Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte最新文献

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

This paper uses zone electrophoresis, one of the most frequently used tools in molecular biology, to explore two ideas derived from Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's reflections on experiments. First, the constraining role played by technical objects—instrumentation and material conditions—in the production of knowledge or epistemic things. Second, the production of interconnected experimental systems by such technical objects, which results in the unexpected entanglement of research fields and experimental cultures. By the beginning of the 1960s, the inception of zone electrophoresis in laboratories around the world transformed—some say, revolutionized—the study of proteins. Even today, electrophoresis continues to open research venues and questions in biomedicine, molecular biology, human genetics, and in the field of molecular evolution. In my essay, I seek to look at the interconnected lives of zone electrophoresis and address the broader social, and even global context, in which this apparently humble technique became a salient tool in the production of biological knowledge. In so doing, I aim to take the past and present of the history and historiography of experimental systems to the future, where experiments and technologies are interrogated as they are used in different geographies and contexts, including contexts of poverty.

[I] want to single out one phenomenon that could be called the ‘politics of sources’. It points to the extent to which the histories that both scientists and historians can write are artifacts of the available sources. The Rockefeller Foundation not only opened its archives very early on for historical work but also invested a lot in making the archives readily available for historical exploration. During the 1980s, many young historians took advantage of this opportunity. Thus, in a relatively early phase of the professional historiography of molecular biology, one could have gained the impression that the development of the new biology as a whole was a bio-politically directed enterprise of the Rockefeller Foundation sustained by the vision that social processes could ultimately be controlled by biological processes.

What can we gain from co-analyzing experimental cultures, regionalization, and disciplinary phenomena of late twentieth century life sciences under our historiographic looking glass? This essay investigates the potential of such a strategy for the case of cell biology after 1960. By merging perspectives from historical epistemology inspired by the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger with a focus on boundary work in the realm of scientific publishing, community building, and disciplinary norms, a set of understudied scientific practices is exposed. These practices, historically subsumed under the label descriptive, have been as central in cell biology as hypothesis-driven research aiming at mechanistic explanations of cellular function. Against the background of an increasing molecular-mechanistic imperative in cell biology since the late 1960s, knowledge from descriptive practices was often judged as having low value but was nonetheless frequently cited and considered essential. Investigating the underlying epistemic practices and their interactions with disciplinary gatekeeping phenomena (as policed by journals and learned societies) provides historiographic access to the plurality of experimental cultures of cell biology, scattered into many interdisciplinary research fields—with some of them only partially engaged with mechanistic questions.

When Hans-Jörg Rheinberger proposed the concept of epistemic things, he drew inspiration from the art historian George Kubler, who had considered the aesthetic object as resulting from problem-solving processes in The Shape of Time (1962). Kubler also demonstrated that a sequence of objects could retrace the progress that led to a solution that was afterwards accepted as the most classical. Parallel to Kubler, Rheinberger demonstrates how temporally extended activities of experimentation are condensed in the object, revealing the moments of innovation that lead to it. In the history of science as well as in art history, various trajectories can thus be grasped in the materially given. Rheinberger conceives of an object as a network of heterogeneous time strings. However, these are manifold: they cannot be thought of as making up a homogeneous temporality encompassing all the others as a temporal container and synchronizing them within it. Since the discovery of the Anthropocene, we no longer separate natural from cultural time, and no hegemonic historical narrative can be taken as unifying all the others. Historical epistemology as proposed by Rheinberger will be read as a contribution to constructing new models of natural as well as of cultural time.