Category Archives: What We’re Reading

Sometimes the right book finds you at the right time, and it shifts your perception just a little, just enough to make a difference. It reminds you of something important you haven’t thought of in a while, or it shows you a new way of looking at and interacting with the world. For me this winter, that book has been The Disappearing Spoon, by Sam Kean. I heard a very fuzzy description of the book at a holiday party, something about the periodic table and political history. As someone eternally interested in chemistry and its impact on society at large, I was intrigued.

The book accompanied me through a whirlwind holiday travel season, and as I read little kernels of story about each of the elements in the periodic table, I found myself unable to stop bringing them up in conversation. As my family pulled foil over Christmas leftovers and discussed my life as a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh: “Did you know that aluminum used to be more expensive than gold, and that Pittsburgh is where the guy who figured out how to isolate it cheaply set up shop?” As news of the flood in Brisbane hit American televisions: “Did you hear that Australian astronomers used chromium to provide evidence that the fine structure constant may change over time?” As friends argued about how pharmaceutical companies should respond to decline effect and toasted the New Year: “In 1932, Gerhard Domagk tested the first antibacterial drug, Prontosil, on his sick daughter in order to save her arm. If he had gotten caught doing it, he would have been arrested.” Continue reading →

Mark B. Brown’s Science in Democracy is a must-read for anyone concerned with the interaction between science and politics. It is a tour of political theory — from Machiavelli, to Rousseau, to Dewey, to Latour — as well as an argument for rejecting the traditional “liberal rationalist” view of science and politics, and a guide to facilitating a better relationship between them.

Although I have always been very aware of the connection between science studies and political theory, I have had no more than a vague conception of the theoretical and historical roots of that connection. Brown’s first task, in part one of the book, is to explain liberal rationalism and how it became the dominant view of science and politics. Roughly, liberal rationalism is the idea that there is, and should be, a strong separation between scientists, politicians, and the public. Scientists are expected to be disinterested, objective, and politically neutral. Politicians are supposed to act in the interests of their constituents. The public is supposed to articulate those interests, but not to participate in the operation of either politicians or scientists, lacking the expertise necessary for participating in either sphere. In fact, the very ability to participate in either sphere may, in this view, disqualify one from being considered a proper member of the public at all. Many efforts at public engagement deliberately exclude anyone with knowledge or “preexisting views” relevant to the issues at hand (231-232). Machiavelli plays a dual role for Brown in this respect, both as an early advocate for the kind of public participation in politics that Brown advocates and as the historical originator of a “rhetoric of expertise” that created a strong division between the scientist and the public. Jean-Jacques Rousseau plays a much less ambiguous role, as an avatar of the most extreme vision of liberal rationalism. Rousseau advocated excluding not only the general populace from social or scientific deliberation, but also advocated excluding all but the most exceptionally talented — the Bacons, Newtons, and Descartes — from science or government.

Continue reading →

In  The  Scientific  Life,  Steven  Shapin  argues  that  people  and  their virtues matter in late modern science. While scientists struggle to remain objective and impersonal, it is the personal, familiar, and charismatic–the traits once swept aside as vices by the scientifically virtuous–that have come to embody the “truth-speakers” of late modernity. With an enormous and  sometimes  daunting  wealth  of  primary  sources  (from  technical commentaries to his own sociological fieldwork), Steven Shapin breathes life  back  into  these  quotidian  virtues.  The  Scientific  Life  is  as  much a disjointed genealogy of scientific virtue as a reminder that trust still matters at the cutting-edge of scientific “future-making.” Shapin’s mastery of historical narrative is clear; anyone interested in the American scientific persona and how it has transformed in the twentieth century would do well to wade patiently through this thick and rewarding text. But hang up your expectations of historical linearity (and, sometimes, thematic coherence) as you weave through motley professionals, theorists, and critics drawn from over a century of science commentators. Perhaps this work is best described as textured: rich in detail, woven intricately, but hardly smooth to the touch.

Shapin begins by detailing the  transformation from science as calling to science as job in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (chapters 1-3). During this period, the idea of science as vocation lost its impetus as the fruits of discovery became politically and economically valuable. Robert K. Merton’s sociology exemplified this shift, asserting that neither constitutional nor motivational differences existed between scientists and non-scientists.  The  Mertonian  “moral  equivalence”  of  the  scientist  (i.e. scientists  are  just  ordinary  folk)  eventually  displaced  Weber’s  “man  of science,”  in  whom  moral  authority  once  stemmed  from  a  merging  of curiosity and morality. The “spirited” scientist became the disinterested scientist, in personal convictions and professional identities. Despite the unclear origins of this “moral equivalence” (as Shapin prudently admits), a commitment to the idea persisted in the post-World War II era of “Big Science” and the military-industrial-academic complex.

Continue reading →

I was driving to the train station last week, and because of Daylight Savings Time (thanks so much for that, George Vernon Hudson) I’ve been doing so in the dark for the past few weeks. As I drove down one street, something struck me as being terribly wrong. It took me a moment to realize what it was: a lack of streetlights. For some reason, this one street was dark, and it really creeped me out.

The fact that I have become so reliant on artificial light; that its absence strikes me so forcefully, makes me all too typical an example of our modern age. In Brilliant, Jane Brox tries to unpick exactly how I (and everyone else) came to this point. While I found the book unsatisfactory as a history of science, it had several sections that were first-rate cultural history.

Continue reading →

Next time you’re sitting down to watch CSI, CSI:NY, Bones, Navy:NCIS or any of the other dozen or so television shows that strongly feature forensic science, spare a thought for where the science began. When did police forces first start using science in a serious way to catch the bad guys?

That’s the question addressed by Deborah Blum in her delightful new book. Despite the subject matter (a series of grisly murders and accidental poisonings) Blum manages to write a book that is eminently readable, even for the non-ghoulish. Rather than dealing with the entire history of forensic science, she wisely chooses to present a micro-history, looking at the rise of forensic chemistry in New York of the Jazz Age and Great Depression.

Continue reading →

Many years (and several careers) ago, when I was working in the lab, I often used HeLa cells. They were a standard culture of human cells, used for a variety of purposes. I never gave much thought to from where (which is to say “from whom”) they came. We had a variety of cell lines to choose from, and HeLa were just the standard, go-to choice.

Fortunately, people like Rebecca Skloot are a good deal more curious than I, and she was inspired not only to research the history of these cells (and through that, the history of cell culturing as a science) but also to research the history of the woman from whom all those countless cells have come.

In many ways, tracking down Henrietta Lacks (the original donor) and explaining the story of cell culturing was the easiest part of the story. It is a standard detective tale of tracking down false leads and looking for evidence in unlikely places. And for Skloot, an experienced medical writer for the New York Times Magazine and NPR, this is just another day at the office. But the book goes beyond the scope of a standard history of science/medicine when Skloot decides to track down the descendents of Henrietta Lacks and tell their stories. It becomes an intensely moving, disturbing story of race and class in contemporary America.

Continue reading →