2
Profitable Knowledge

In 1571, alchemist Philipp Sömmering arrived at the north German court of Julius, Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. On the promise of producing a tincture for turning silver into gold, Philipp secured a formal contract from the Duke for himself and a retinue of fellow alchemists. The Duke also offered Sömmering several gifts, including a horse and some English cloth as well as lodging, a laboratory converted from a stable, and several research assistants to help with the work. The work, however, did not go as planned. Treated with suspicion in the Duke's court, the alchemists soon ran afoul of several powerful courtiers, including Julius' wife. Accused of committing fraud, but later also accused of adultery, murder, sorcery, attempted poisoning, and theft, Sömmering and several of those with him were imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, tried, convicted and, in 1575, brutally executed as Betrügers - fraudulent alchemists.

As interpreted by science historian Tara Nummedal (2007), Sömmering's punishment as a convicted fraudulent alchemist illustrates the historical construction of a legal-cultural boundary functioning to preserve social belief in Sömmering's opposite: the true alchemist who practiced real alchemy and could transmute base metals into precious ones.1 If the role of alchemist was not yet fully articulated, alchemy nevertheless represented a legitimate and potentially valuable subject of investigation in those days, with Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle (about whom, more in Chapter 3) counted among its more illustrious European practitioners. Sömmering was the outlier here, for, as recent scholarship has also shown, alchemy occupied a central place in the surge of cultural interest in empirical knowledge associated with the Scientific Revolution and was a "driving force behind the emergence of laboratories, debates about the power of human technology and the boundary between art and nature, matter theory, and even specific ideas like gravity" (Nummedal 2007: 8). His was brilliant proto-scientific derailment (see 2nd Prescription for Practice), exemplifying itinerant knowledge production in out-of-the-way places, like converted stables (see 1st Prescription for Practice).

Nummedal's study focuses not on Enlightenment superstars like Newton and Boyle, but on far more typical, if less studied, "entrepreneurial alchemists," whose livelihoods were supported by the political and financial elites of the Holy Roman Empire and whose practices, importantly for us, were often entwined with industry (specifically mining), state power, and money. As she draws the connections:

[T]he princes and wealthy investors who supported alchemical work in this period clearly saw more commonalities than differences between alchemy and mining; in fact, these patrons clearly thought about alchemy as an extension of their long-standing interest in mining technology. Patrons hired alchemists and mine experts to address the same kinds of technical problems ., and patrons frequently responded to alchemical proposals with the same kind of investor mentality that framed their response to mining proposals. This connection between entrepreneurial alchemy and mining would have important consequences for the early modern practice of alchemy, as alchemists were expected to produce not merely ideas, but also increased profits. (86)

This chapter considers the centuries-old relationship between knowledge making and profit-making. With alchemy, that relationship pre-figured the rise of modern science. We aim to show that scientific inequality formation today remains both a product and source of this relationship.

The word profit is usually understood in economic terms, as the money one is left with after accounting for all other expenses. But the term's original meanings - progress, from Old French, and advance, benefit, from Middle English - speak to a more capacious set of ideas that intuitively align with modern notions of science as a means to human progress, intellectual advancement, and broad societal benefit, as we noted in our opening chapter. That science may instead represent a strategy for securing financial profit seems to contradict the common notion that Science (with a capital S) stands (or should stand) beyond the reach of crass human economic or political interest. This contradiction - between an idealized notion of pure, objective, or value-free science and its "never pure" practical embedding in markets, politics, and culture (Shapin 2010) - troubles the title we chose for this chapter and fuels our analysis of scientific inequality formation throughout the book.

Our analysis of profitable knowledge relies on the term "profit-making" rather than "capitalism" or the even more abstract "economy." Like capitalism, profit-making is inherently exploitative; in the process, someone or something is inevitably losing revenue, value, worth, or well-being, relative to someone else (Fleurbaey 2014). Indeed, profit-making is a necessary feature of capitalism, working historically as a mechanism for accumulating and concentrating wealth and power and thus for deepening all kinds of inequality. As we will show, this includes inequities within the domains of science and technology. Yet, unlike capitalism, which is a vast, complex, and dynamic system, profit-making is a relatively straightforward idea that not only predates capitalism historically but also anticipates a certain set of practical activities and goals. It is something most of us have experienced in some way in our own lives, as Sömmering experienced in his own tragically shortened one, and so it is tangible and relatable in ways that a complexly abstract global system like capitalism is not.

We have organized the chapter in rough chronological fashion, the better to illustrate how science inequality formation has both fed on and nourished profitable knowledge across the centuries. The bulk of our discussion is situated in the contemporary "neoliberal era," which begins in the 1970s and remains a dominant force in science today. (STS also emerged in the 1970s and we will have more to say about neoliberal strains of STS later in the chapter.) A central dynamic of scientific inequality formation in this period lies in the tension between two main projects - a dominant project that casts science as the engine driving technological innovation and industrial development, paired against a subordinate project mobilizing to bring scientific and public attention to the "manufactured risks" that science and engineering can often produce (Beck 1992). This contemporary dynamic is not new, but a continuation and multiplication of the ways that profit-making and science have intertwined historically, as we describe in the next two sections.

A Long and Complicated Marriage

Beyond practices specific to alchemy, economic ideas planted the seeds of modern scientific thought. Writing on the origins of science, historian Joel Kaye (1998: 16) has shown that the rapid "monetization" of European society during the fourteenth century - involving the spread of markets and towns, acceleration of agricultural and craft production, innovations in commercial enterprises and techniques, and more generally, the popularization of money as a medium of exchange - had enormous economic, political, social and scholastic impacts. With the rise of this new market order, which placed explicit cultural value on practices of measurement, calculation and quantification, the old Aristotelian model of nature as fixed and absolute slowly gave way. In its place, Kaye writes:

Scholastic natural philosophers began to create a new model of nature, one that could comprehend the order and logic of the marketplace - dynamic, self-equalizing, relativistic, probabilistic, and geometrical - a nature bound together and constructed by lines in constant expansion and contraction. It was within this new model of nature that science emerged. (14)

And as it emerged, scientific ideas and products - including new ways of conceptualizing, measuring and predicting profit and loss - became inextricably bound to the rise and expansion of a new economic order called capitalism.

Writing on economic developments during roughly the same time-period, sociologists Raj Patel and Jason Moore (2017: 24) put a similar point more bluntly. They write, "if profit was to govern life, a significant intellectual state shift had to occur: a conceptual split between Nature and Society" involving "a transformation in how some humans understood, and acted upon, nature as a whole." In their view, the writings of natural philosophers like Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and René Descartes (1596-1650) were instrumental in formalizing philosophical distinctions between nature and society. Their categorization of the world into two overarching and unequal domains "cheapened" the world by setting humans apart from the non-human world and then elevating the intrinsic value of one category ("Society") above the other ("Nature"). The shift involved a "massive exclusion" within early modern notions of society by relegating most women, Indigenous and other colonized people, and non-Europeans to the lesser-valued "Nature" side of the equation,...