Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 fo
Table of ContentsContributorsAcknowledgmentsPt. 1Introduction1What Tools? Which Jobs? Why Right?3Pt. IICo-Constructing Tools, Jobs, and Rightness2The Role of Instruments in the Generative Analysis of Science473The Sociology of a Genetic Engineering Technique: Ritual and Rationality in the Performance of the "Plasmid Prep"774Re/constructing Socioecologies: System Dynamics Modeling of Nomadic Pastoralists in Sub-Saharan Africa115Pt. IIIDisciplining the Tools5Manometers, Tissue Slices, and Intermediary Metabolism1516Whatever Happened to Planaria? C. M. Child and the Physiology of Inheritance1727Organisms and Interests in Scientific Research: R. A. Emerson's Claims for the Unique Contributions of Agricultural Genetics1988Measuring Nature: Quantitative Data in Field Biology233Pt. IVChanging Constructions of Tools, Jobs, and Rightness9Craft vs. Commodity, Mess vs. Transcendence: How the Right Tool Became the Wrong One in the Case of Taxidermy and Natural History25710A Need for Standard Methods: The Case of American Bacteriology28711The Tools of the Discipline: Standards, Models, and Measures in the Affinity/Avidity Controversy in Immunology312Index355
