Abstract
To what extent is contemporary science — for instance, biotechnology — a public or private thing? What does it mean for a science to be labelled public or private? Where should the responsibility for making such judgements be lodged?
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Notes
I have written a series of articles on the episodic and pragmatic demarcation between science and non-science, beginning with Gieryn (1983: 781–95) and synthesized in Gieryn (1995: 393–443).
The strategy is akin to semiotic actant-network studies such as Callon (1987: 83–103) and Latour (1987).
The following description captures the building as I observed it on repeated visits to Ithaca, starting in 1989 at the Dedication Ceremony and most recently in 1992.
A pioneer in historical studies of laboratory design is P. Thomas Carroll (recently Carroll, 1994). Cf. Allen (1977); Owens (1985); Hannaway (1986); Laszlo (1987); Shapin (1988, 1991); Forgan (1989); Stinchcombe (1990); Hillier and Penn (1991); Lynch (1991); Ophir and Shapin (1991); and Shackelford (1993).
Among the rare studies of the design process for science buildings are Shoshkes (1989: 96–123) on the Lewis Thomas Molecular Biology Laboratory at Princeton; and — of the coffee-table variety — Watson (1991).
On the professionalization of tasks, cf. Abbott (1988: 50) for the observation that ‘the architect becomes a broker negotiating a general design through a maze dictated by others’. Cf. Gutman (1988); and Cuff (1991).
Michael Lynch sees lab places as incessantly ‘made’: ‘This does not make floors and walls irrelevant, but it suggests that when various practitioners construct and tear down walls, assign equipment to places and practitioners to equipment, manage computer files, set up precautions against contamination, and so forth, they are ... effecting local arrangements within a specific topical field. ...by trying to understand the space of knowledge we confront an ecology of local spaces integrated with disciplinary practices’ (Lynch, 1991). The idea that design moves along a gradient of stabilization comes from constructivist (often Callonian/Latourian) studies of technology (in effect, I treat buildings as walk-through machines), such as Bijker et al. (1987); and Biiker and Law (1992).
Building design is ‘heterogeneous engineering’ as John Law describes it: ‘in explanations of technological change the social should not be privileged. ... Other factors — natural, economic, or technical — may be more obdurate than the social and may resist the best efforts of the system builder to reshape them. ... the stability and form of artifacts should be seen as a function of the interaction of heterogeneous elements as these are shaped and assimilated into a network.’ (Law 1987)
My discussion in this paragraph refers to prospective design — the representation of space before its material construction.
The hypermedia version of the Cornell Biotechnology Building was built by Peter C. Honebein, with assistance from Pai-Lin Chen and William Brescia. The project was initially a portion of the 1991 Sociological Research Practicum, with funding provided through the Institute of Social Research at Indiana University. A description of the goals and technical means of the hypermedia project is available from the author. The interviews were conducted between 1989 and 1992, after the initial occupancy of the building. Interview transcripts were entered into the hypermedia environment as ‘text’ files, and searched directly via the HyperKRS Search Application. Other documents (the design paper trail, blueprints, photographs) were scanned in as ‘graphic’ files, and the search was conducted through keywords electronically appended to each document.
DBA’s ‘Programme and Project Concept’ phase report begins with the justification for a new biotechnology building at Cornell, situates the project within the organizational context of the Division of Biological Sciences, lists members of the design team, and outlines the basic criteria said to guide design decisions. Each ‘functional unit’ (e.g. ‘administration’ or ‘research space’ at the highest level of aggregation, ‘flexible environmental chamber’ or ‘fly rooms’ at the lowest) is described in terms of the activities and people who will occupy it, desired square footage, utilities requirements (electrical, mechanical, HVAC) and its relationship to other functional units (to resolve questions of ‘adjacencies’ and ‘stacking’). These verbal and numerical descriptions of spaces are accompanied by plans showing the architecture of the proposed building — a two-dimensional graphic representation of spatial allocation of functions and of utilities. As the project moves through schematics and design development, verbal and numerical representations are refined and revised, and the drawings assume sharper definition and detail.
A description of the ‘Site Programme Requirements’ prepared several months later (10 December 1984) is even more explicit about the exclusion of this new public for (from) the building: ‘Corson-Mudd [an adjacent biology building] and Biotech are research facilities, and do not include teaching laboratories or classrooms. Undergraduate students are not normally expected to be in these buildings.’
A DBA architect told me that Cornell did not want people ‘wandering through a laboratory, potentially being exposed to stuff that he doesn’t even know he’s being exposed to’. The idea was carried into the conceptual phase report of 16 April 1985: ‘due to the potential of accidental exposure to dangerous substances, the building design should clearly define research areas, with proper security and isolation’.
The minutes of a building committee mecting one week later (24 January 1985) read: ‘Visitors to be directed to contact points.’ As we shall see in the case of laboratories for ‘visiting corporate scientists’, some visitors get further inside the CUBB — and stay there longer — than others.
One advantage in doing an electronic search for public and private is that the computer works with no a priori assumptions about which appearances would be of greater or lesser sociological interest — it looks for a defined character string anywhere, overlooking none of them. I was reminded of this when a search for ‘privacy’ took me to a meeting report of 18 December 1985, where the focus was on telecommunications requirements. At first, I was excited, hoping to find some juicy discussion of computer or phone security — but alas, the privacy in question belonged not to humans but to non-humans. ‘The “privacy” principle applies to all Telecom (voice) wiring. The wiring is to be run in its own enclosures separated from all other wiring. Separation is needed to assure system integrity.’ Each wire gets privacy from other wires. A later memo accused the architects of forgetting this privacy principle, as they crammed several wires into the same conduit!
One scientist indicated (28 September 1990) that the public (taxpayers) and private (corporate) parts are not necessarily aligned: ‘Companies are giving us money so we could put up this building, and I assume if they are doing that, they figure ... that it’s worth it to them. Or they wouldn’t be doing it anymore, giving us money. But, if you are talking about to the public ... I don’t know.’
The lobby has been used for weddings and ballroom dances, as well as scientific meetings.
A faculty scientist in the eukaryotes research group told me: ‘the common policy here is that each faculty have the same space. Whether it is a junior faculty with five students or a senior faculty with twenty students and post-docs. That was a sort of general policy of this [building] committee’ (28 September 1990). The origins and implications of modular lab design at Cornell is discussed more fully in Gieryn, ‘Building Social Structure: Laboratory Design and the Stabilization of a New Science.’
Mainly because the technology of electrophoresis became cheaper, smaller, safer and more often used, it was later decided to house it on wet benches in the private labs, obviating the need for a special room in communal space. Is this a failure to colonize the communal? Perhaps. But it points out a tradeoff inherent in the strategy: successful colonization — locating equipment outside the lab — means more steps needed to reach it (a loss of time so precious in the fast-paced world of biotechnology).
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© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Gieryn, T.F. (1998). Biotechnology’s Private Parts (and Some Public Ones). In: Smith, C., Agar, J. (eds) Making Space for Science. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26324-0_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26324-0_13
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