HIST 17502/HIPS 17502
Science,
Culture, and Society III
Instructor: Adrian Johns
Assistants: Ryan Boynton, Christina Fradelos, Todd Ojala
Spring Quarter, 2005
Syllabus
Course Outline
In recent years science has provided some of the biggest headlines in the world's press. From the argument over genetically modified foods to the debate over nuclear missile defense, and from the controversies over alleged spying at Los Alamos to the struggle over intellectual property in digital media, many of the major issues of the day emerge from the worlds of science, medicine and technology. This course finds much of its rationale in such cases, where scientific questions become inseparable from social ones. It has two main aims. First, it helps students to understand what science itself is, as a social as well as intellectual enterprise. And, second, it helps us to decide what role that enterprise plays - and should play - in our society.
The course is organized around a series of broad questions about science. These questions are addressed by means of examples drawn from both the past and the present. The historical cases arise in chronological sequence, ranging from the development of experimental methods in the late seventeenth century to the advent of biotechnology in the modern era. They furnish a selective set of materials for a history of scientific practice. Their larger purpose here, however, is to highlight the depth and importance of many problems still confronting the world of science today. We'll conclude by considering two areas in which those problems loom largest: global warming and biotechnology.
No scientific knowledge of any kind is needed to take this course.
Course Requirements
Class sessions meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12:00-1:20 in HM 130.
Written work. This falls into three categories.
1. Students are to prepare a one-page paper every week (except for April 26 and May 31), due at the time of the class on Tuesdays. They will generally be returned at the Thursday class. In total these papers amount to 20% of your final grade.
2. A short (5-7 page) paper is due on April 26. 30%. This should be an analysis of an issue or subject raised in the first half of the course.
3. A longer (12-15 page) paper is due on May 31. 50%. This should be a more extensive study of an issue or subject addressed in the course; it cannot be on the same subject as the short paper.
Students should obtain the approval of an assistant for the title of the longer essay before writing it. For both of the two papers, they should use academic conventions - in particular, they should cite full bibliographic and page information for any source from which they quote or employ ideas, using footnotes or endnotes. They should also include bibliographies. These essays should try to do more than simply describe; they should attempt some critical engagement with ideas and issues. They should also strive to be grammatical. Papers should be word-processed and stapled, and you must retain copies of them. They may not be submitted electronically. Students who submit papers late without reason may be penalized.
Readings
There is no single textbook for this class. Three highly readable books revealing important aspects of the modern scientific enterprise are recommended, however, and you should have read through all three by the end of the quarter. They are available at the Seminary Co-op:
It is further suggested that you keep yourself informed of new developments in the world of science by means of a major newspaper (the New York Times is a good choice). Periodicals such as The Economist, The New Yorker, New Scientist, and Scientific American also contain regular reports on relevant topics. It is especially interesting to contrast the stances towards science and scientific claims taken by such different periodicals: The Economist and the Wall Street Journal, for example, are consistently very different in this respect from Newsweek, which is in turn very different from the New York Times.
Appointments
My office is in Foster 510. I have office hours on Fridays at 10-12. You are welcome to come by at this time and ask me anything about the course. You are also welcome to schedule appointments at other times. My network phone number is 2-2334. My email address is johns@uchicago.edu.
Science,
Culture, and Society 3
Schedule
of Topics
This is a provisional schedule of topics. The subjects we actually address may differ from these, depending partly on developments in science itself.
1
What is a scientific fact?
Facts are the bedrock of science. They are commonly taken to be
incontestable bits of truth, discovered objectively and shorn of all social or
cultural content. Some of these facts have enormous influence. But
humans have not always thought of nature in terms of "facts."
So where did these things come from, and why did we come to believe in
them? We can understand what facts are (and are not) by looking at how
they are arrived at, how they become the subjects of controversy, and how they
sometimes disappear.
Historical
example: Robert Boyle and the "experimental philosophy" (17th
century).
Modern examples: DNA fingerprinting, missile defense.
2
What is a scientific discovery?
Science makes discoveries. That is, it reveals to us new things in the natural world: things like oxygen, electrons, and living coelacanths. The endless parade of new discoveries is largely what has given science its immense cultural value. Looked at closely, however, the process of discovery itself becomes distinctly mysterious. Is there a "logic" of discovery - a method by which discoveries may be attained? If so, what is it? What is the relation between the discovery and its discoverer? Finally, how do we decide that a dramatic new claim is in fact a discovery after all?
Historical example: Joseph Priestley and the discovery of oxygen (18th century).
Modern example: Joseph Weber and
the non-discovery of gravity waves; (perhaps) cold fusion and the recent Oak
Ridge fusion claims.
Extracts from
Priestley, in J.B. Conant (ed.), Harvard Case Studies in Experimental
Science (1957), I, 88-103.
T.S. Kuhn, "The
historical structure of scientific discovery," in Kuhn, The essential
tension (1977), 165-77 (orig. 1962).
H. Collins and T. Pinch, The Golem: What you should know about science (2nd edn., 1998), 91-107.
3
Did science slay
God?
Ever since its first publication, the Darwinian theory of evolution has been
the focus of bitter controversies about science and religion. One recent biography of
Historical
examples: Darwin; the Scopes Trial (1850s-80s;1920s).
Modern example: "Intelligent design" and the politics of science education.
4
What is a
scientist?
The figure of the scientist is an enormously influential one in modern
society. But what are the characteristics that denote a scientist?
Where do they come from, and why are they so respected? Above all, how
are they changing today? To answer these questions we'll begin with the
coining of the term "scientist" itself, and with sociologist Max
Weber's classic formulation of science as a "vocation." Then
we'll compare that formulation to the portrait given in
James Watson's Double Helix - the first modern warts-and-all account of
a scientific discovery, and itself something of a classic. Finally we
shall consider how the figure of the scientist is changing as university
researchers engage in today's realm of biotechnology.
Historical
examples: The invention of the "scientist" (1830s-40s); Max Weber on
science as a vocation (1918).
Modern examples: James Watson and the discovery of DNA; the culture of biotech.
5 What is a
scientific laboratory?
Scientific experiments and tests are most commonly carried out in places
called laboratories. The word is an old one, coined in the
seventeenth century. It originally seems to have referred to an
alchemist's den - a place of work (in Latin, labor) and a place of
prayer (oratorium). But today's laboratories are highly
professionalized places. How do the characteristics of the lab affect the
work that goes on there? And how can we be confident that the artificial
conditions of the lab properly reflect the circumstances of the "real
world" outside? To answer those questions we'll consider the
fortunes of Louis Pasteur in the late nineteenth century, when he attempted to
use laboratories to revolutionize the life sciences of his time. But
we'll also find that they remain live issues today in the testing of
Genetically Modified Organisms.
Historical
example: Louis Pasteur (1870s-80s).
Modern example: GMO
testing.
Translated extracts
from Pasteur's "Memoir on the organized corpuscles which exist in the
atmosphere," in J.B. Conant (ed.), Harvard case studies in experimental
science, II (1957), 508-17.
B. Latour,
"Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world," in K. Knorr-Cetina
and M. Mulkay (eds.), Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of
Science (London: Sage, 1983), 141–70.
C.C. Mann, "Biotech goes wild," Technology Review July/August 1999.
6 What is a
scientific prediction?
Scientists supposedly test their claims. They do so largely by
making predictions and then seeing if those predictions come true. But
what tolerances do they adopt when they perform such tests? More
generally, how much certainty should the public place in scientific
predictions, especially of great events that cannot be closely modeled in a
laboratory? Major policy issues may hang on such questions, as in the
case of nuclear waste disposal, which demands an understanding of events 100,000
years in the future. And what about disciplines whose predictions don't
work, as has been the case with earthquake science?
Historical
example: Albert Einstein and the testing of relativity (1880s-1930s).
Modern examples: nuclear waste disposal; earthquake science.
7 What is a
scientific instrument?
Scientific tests and predictions often rely on machines called instruments.
The manufacturing of scientific instruments is an enterprise
centuries old, but in the last hundred years or so the scope, scale and
size of such instruments has increased dramatically. Today's devices are
no longer the children's toys that Isaac Newton bought from his local fair in
order to investigate the behavior of light. They are specialized, complex
equipment, often developed specially for the purpose. But as we depend
ever more on these machines, we need to ask the simple question: what comes
first, the instrument or the science? Do ideas drive technology, or does
the available technology determine the science that is done?
Historical
example: cloud and bubble chambers (1890s-1980s).
Modern example:
LIGO (and we may also talk about the Hubble Space Telescope).
C.T.R. Wilson,
"On a Method of Making Visible the Paths of Ionising Particles through a
Gas," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 85 (1911), 285-88
(online at JSTOR here).
P. Galison and A.
Assmus, "Artificial Clouds, real particles," in D. Gooding, T. Pinch,
H. Collins, “LIGO becomes big science,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 (2003), 261-297.
8 Did science
get too big?
Starting in the middle of the twentieth century, people began to talk in
terms of something they called “big science.” By this they meant a kind
of large-scale, state-funded enterprise – something that could never be carried
out by small groups of researchers, let alone an individual scientist.
The original instance of big science was the Manhattan Project, which
culminated in the dropping of two atomic bombs on
Historical example: Totalitarian science, the Manhattan Project, and the establishment of big science.
Modern example:
9 Is science
moral?
It is fairly common to hear science characterized as an ethical enterprise - one with its own norms of conduct, which are policed by the scientific community itself. Thus many people believe that science is less subject to fraud or hucksterism than most human activities, and that when such misconduct does occur it is quickly rooted out by virtue of the very process of testing that makes science what it is. If this is so, then what exactly are the norms of science? Where did they come from? What effect do they have on the practice of scientific work? And, perhaps most important, who makes sure that they are observed? We'll begin to answer these questions by looking at the classic description of the scientific ethos as moral and self-policing. We shall then examine three recent cases where important elements of that ethos have been questioned: the so-called "Baltimore case," in which Congress insisted on imposing outside oversight of laboratory practices; Bjorn Lomborg’s controversial critique of climate science, which led to his being temporarily accused of misconduct; and the recent declaration by the Union of Concerned Scientists that the Bush administration has actively censored the scientific process.
10 Who owns
science?
No meeting
One of the "norms" that Merton posited for science was what he
called "communism." He meant that scientific knowledge itself
was common to all humanity. But it turns out that knowledge can be
made a subject of property, at least temporarily: this is what patents and
copyrights are for. But where should property rights in scientific
knowledge stop? This has become a vital question today in two
respects. First, there is a strong public movement for access to the
results of publicly-funded research. The NIH has recently declared that
science produced under its auspices, for example, should be freely available
after six months. This accords well with our image of science as public
knowledge – but it also imperils the economic processes by which that knowledge
has been circulated since