Printculture : Lab Style

Lab Style

by M Massino | July 14, 2006 | Academic Life , Science

Yesterday I spent the afternoon in an embryonic stem cell research lab. It was amazing.

A researcher there gave me a tour, starting with a quick and dirty lecture on types of stem cell research, limits, applications, etc. He drew pictures of cells, neurons, flow charts of chemical processes. I got to look into a microscope and look at embryonic stem cells and neurons, to watch researchers move samples from tube to tube, arms under what can only be described as a very expensive buffet sneeze guard (to keep out bacteria) listening to Def Leppard on a cheap radio.

After leaving the lab, feeling like I had come from a magical place, like Disneyland except not having any prior knowledge of the characters, I picked up Bruno Latour's first book, Laboratory Life, an anthropological field study of two years (1975-1977) spent observing life in a lab at the Salk Institute of San Diego.

I wanted to read it both to continue to chase my pleasurable experience at the lab and, perhaps more, to feel (somewhat) amongst my own again.

As Latour and Woolgar write, the outsider in the lab is generally a professional scientist working in another field, or a novice scientist who will soon be joining the professional ranks. This observer can be taught easily and with pleasure. However,

for outsiders who are completely ignorant of science and do not aspire to join the ranks of professional scientists, the situation is rather different. The most naive (and perhaps least common) reaction is that nonscientific outsiders simply have no business probing the activities of science. More commonly, although working scientists realize that a variety of nonscientific outsiders, such as historians, philosophers, and sociologists can and do have professional interests in science, the precise point of their questions and observations is a source of some bewilderment...An observer who declares himself to be an “anthropologist of science” must be a source of particular consternation.

If L&W think the soft sciences get a hard time, try walking into a lab and telling someone who is casually operating a machine that costs more than my post-secondary education that you're from the Humanities.

Except, aside from occasional raised eyebrow, everyone stopped for a moment to be my teacher and no one was suspicious about my intentions. Amused, yes, curious perhaps, and in some cases confused, but never unfriendly. Sometimes their explanations of things, even in what they reckoned was in simple language, far outstripped my knowledge, sometimes things worked out just right. But on the whole I was constantly wishing I knew more so I could take more in.

While I wanted more in, Latour's approach to writing about the life of the lab maintains a certain distance. As an ethnographical/anthropological study, he aimed to look at and treat the lab culture as a strange or unfamiliar “tribe,” in order to “not take too much for granted”:

Outsiders largely unfamiliar with technical issues may severely jeopardize their observational acumen by initially submitting themselves to an uncritical adoption of the technical culture.

I was certainly mesmerized, but I tried to remain critical. And at times I felt about as outside as it gets. But while Jonas Salk (of polio vaccine fame) wrote an admiring introduction for Latour and Woolgar, recognizing their intelligence, understanding and keen observation despite their “outsider” position, nobody was congratulating me for having trouble focusing the microscope.

But I did get to wear a lab coat, and I did remember what the parts of neurons are called, how dopamine works and a few other sundries from intro chemistry and psychology.

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