Role of autoradiography in biological research biology discussion
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1In his introduction to La Vie de laboratoire, Bruno Latour is dismissive of accounts of the practices of the scientific community found in the writing of scientists themselves. For him, their works lack inquiry, direct observation and contradiction:
1. This passage is not part of the original English version of Laboratory Life.
Pour donner un peu d’indépendance aux analyses de la science, il est donc nécessaire de ne pas se reposer uniquement sur ce que les savants et chercheurs disent d’eux-mêmes. Ils doivent devenir ce que l’ethnologie nomme un « informateur », un informateur certes privilégié, mais enfin un informateur dont on doute. (Latour 1996: 17)1
2.Certainly, Latour is defending his own position as the non-participant observer of the scientific process, but his final analysis is inevitably just as unreliable as that of the participant-analyst he relegates to the position of a mere ethnologist’s “informer”. Scientists are rarely dupes: many have a better working knowledge of current theories in the sociology of science than do sociologists or indeed linguists of the basics of science. When they write about what they do – as autoethnologists – they do so in the full knowledge that their version is not the only possible version. Indeed, it is the very unreliability – the subjectivity – of autobiographical writing that makes it worth examining more closely.
3In a study of Darwin and the genre of biography, Robert M. Young has argued that biography does not merely fill in the “background” of the scientist’s life, but also provides “the materials that take us to the centre of the scientific enterprise”