Technical Work

A review of Karen Rader's "Making Mice"

Karen A. Rader. Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900–1955. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2004, pp. 312, Price $45.00 £29.95. Hardbound. ISBN 0-691-01636-4.

Jim Griesemer and I wrote an essay review of Karen Rader’s book on C. C. Little and the Jackson  Laboratory (JAX). Little (1888 - 1971) was a mammalian geneticist who started out to use pure-bred strains of mice as a means to study cancer. He founded the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1929, with the sponsorship of automobile magnate Roscoe B. Jackson. The Laboratory faced several financial crises over the years (Jackson’s early death, the Depression, changing sponsor policies), and survived each time by expanding the market for its specialized mice. The Laboratory has thus grown to become a major supplier of specialized mouse strains for research. Rader’s book focuses on an important part of this story, the development of  standardized strains of mice.

Little’s achievement was to develop an organization that could develop and produce large numbers of standard, i.e., pure-bred, mice to serve as raw material in research studies. The problem here is scale. It isn’t enough merely to produce a genetically homogeneous line of mice; the mice have to be produced in volume and shipped around the nation to many customer laboratories. The characteristics of the mice have to be authenticated, and the character of the line has to be maintained. All this requires an industrial-scale organization to breed, feed, and care for many thousands of mice in multiple specialized lines. Quarters must be reliable, diets must be homogeneous, disease must be prevented, breeding must be closely supervised, and all of this must be accomplished with an eye on the budget.

In our review, Jim and I faulted Rader for not relying more heavily on comparative analysis, and for not showing us more of the technical aspects of the problem of mass breeding and the way it articulates with the research programs it supplies. A comparison with other sorts of mass production projects in the wider economy would also be extremely interesting. This of course would have been far beyond the scope of Rader’s study, and she can’t really be faulted for not providing it. But I can’t help but wonder if Little’s connections with the automobile industry gave him something more than access to wealthy patrons. Perhaps he learned about mass production methods there as well? In any case, it remains for another study to show us the connections between industrial-scale mouse breeding, the research that consumed the mice, and the changing character of American institutions after World War I.

Griesemer, J., and E. M. Gerson. 2006. "Of mice and men and low unit cost". Studies in History & Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37: 363-372.

A review of Horace Judson's "The Great Betrayal"

Horace Judson published a book on fraud in scientific research about two years ago (Horace Freeland Judson, The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004. $28.) I wrote an essay review of it some time ago, and I thought I'd post it here.

Judson's book is certainly the best available overall view of the problem of fraud in science. It's very well written, and poses a lot of interesting questions for further research. The discussion of the relationship between law and science (Chapter 9) is outstanding. The discussions of peer review and the role of the Internet are very good.

Much of my essay deals with two issues. The first is the problem of replication and robustness. Replication consists of producing the same results in the same way; it is useful for detecting coincidences and accidents. Robustness comes from the convergence of multiple different lines of activity-- different methods, different lines of evidence, different researchers, different laboratories. Robustness is one of the principal goals of research, and it is also the primary means of detecting fraud.

The second issue follows directly from the first: it is the problem of checkability, i.e., making the work of achieving robustness easy, convenient, cheap and (to the maximum extent feasible) automatic. Our conventions for making research accessible can be changed to improve checkability. Improved bibliographic standards, making data available, and other reforms can be used to reduce the cost of checking by a substantial amount without greatly increasing the workload of scientists. This approach contrasts sharply with using traditional forensic and auditing methods after suspicion has been aroused.

Two papers on CSCW

I've posted two papers on computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), which can be downloaded from the "Working papers and reprints" list in the left-hand column. The first paper, Reach, bracket and the limits of rationalized coordination was prepared for a forthcoming volume on Resources, Co-Evolution, and Artifacts: Theory in CSCW, edited by Mark S. Ackerman, Christine Halverson, Thomas Erickson, and Wendy A. Kellogg. The second paper, The organization of reconciliation in distributed work, is for a workshop on Distributed Collective Practices to be held at the ACM's CSCW conference in Chicago on November 6. The "Reconciliation" paper is an elaboration of some points made in the "Reach, bracket" paper.``

"Reach, bracket" is a theoretical paper concerned with coordinating tasks in highly distributed work. This problem has been gaining increasing importance as the development of information technology has made it common to cooperate across organizational, territorial, cultural, and other boundaries. The paper argues that we need to distinguish between problems of coordination across different circumstances, and problems of coordination in each set of local circumstances. The first class of coordination problems is largely, but not entirely, accomplished through the use of abstract standards (protocols); the second is accomplished by customizing arrangements and by reconciling incommensurable requirements.

How are such requirements reconciled? Often, there is a common system of arrangements which can impose a solution; for example, a dispute within a firm can be resolved by a management policy decision. But what happens when there is no centralized means for making and enforcing such decisions? The second paper (summarizing and extending a section of the first) discusses several different organizational mechanisms for reconciling differences in the absence of a centralized mechanism: exactly the situation that arises when there are disagreements in a task that cuts across organizational, territorial (i.e., legal and political) and cultural boundaries.

ISHPSSB's Future Directions conference

The Future Directions workshop of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology was held on the University of San Francisco campus last week, and it was a resounding success.

The workshop was the first "off year" meeting sponsored by the Society, and so was experimental. The workshop emphasized topics of interest to graduate students, such as finding a job and publishing strategies, although there were just as many sessions devoted to technical issues.

It's clear that many people are eager to organize workshops in years to come, and this should certainly become a routine part of the Society's activities.

I moderated a session on "Interdisciplinary issues", and presented a brief comment, which I'm posting here.

A discussion of the workshop is being held on the Philosophy of Biology blog, with an open thread for comments (which are, of course, welcome here too.

Generalization in legal reasoning

I picked up a copy of Frederick Schauer's Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes because it looked very promising. The book is about generalization in legal reasoning, and I thought I'd learn something about methods. Schauer is Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and author of several books in legal philosophy. I started the book in happy anticipation, rapidly became puzzled, then a little put off, and finally wound up just plain irritated.

Concepts of culture. 1: Social science vs. criticism

In recent years, culture studies and cultural history have become very popular approaches in the humanities. This is all to the good, but the notion of "culture" is used in several different ways, and they aren't compatible with one another. In this post, I want to look at two of these notions of culture and the problems they cause; I'll look at some others later.

A paper on Evo-Devo

I've posted a draft paper on the intersection of evolutionary and developmental biology (called "Evo-Devo"), which can be downloaded by clicking on the title in the list on the left. This is from a workshop last year at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA. It's a lovely place, and the workshop was very productive and a lot of fun.

The workshop grew out of a session the year before at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA., which is one of the finer ornaments of civilization.

The papers from the workshop are going to be published in a book edited by Jane Maienschein and Manfred Laubichler of Arizona State, who also organized the workshop, gave papers, and made everything work right.

The paper sketches a major thread in a complicated argument I'm trying to make about the ways in which institutional arrangements influence the intellectual content of research. It focuses Evo-Devo, which is the most interesting and exciting area of research in biology today.

Laws of cat

Posting pictures of cats has become a popular thing to do among bloggers (just enter "cat blog" in Google's image search and see, or try this). Rather than join that parade, I thought I'd post some generalizations about cats.

Is the truth a popularity contest?

I said I was going to discuss some common errors in the science (or culture) wars. Here, I want to deal with one of the claims most irritating to sociologists-- the accusation that sociologists think that "truth is a popularity context" or that "anyone's opinion is just as good as anyone else's". This view is irritating just because it gets things so completely backwards.

Does "socially constructed" mean "not real"?

When I started this blog, I thought that I'd avoid the running debates which make up the "science wars" front in the "culture wars". Bruno Latour's book and Michael Lynch's book are two very reasonable (and arguable) approaches by social scientists who often agree; here is a rich lode of materials on the other side.

I'm reluctant to get into these debates because I think that most of the points brought up the opposition are irrelevant to the problems of understanding how and why institutions (scientific or otherwise) work the way they do. I also think that many of the arguments in the science wars are of very poor quality. But avoiding the debates is an idle fantasy, and low quality is not a strong barrier to broad acceptance of an argument. So I find myself driven to deal with some of the more common mistakes which appear discussions of science studies. I'm going to try doing this in series of relatively short posts, dealing with one problem at a time.

The ex ante-ex post distinction and scenarios

I have been reading Lawrence Solum's Legal Theory Blog on some problems of intellectual property with great profit. Solum is engaged in a discussion with Eugene Volokh [1,2] on certain problems in economic analysis of intellectual property rights. My concern here is with two methodological problems. The first problem comes from the ex ante/ex post distinction, the second from the use of hypothetical cases.

Comparative analysis of sea lion skulls

I was visiting the California Academy of Sciences with friends yesterday, and I took them to see the Skulls exhibit. The core of the exhibit is a collection of sea lion skulls (about 900 in all) that occupies an entire wall of the exhibit hall. As you walk up to the wall, you see an enormous matrix of very similar forms, all displayed the same way. The labels on the exhibit tell you that there are seven skulls in the collection which are not sea lions, and this sets an obvious puzzle: find the ringers. You're helped, if you want it, by the labels on the rail in front of the wall, which unobtrusively flag the outlier skulls.

Looking for the outliers leads you to start looking more closely at the individual skulls in the exhibit. Differences are readily apparent: some are larger than others; many have a pronounced crest on top, while others don't; some have larger fangs than others; one (E33) seems to be wider than it is long, while most of them are longer than wide (Aha!); and so on. The longer you look, the more differences appear, the more subtle they become, the more minor variations in proportion seem to stand out, the more strongly a few skulls seem to look, well, peculiar.

You can't help speculating: the smaller ones must be juveniles. The crests seem to be associated with overall size, but many of the bigger skulls seem to be heavier as well, with larger fangs; are those the males? The large one with the rounded skull, no crest, and a short muzzle doesn't seem to fit into that sequence-- sure enough it's a bear, not a sea lion. But the bear looks a lot more like a sea lion than the sheep does.

In short, the Academy has developed a wonderful machine for teaching comparative analysis in an extraordinarily effective way, leading people to discover and sort out the important similarities and differences for themselves. The important lesson of course, is not sea lions, but discovering and sorting out similarities and differences. It's a lovely example of the highest-quality kind of education in comparative analysis, one which is rarely found in laboratories.

If you're in the Bay Area, the exhibit will be open every day until December 31, when the Academy will be closed for reconstruction. The Academy (but not the skulls exhibit) will re-open in downtown San Francisco next year, and the rebuilt Academy is scheduled to re-open in 2008.

Graff on college teaching

I've been enjoying Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe. The core of his argument is that colleges are doing a poor job of teaching, for at least two reasons. First, they fail to explain the culture of scholarship to students, thus leaving the students unsure of what and how to learn. Second, Graff feels that academia does a poor job of reaching out to the bigger world, of transmitting its most important lessons, which are about the value of argument-- i.e.,

…summarizing the claims of others, sticking with a summary to unpack its key implications and premises, weighing evidence, spotting and identifying contradictions and non sequiturs, telling stories and devising examples that exemplify one's point, generalizing one's conclusions, and many other practices that come into play in every field. (p. 22)

Patronage and technical work

Patronage plays an important part in the stratification of social worlds organized around technical work. It is the patronage in technical worlds that gives them much of their peculiar flavor, a vigorous compost produced by something that isn't really a social movement, and isn't really an ethnic group, but seems to act sometimes like either or both.

Obligations among specialties (cont.)

I said in my post about burden of proof (last post, 3 August), that many of the relations among specialties can be seen as a network of settled obligations. At the same, unsettled relations among lines of research can often be seen as disputes about what obligations one specialty has toward the concepts, theories, and methods of another.

Many of the obligations among specialties are quite clear and solid. For example, research in many areas presupposes much of modern physics conceptually, theoretically, and procedurally, via embedding in instruments. It's easy to think up a chain of these dependencies: chemistry is obligated to physics, molecular biology is obligated to chemistry, cell biology is obligated to molecular biology, development is obligated to cell biology, and so on, so that we eventually wind up noticing, e.g., that Da Vinci's Last Supper (1498) is obligated to the physics of sub-atomic particles.