Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte最新文献

This essay reflects on how technological changes in biomedicine can affect what archival sources are available for historical research. Historians and anthropologists have examined the ways in which old biomedical samples can be made to serve novel scientific purposes, such as when decades-old frozen tissue specimens are analyzed using new genomic techniques. Those uses are also affected by shifting ethical regimes, which affect who can do what with old samples, or whether anything can be done with them at all. Archival collections are subject to similar dynamics, as institutional change and shifts in ethical guidelines and privacy laws affect which sources can be accessed and which are closed. I witnessed just such a change during my research into human genetics using archives in the Wellcome Collection. A few years into my project, those archives had their privacy conditions reassessed, and I saw how some sources previously seen as neutral were now understood to contain personal sensitive information. This paper describes the conditions of this shift—including the effects of technological change, new ethical considerations, and changing laws around privacy. I reflect on how these affected my understanding of the history of human genetics, and how I and others might narrate it.

Lara Keuck and Kärin Nickelsen, the organizers of this special issue and its workshop, invited me to contribute a closing commentary, and I feel honored and pleased to do so. Now that the English version of the book that inspired it is forthcoming,¹ it might be better to look ahead instead of looking back. Therefore, I will try to convey in my concluding remarks less the air of a closure than that of an outlook on things to come. And I hope I will be forgiven the rather rhapsodic character of what follows.

I will organize my remarks along the three sections of the issue, Conjunctures, Traces, and Fragments, before concluding with a brief note on historical epistemology. But first, let me comment on the title of my new book: Spalt und Fuge, in English, Split and Splice. The title was chosen with deliberation. Spalten, to split, and fügen, to splice, are the two cardinal activities of experimentation. I consciously avoid the traditional notions of analysis and of synthesis. They are logical categories that have been imported into the practice of experimentation; they have not grown out of it, and they suggest neat divisions and equally neat fusions. Neither is characteristic of the experiment. Experimentation, as a process of finding one's way into the unknown, needs more practice-oriented categories in order to apprehend its moves. If you split a log, the wood resists, and the products of your wedging activity will show uneven faces, depending on the knots and inner structure of the trunk. The same holds true for the object of your experimental inquiry; knowledge of these structures is of utmost importance for experimental exploration. If you splice a rope or if you graft a twig onto your vine, the points of suture will remain visible as signs of a mutilation. So will the pieces of your experimental activity, if joined to form a whole again. And it is indeed of utmost epistemic importance for the ongoing experimental process not to forget that these sutures always are—and will have to be—provisional. The title of this phenomenology of experimentation, Split and Splice, aims at calling to mind these epistemic uncertainties, inherent in the life of epistemic things.

In this article, I first outline the professionalization of the history and philosophy of biology from the 1960s onward. Then, I attempt to situate the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger with respect to this field. On the one hand, Rheinberger was marginal with respect to Anglo-American philosophical tradition; on the other, he was very influential in building up an integrated history and philosophy of the life sciences community at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and beyond. This marginality results, I suggest, from three main sources: his use of concepts coming from continental traditions in the study of the life sciences, which are foreign to Anglo-American philosophers of science; his focus on practices instead of theories; and his research trajectory as a molecular biologist, which led him to be critical of disciplinary boundaries. As a first step in situating and historicizing Rheinberger's trajectory, this article invites comparative studies and calls for a history of “continental philosophy of biology” in the twentieth century.

The publication of Toward a History of Epistemic Things 25 years ago was a landmark in science studies. Not only was the book a brilliant overview of new research trends, but it was also a personal and highly original contribution because of its emphasis on the major role of experimental systems in the construction of scientific knowledge. The paths that it opened have not yet been fully explored. More seriously, the ambition of the author to reinforce the value of scientific knowledge by the role of experimental systems in its construction has not been pursued.

In the introduction to his Spalt und Fuge, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger points to the possibility that we are currently experiencing a new turning point regarding forms of experimentation, which is characterized by the growing importance of high-throughput methods and big data analytics. This essay will explore the thesis that data-intensive research indeed constitutes a form of post-experimental research by interrogating research practices in precision medicine. Section 1 will introduce this thesis and highlight salient features of precision medicine as an example of post-experimental research. Section 2 suggests approach as a category that is broader than experimental system, as discussed by Rheinberger, and can serve to analyze and compare diverse forms of research, including experimental and post-experimental practices. The essay concludes with a reflection on how categories developed for the historiography of recent science might require an update when the science or its context changes (section 3).

In 2013, Hans Jörg Rheinberger proposed that Mendelian genetics and molecular biology were “scientific ideologies,” that is, for him they are systems of thought whose objects are hyperbolic; they are not, or not yet, in the realm of and not, or not yet, under the control of that system. This article proposes that precision medicine today is a scientific ideology and analyses the implications of this statement for historians of biology, genetics, and medicine.

Just when molecular biology is arguably delivering on some of its long-promised medical applications—think mRNA vaccines, monoclonal antibody drugs, PCR testing, and gene therapies—the history of molecular biology has lost much of its shine. What not too long ago seemed like a burgeoning field of research with endless possibilities, is now often reduced to the “central dogma” that saw its apotheosis in the effort to sequence the human genome but has since unraveled. The essay will discuss several possible answers to this apparent paradox.

In 1997, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger published his now seminal book Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Twenty-four years later, in 2021, he compiled a collection of essays under the title Spalt und Fuge: Eine Phänomenologie des Experiments, which will shortly also be available in English. What happened between these two books? What does it mean to write the history of the life sciences now? What is the place of Rheinberger's historical epistemology in the contemporary landscape?

These were the questions that we, the editors, started discussing in the summer of 2021. The occasion was not only Rheinberger's latest book, but also the more mundane fact that one of us, Lara Keuck, had just joined the editorial team of this journal. The other one of us, Editor-in-Chief Kärin Nickelsen, therefore proposed to collaboratively edit a small topical collection, dedicated to their mutual interest in the history and historiography of the life sciences, in order to introduce the novice to the inner workings of journal making. Rheinberger's Spalt und Fuge would loosely serve as a starting point for a forum of four or five short contributions, mainly from early and mid-career scholars in the field. The project would avoid any Festschrift character (since several of them had been published already¹); instead, we wanted to initiate a discussion about how topics and concepts associated with Rheinberger's work, and others that originated in the same period, are dealt with today. After all, we are now starting to write the history of life sciences during the 1990s, when some of our favorite historiographical tools were invented. What does this mean for our distinction between actors’ categories and analytical categories? Are concepts such as the experimental system still helpful, given the enormous changes within both the life sciences and their historiography? We drafted a one-page concept paper and started to send out invitations.

The project developed a dynamic that we had not anticipated. Our colleagues thought the questions were timely and worthwhile; however, they also inquired about the scope of our collection and the invitees. We realized that we needed to include more voices, from scholars across academic generations with different degrees of proximity to Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) under Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's directorship (1997–2011). Thus, in between recurrent waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked some of the busiest scholars in our field to write an essay within a ridiculously short timeframe—and, miraculously, they agreed. In early April 2022, we met in person and on screen, for an authors’ workshop at the MPIWG (Figure 1). We had, meanwhile, added a subtitle to our initial proposal, which read Traces of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. We deliberately chose the Rheinbergian term traces because, despi