Woolgar
1986), the sociologist Bruno Latour describes how he realised (while in
the Ivory Coast as a researcher) that to divide and to discriminate between
scientifi c knowledge and farmers' knowledge was problematic. He therefore
decided to apply the same fi eld methods used to study Ivory Coast farmers
for studying fi rst-rate scientists. Latour performed an ethnographic study on,
as he describes, a 'tribe of scientists' and 'their production of science' (p. 17)
at an endocrinology laboratory at the Salk Institute. The work here, writes
Latour, 'is commonly heralded as having a startling or, at least, extremely
signifi cant effects on our civilisation' (p. 17). One major conclusion from
Latour and Woolgar's study is that scientifi c activity should not be seen as
rendering a mirror of nature; instead the laboratory is a place where reality
is constructed.
The anthropologist Laura Nader (1972), though not speaking specifi cally
about the laboratory, has in a similar vein emphasised the importance of
studying the production of authoritative knowledge, and called upon
researchers to 'ask “common sense” questions in reverse' (p. 289) in their
'own' societies. The studies on taken-for-granted authoritative knowledge
and on scientists in one's own society as exemplifi ed by Nader and Latour
and Woolgar, have been a source of inspiration for me. The basic assumptions
in my study, however, differ from Latour's, as I do not wish to emulate his
defamiliarisation and 'exotisation' of the laboratory and laboratory scientists,
e.g. by referring to them as a tribe. Furthermore, Latour's focus seems to be
on the production of scientifi c knowledge, whereas his 'tribe of scientists',
the specifi c producers, remain rather invisible.
Magnifying the invisible
Today we may take the cell, diagnostic classifi cations, and the technological
means for magnifying and rendering cells visible for granted, as technologies
of visualisation now have, as Birke (1999:76) says, 'become part of the social
processes by which we come to understand what it means to “see” inside
the body'. Cartwright (1995) reminds us to scrutinise the co-evolution of
visualisation technologies and medical knowledge. Different forms of 'static'
and 'moving' visual technologies are in fact intertwined with different
fi elds of medical knowledge of the body's inside, she argues. For example,
the cinema, 'a technology designed to record and reproduce movement'
(ibid. xii), was practically and ideologically associated with physiology. In
contrast:
