Picture Control: The Electron Microscope and the Transformation of Biology in America, 1940-1960 (Writing Science

by Nicolas Rasmussen

Two major questions motivate this study: How do new devices get taken up as experimental systems by scientists? How does the adoption of new instruments affect scientific knowledge?

436 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for anyone who is interested in how instrumentation affects what it is that we are able to know. This book is about how development of the electron microscope in the mid twentieth century changed biology. I think there are parallels to how big data and standardization in cyberinfrastructure are changing research today. In the early days of the electron microscope each research lab built their own microscope, so researchers had very sophisticated knowledge of how the instrument affected their observations. Eventually electron microscopes and practices for using them were standardized, and manufacture of the microscopes was outsourced. The limitation of this is that scientists had less understanding of how the instrument affected what they saw since they were less intimately involved with the creation of the instrument. The benefit was that standardization allowed microbiology to grow up into a big science. It wasn't until I read this book that I understood what I meant for a discipline to be a big science, and how integral standardization is to big science.

The reason I like this book so much is that I think there's a tension though between standardization and improvisation in inquiry that needs more attention. This book focuses more on the benefits of standardization of research practices, but addresses the tension by addressing the effects instrumentation has on researchers' perceptions. Rasmussen cites Patrick Heelan, a philosopher of science at Georgetown who advances a first-person, phenomenological account of experimentation founded in the primacy of perception and suggests adapting the hermeneutic circle to scientific experimentation. I think this is relevant to people concerned about how to best support research data management. We think a lot about best practices for dealing with data, and not enough about the meaning the data has to researchers. Sometimes inefficient practices might have epistemological value.