The Right Tools for the Job

This volume examines scientific practice through studies of research tools in an array of 20th-century life sciences. The contributors draw upon and extend the multidisciplinary perspectives in current science studies to understand the processes through which scientific researchers constructed the right - and, in some cases, the wrong - tools for the job. The articles portray the crafting or accessing of specific materials, techniques, instruments, models, funds and work arrangements involved in doing scientific work. They demonstrate the historical and local contingencies of scientific problem construction and solving by highlighting the articulation between the tools and jobs. Indeed, the very "rightness" of the tools is contingently constructed, maintained, lost, and refashioned.
The cases examined include evolutionary biology laboratory systems, the plasmid prep procedure in molecular biology, models in the human ecology of African pastoralists, the micromanometer in metabolic studies, genetics research and the role played by Planaria and corn, quantitative data in field biology, taxidermy in natural history, technical standardization in bacteriology, and the discipline of immunology as the tool for stabilizing conceptual definitions in the field.