The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences - Rilegato

Clarke, Adele E.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691085811 ISBN 13: 9780691085814

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 1992

Riassunto

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 (Yrjo 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).

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Contenuti

	Contributors
	Acknowledgments
Pt. 1	Introduction
1	What Tools? Which Jobs? Why Right?	3
Pt. II	Co-Constructing Tools, Jobs, and Rightness
2	The Role of Instruments in the Generative Analysis of Science	47
3	The Sociology of a Genetic Engineering Technique: Ritual and Rationality in the Performance of the "Plasmid Prep"	77
4	Re/constructing Socioecologies: System Dynamics Modeling of Nomadic Pastoralists in Sub-Saharan Africa	115
Pt. III	Disciplining the Tools
5	Manometers, Tissue Slices, and Intermediary Metabolism	151
6	Whatever Happened to Planaria? C. M. Child and the Physiology of Inheritance	172
7	Organisms and Interests in Scientific Research: R. A. Emerson's Claims for the Unique Contributions of Agricultural Genetics	198
8	Measuring Nature: Quantitative Data in Field Biology	233
Pt. IV	Changing Constructions of Tools, Jobs, and Rightness
9	Craft vs. Commodity, Mess vs. Transcendence: How the Right Tool Became the Wrong One in the Case of Taxidermy and Natural History	257
10	A Need for Standard Methods: The Case of American Bacteriology	287
11	The Tools of the Discipline: Standards, Models, and Measures in the Affinity/Avidity Controversy in Immunology	312
	Index	355

Product Description

Book by Clarke Adele E

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1992
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0691085811
• ISBN 13: 9780691085814
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 388
• Redattore: Fujimura Joan H.
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile