The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology

277 Pages·2012·28.597 MB·English

by  Thomas Söderqvist (editor)

The Historiography of
Contemporary Science and
Technology
Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine
edited by John Krige, CRHST, Paris, France.
Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine aims to stimulate
research in the field, concentrating on the twentieth century. It seeks to con
tribute to our understanding of science, technology and medicine as they are
embedded in society, exploring the links between the subjects on the one hand
and the cultural, economic, political and institutional contexts of their genesis
and development on the other. Within this framework, and while not favouring
any particular methodological approach, the series welcome studies which
examine relations between science, technology, medicine and society in new
ways e.g. the social construction of technologies, large technical systems.
Other titles in the series
Volume 1
Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology
edited by Robert Fox
Volume 2
Technology Transfer out of Germany after 1945
edited by Matthias Judt & Burghard Ciesla
Volume 3
Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture: The Making of Scientific Careers in
North America, 1885-1985
Paolo Palladino
Volume 4
The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology
edited by Thomas Soderqvist
Other Volumes in Preparation
Making Isotopes Matter: EW. Aston and the Culture of Physics
Jeff Hughes
Molecularising Biology and Medicine: New Practices and Alliances,
1930s-1970s
Soraya de Chadarevian & Harmke Kamminga
This book is part of a series. The publisher will accept continuation orders which
may be cancelled at any time and which provide for automatic billing and shipping
of each title in the series upon publication. Please write for details.
The Historiography of Contemporary
Science and Technology
Edited by
Thomas Soderqvist
Roskilde University, Denmark
! I Routledge
S^^ Taylor &. Francis Group
New York London
First published in 1997 by Harwood Academic Publishers.
This edition published 2012 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 1997 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any in
formation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
The historiography of contemporary science and technology.
— (Studies in the history of science, technology and
medicine ; v. 4)
1. Science — Historiography 2. Technology — Historiography
I. Soderqvist, Thomas
509
ISBN 978-3-7186-5906-7
Contents
Preface vii
Notes on Contributors xi
Chapter 1 Who Will Sort out the Hundred or More Paul Ehrlichs?
Remarks on the Historiography of Recent and
Contemporary Technoscience 1
Thomas Soderqvist
Chapter 2 Whigs, Prigs and Politics: Problems in the
Historiography of Contemporary Science 19
Jeff Hughes
Chapter 3 The Conversation: History and History as it Happens 39
M. Susan Lindee
Chapter 4 Using Interviews to Write the History of Science 51
Soraya de Chadarevian
Chapter 5 Writing the History of Space Science and Technology:
Multiple Audiences with Divergent Goals and Standards 71
Joseph N. Tatarewicz
Chapter 6 Participant Observation and the Study of Biomedical
Sciences: Some Methodological Observations 91
liana Lowy
v
vi Contents
Chapter 7 The Living Scientist Syndrome: Memory and History
of Molecular Regulation 109
Jean-Paul Gaudilliere
Chapter 8 Electric Memories and Progressive Forgetting 129
Skuli Sigurdsson
Chapter 9 Knowledge of the Brain: The Visualizing Tools of
Contemporary Historiography 151
Susan E. Cozzens
Chapter 10 Writing about Scientists of the Near Past 165
Frederic L. Holmes
Chapter 11 Recent Science: Late-Modern and Post-Modern 179
Paul Forman
Chapter 12 Scientists as Policymakers, Advisors and Intelligence
Agents: Linking Contemporary Diplomatic History
with the History of Contemporary Science 215
Ronald E. Doel
Chapter 13 Who's Afraid of the History of Contemporary Science? 245
Steve Fuller
Index 261
Preface
Historians of science (including related areas of history of technology and history
of medicine) are confronted with a paradox: more than 90 percent of all science
in history has been produced during the last half century but so far only a small
fraction of historical scholarship deals with this period. One reason for this glar
ing discrepancy may be that historians who approach the recent and contempor
ary technoscientific scene are confronted with new and unfamiliar methodologi
cal and theoretical problems. How shall we handle the huge amounts of published
and unpublished sources? Is it possible to write a synthetic history of recent sci
ence? What level of scientific training is necessary to understand recent and con
temporary science? Does the lack of historical distance prevent good scholarship?
Can (and will) historians of recent science share the turf with other professional
groups, such as active scientists, scholars of science and technology studies, and
science journalists? How shall we deal with scientists' and technocrats' constant
interference with our work? Whose history are we writing? Whose science?
These and many other questions were the focus of an International Workshop on
the Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine, held on
the 16-17 September 1994 at Goteborg University, Sweden. The workshop which
was hosted by the Department of Theory of Science and Research was attended by
around 40 participants from Europe and the United States. Most of the chapters in
this volume are revised versions of papers presented at the workshop.
The thirteen chapters cover a great variety of topics, stretching from the role of
participant observation in the recent history of immunology and interviews in re
cent biomedical science to the possibility of identifying a specific postmodern
science. In the introductory chapter (a draft version of which was sent as a back
ground paper to the participants before the conference), a number of methodolo
gical issues are discussed that confront historians of recent technoscience, e.g., the
vn
viii Preface
overload of published and unpublished source materials, the use of quantitative meth
ods for writing synthetic historical narratives, how to handle the relation with the
historical actors, and the problem of insufficient scientific training in writing about
recent technoscience. Jeff Hughes questions the significance of some of these issues,
particularly the idea of synthetic narratives of recent science, and adds another set of
problems, including the fundamentally political character of historiographical choices.
If there are problems unique to the history of recent and contemporary science, he
concludes, they lie in the increasingly bitter politics of scientific legitimation.
Accordingly the contests surrounding recent and contemporary science include
the sometimes vexed relations between historians and scientists. Susan Lindee main
tains that what makes the history of recent and contemporary science a profoundly
new kind of history is that it involves the historical actors in the process; a circum
stance which raises, among other things, the problem of the historians' social re
sponsibility towards the scientists. Soraya de Chadarevian also focuses on the
tensions between historians and scientists and reviews the tradition of oral history
of science against the background of her experiences of interacting with molecular
biologists. Joseph Tatarewicz takes his experiences of writing the history of the Hubble
Space Telescope Project as his point of departure for discussing the close ties be
tween patron and historian: too much sponsor control leads to loss of credibility and
the issue of control and credibility is thus continuously negotiated. liana Lowy, fi
nally, describes her experiences as a participant observer in a biomedical laboratory
and how the scientists' acceptance of her presence was based on the expectation that
she would be a witness to the project's predicted success.
Memory — and its counterpart, forgetting — is another important theme in
the historiography of recent and contemporary science. Drawing on his studies
of the history of molecular biology (allosteric proteins), Jean-Paul Gaudilliere
analyzes how historical accounts told by scientists differ from those generated by
other professional groups and the tension between the native production of memory
and the professional writing of history. Skuli Sigurdsson draws on his work on a
commissioned history of the electrification of Iceland and problematizes the habit
of speaking in terms of scientific and technological progress, a major obstacle
for writing the history of recent technoscience. Progress talk induces forgetful-
ness and enshrines the present at the cost of the past; historians of technoscience
might let forgetting as well as remembering, be an integral part of their reper
toire of self-authentication.
Another recurrent topic consists of the strategic problems involved in pro
ducing an overview of recent technoscience. Susan Cozzens reports on her work
on the relation between co-citation maps of the 'research agenda' of recent
neuroscience and the neuroscientists' own mental maps, and raises the question
of whether the effort involved in creating synthetic overviews of major research
areas is worthwhile. Frederic Holmes argues that the number of historians will
Preface ix
never keep pace with the exponential growth of science and the differentiation of
specialized research fields; the few historians of recent technoscience will there
fore have to choose whether to spread their forces out evenly in the territory and
thereby risk being isolated inquirers, or gather around a few emerging historical
focal points, such as molecular biology, thereby further exaggerating the prom
inence of these fields of study.
Several chapters touch directly or indirectly on questions of moral responsibil
ity. Paul Forman sees the 'moral economy' of late twentieth century science to
be in many respects quite different from that of modern science since the 'scien
tific revolution'; he suggests that the instrumentalization and fragmentation of
knowledge production in postmodernity puts the notion of responsibility squarely
on the agenda of studies of technoscience and that historians must be prepared to
confront thorny moral issues. Ronald Doel explores a new field in the study of
recent and contemporary history, viz., the borderline between contemporary diplo
matic history and the history of contemporary science. After a thorough literature
review he discusses, among other things, how covert funding for international sci
ence policy affected peer review and decisions about the directions of major re
search programs during the Cold War.
Steve Fuller provides the volume with a summary of the main positions con
cerning the historian's role with respect to contemporary science; he then con
trasts the epistemic roles played by historically based arguments in the natural
sciences versus the humanities and the social sciences, and finally ends with an
argument for a refurbished alternative grand narrative of the history of science.
A few words of acknowledgments. The participants of the two-day Goteborg
workshop were a sine qua non for making this book possible. Their enthusiastic
and knowledgeable comments provided an atmosphere of open intellectual ex
change, and the many frank remarks greatly helped to improve the papers se
lected for this volume.
I would like to thank Svante Lindqvist for his support in organizing the work
shop, Aant Elzinga and the Faculty of Humanities and Arts, Goteborg University,
for providing us with a wonderful setting (Agrenska Villan) for the meeting, and
Alice Malmstrom and Anna Soderqvist for sorting out all possible practical prob
lems during the two meeting days. The generous economic support of the Swedish
Council for Research Planning is gratefully acknowledged.
I am also grateful to John Krige for being such a prudent series editor, to Lone
Avlund Guldager for copy-editing, and Harwood Academic Publishers for their
care in the production of the book. And finally, my most sincere thanks to the
other twelve authors for their contributions, their cooperation and their patience.