Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte最新文献

In this paper, I ask about the broader context of the history and philosophy of biology in the German-speaking world as the place in which Hans-Jörg Rheinberger began his work. Three German philosophical traditions—neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and Lebensphilosophie—were interested in the developments and conceptual challenges of the life sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their reflections were taken up by life scientists under the terms theoretische Biologie (theoretical biology) and allgemeine Biologie (general biology), i. e., for theoretical and methodological reflections. They used historical and philosophical perspectives to develop vitalistic, organicist, or holistic approaches to life. In my paper, I argue that the resulting discourse did not come to an end in 1945. Increasingly detached from biological research, it formed an important context for the formation of the field of history and philosophy of biology. In Rheinberger's work, we can see the “Spalten” and “Fugen”—the continuities and discontinuities—that this tradition left there.

This contribution draws attention to the circulation of materialities and persons as a central feature in the constitution of experimental cultures. The protein and ribosome research at the Max Planck Society (MPG)—with a main focus on the research conducted by Brigitte Wittmann-Liebold at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics—serves as an example to highlight some of the central conditions that determined the material circulation in molecular biology: the very organizational framework of gender and economics. In doing so, this contribution argues for a historical narrative that stresses the conditions facilitating the circulation of technologies, materials, and personnel. Histories of this kind contribute to an integrated view of the scientific, technological, social, political, economic, and cultural specificities of experimental cultures.

In the writings of the polymath and experimental scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) one sometimes comes across startlingly modern observations on the phenomenology of scientific activity, for example on the relationship between experiment and hypothesis, on the role of contingence in scientific discoveries, or on the dialectic between the invention of the new and the arrangement of accumulated knowledge. In a record of his private notebooks, known as Sudelbücher (“Waste Books”), he casually notes what constitutes a pure demonstration experiment:

Now that we know nature, even a child understands that an experiment is nothing more than a compliment paid to it. It is a mere ceremony. We know its answers beforehand. We ask nature for its consensus as the great lords ask the estates.¹

Demonstration experiments were common around the eighteenth century, not only for didactic purposes, but also in the many forms of spectacularization of science, which concerned in particular a then new and mysterious field of knowledge: electricity. The aforementioned definition, however, also brings with it an implicit distinction between a demonstration experiment and a proper experiment: in the former, phenomena we already know are just confirmed and displayed; in the second, something new, which we haven't discovered yet, comes forth. It was precisely this dialectic of expectability and surprise, typical of scientific activity, that engrossed Ludwik Fleck in the twentieth century. According to Fleck, valuable experiments are always “unclear, unfinished, unique”;² as soon as they become clear and arbitrarily reproducible, they are at best suited for demonstration purposes, but no longer useful for research purposes, for “the richer the unknown, the newer the field of research, the less clear the experiments are.”³ Hans-Jörg Rheinberger later took this tension further and reformulated it as a relationship between “epistemic things” and “technical objects.”

In his epochal book Toward a History of Epistemic Things (1997), Rheinberger defines experimental systems as “the smallest integral working units of research,” which “give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able clearly to ask.”⁴ Quoting François Jacob, he also calls them “machines for making the future.”⁵ Experimental systems consist of two components: epistemic things and technical objects. The research object is defined as an epistemic thing, which means “material entities or processes—physical structures, chemical reactions, biological functions—that constitute the objects of inquiry.” These objects “present themselves in a characteristic, irreducible vagueness,” which is indispensable, because “paradoxically, epistemic things embody what one does not yet know.”⁶ Rheinberger explicitly follows Bruno Latour's idea of the indefinability of the new research obje

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.