The work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's research group is divided into three overlapping areas of investigation: (1) the history and epistemology of experimental practices; (2) the history of objects and spaces of knowledge; (3) the historical pragmatics of concept formation and the uses of theory in the life sciences. Most of the individual projects are situated in the context of the biological and the medical sciences from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The overarching historical question is: What are the conditions conducive to scientific innovation?
Each of these three areas of investigation will be the subject of a major international conference, the first of which will be held in 1999.
Over the past three centuries, the study of living beings has changed from a classificatory historia naturalis, an anatomy of visible structures, and a physiology of apparent body functions, to a highly stratified investigative endeavor adapted to its similarly diverse research objects. These objects range in scale from biodiversity through the social behavior of organisms to macromolecules. Each of these levels of organization and investigation has developed a corresponding phenomenology, set of analytical approaches, and methods of determining its object. In history of science `from the top down,' these developments are often seen as a social process through which scientific disciplines became differentiated, or as a succession - evolutionary or revolutionary - of theoretical paradigms. Complementary to the history of disciplines and the history of ideas, and in accordance with the recent `practical turn' in the history of science, the perspective of this investigation is `from the bottom up.' It inquires how fields of research, and ultimately disciplines, aggregate around a cluster of practices and technologies, methods, concepts, and theoretical conjectures to become relatively stable configurations. Such aggregation appears to be socially as well as theoretically underdetermined.
Serious consideration of this empirical horizon of the life sciences demands that historical assessment start not with the reconstruction of the development of biological theory according to a perceived immanent logic, but rather with the reconstruction of the practical contexts in which particular theories gained momentum. Here, the importance of experimental arrangements for the genesis of concepts and generalizations in the modern biological sciences moves center stage. Our analyses proceed from the assumption that experiment itself is a historically variable practice that has undergone decisive shifts of structure and content. These shifts can be illuminated best through broadly conceived comparative studies. As early as the seventeenth century natural philosophers experimented with living things; but in what sense? The demonstrative experiment of the seventeenth century differs significantly from the eighteenth-century idea of an experiment as a more or less systematic extension of observation. In the nineteenth century, conversely, observation itself becomes dependent on experimental exploration in many areas of science. In accordance with these changes, the practice of experimentation has taken on different forms and has become greatly diversified. These forms of experiment deserve systematic assessment.
Of particular relevance to the life sciences of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries is a close examination of what we call `experimental systems.' On the one hand, experimental systems can be viewed as comparatively robust, if transient, embodiments of concepts. On the other hand, they represent the most basic, integral, social realizations of scientific activity. As François Jacob once put it: "In biology, any study [begins] with the choice of a `system'."
This state of affairs, synchronically and diachronically, calls for an epistemology of experimentation. A comparative study of the forms of experimentation is an important element of a historical epistemology of the sciences. Such an epistemology of experimentation lies beyond those modes of philosophy of science that have relegated to the experiment the trivial function of testing hypotheses. The case studies that are needed to realize this project require new methodologies. In addition to the analysis of published texts, they include the systematic evaluation of laboratory notebooks and of oral history documents, the study of historical laboratory structures and of other microstructures of scientific practice, and, finally, the virtual reconstruction of historical experiments.
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's recent book Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford University Press, 1997) contains a detailed investigation of the history of protein biosynthesis research between 1945 and 1965. Central to the story is an `in vitro system' for the incorporation of radioactive amino acids into proteins. The establishment of this system is followed closely and its various elements are analyzed. This historical case study in experimental systems concomitantly eludicates the roles and functions played by cancer research and biochemistry in the development of molecular biology. On the basis of this historical material, several epistemological concepts are developed both in order to understand experimentation in twentieth-century life sciences and to contribute to a general epistemology of experimentation. These include `experimental system,' `epistemic thing,' `representation,' and `conjuncture.'
Sven Dierig (in cooperation with Jörg Kantel)
Based on digitized illustrations, texts, and other historical records taken from scientific journals and handbooks, catalogues of scientific instruments, administrative documents, correspondence, and laboratory notebooks, the goal of the Virtual Laboratory for Physiology is to provide an electronic research tool for historical studies on the development of instrumentation and experimentation in nineteenth-century life sciences. The database aspires to a complete collection, classification, and integration (through hyperlinked documents) of representations of experimental practices, instruments, and technical tools used in the production of knowledge and in teaching in the nineteenth-century physiology laboratory. The Virtual Laboratory for Physiology will be presented on the World Wide Web. It will include a virtual library with all relevant journals, allowing visitors to conduct online literature searches and to evaluate statistical and geographical distributions (landscapes of experimentation). Newsgroups and other Internet-related forms of communication will be established to provide a forum for discussion and information exchange.
Sarah Jansen, "`Population' as an Object of Experimental Systems: Ecology and Related Fields in Germany, 1850-1950"; Ohad Parnes, "The Origins of Microscopical Biology, 1760-1850"; Henning Schmidgen, "Pendula, Noematographs, and Chronoscopes: The Origins of the Reaction Time Paradigm in Nineteenth Century Psychology" (see Activities of the Visiting Scholars and Research Fellows p. 190) .
This area of investigation is based on the assumption that a decisive aspect of scientific innovation lies in choosing, shaping, reshaping, and sometimes in abandoning certain objects of study. The mere examination of the history of these objects presupposes that they take on various forms in the different research contexts in which they acquire their epistemic value. Embryos, brains, mice, and bacteria are not epistemic things by themselves; they are things that become epistemic insofar as they locate monsters, memory, oncogenes, and messengers in a cluster of practical and theoretical relations. The projects in this area of investigation focus on three central aspects of the history of scientific objects in the life sciences: first, the choice of organism, or of part of an organism; second, the spaces in which these organisms or parts function as objects of epistemic interest; and third, the `mental culture' of the scientist who lives in these spaces and investigates these objects.
The choice of organisms has always played and continues to play a decisive role in the life sciences. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the meaning of key biological concepts has been shaped by the availability of particular model organisms. Late eighteenth-century vitalism, for example, was by no means a purely speculative endeavor; it is unthinkable without the frog as a model and emblem of bioelectricity. Similarly, the eighteenth-century conception of epigenesis relied on the polyp as a model of organic regeneration. The history of genetics, to take another example, can be portrayed as a succession of model organisms: from humans to peas to flies to molds, bacteria, viruses, and back to higher organisms. Alternatively, experimental medicine has been characterized since its beginnings by a debate as to what animal models are best suited for the study of human diseases and the testing of pharmacological substances. A closer analysis of such examples shows that the uses and scientific `careers' of certain organisms are bounded by a complex set of conditions. These include technical specifications such as utility, disposability, suitability for laboratory work, and ease of manipulation; ethical and financial considerations; forms of everyday life; and theoretical presuppositions. These conditions may include the natural and cultural histories of organisms, of diseases, or even of entire environments. Here the cultural, social and epistemological aspects of the investigative enterprise are tightly interwoven.
A natural object can become interesting for many reasons, but it only becomes epistemically relevant if it fits into real and symbolic spaces that have taken different forms in history. Such spaces of knowledge include natural cabinets, botanical gardens, agricultural experiment stations, laboratories, the `field' of the anthropologist or the naturalist, and computer simulations. Every space of knowledge is characterized by its own particular material culture. Spaces of knowledge mark the boundaries of epistemic objects and connect them to larger cultural settings, forms of everyday life, forms of art and architecture, and especially forms of scientific communication. In turn, these spaces receive their particular shapes from the chosen objects of study. Such mutual dependence of objects and spaces is characteristic not only of the microworld of experimental systems, but also of natural histories, anthropological and clinical classifications, and multidimensional scientific accounts of mass phenomena such as epidemics.
Finally, to any particular material culture there corresponds the scientist's `mental culture.' In fact, `the scientist' is itself a figure displaying historically contigent configurations of explicit and tacit knowledge, skills, bodily and mental discipline, and gestural repertoires. These include such elements as the mastering of instruments in a given experimental situation and the training of the senses in subjective sensory physiology. The concept of mental culture encompasses not only the above aspects, but also the virtues, passions, mentalities, and idiosyncrasies of the researcher. Thus the scope of mental culture ranges from the importance of sensibility in late eighteenth-century life sciences and the role of heroism in romantic self-experimentation to attempts to include or exclude the participating observer in twentieth-century anthropology. The assumption is that such mental culture, in combination with material cultures, helps to explain the relationship between scientific activity and more general cultural and social ideas, practices and values. Notions such as epistemic objects, spaces of knowledge, and mental cultures will allow the development of a framework to overcome the traditional dichotomies of internal vs. external factors of scientific development, of experiment vs. observation, of basic vs. applied research, and of scientific method vs. bricolage.
Michael Hagner's recent book Homo cerebralis. Der Wandel vom Seelenorgan zum Gehirn (Berlin Verlag, 1997) describes the transformation of brain research in the years around 1800, from `the organ of the soul' to the brain. In the early modern period, the organ of the soul served as a material medium between the body and the soul. It permitted an understanding of man which combined metaphysical and religious aspects with medical and natural historical approaches. The reconceptualization of the brain as an organ, in which various mental qualities were housed equivalently among each other, marked an epistemic rupture. The previous conception allowed for the categorical differentiation between body and the soul, and between reason and passions, in accordance with an enlightened, yet strictly hierarchical view of man. The new development of brain research represented a science of man, whereby the former categorical differences were now localized in the brain. The brain emerged as the epistemic field for various attributes and differentiations that became fundamental for modernity - such as man/woman, madness/genius, wilderness/civilization, and sense/sensibility.
The study covers the period from the late Enlightenment to the 1870's, when the foundations of modern experimental brain localization were established. A major focus of the book is the new role of the brain in early nineteenth-century phrenology and romantic Naturphilosophie . Although these movements often were regarded as obstacles to scientific progress, both were essential in establishing this new approach, providing a number of assumptions, models, and practices which became central to modern localization research in anatomy, experimental physiology, and clinical research.
In the context of collaboration with Lorraine Daston, Dorinda Outram, and H. Otto Sibum on the conference project "Varieties of Scientific Experience," ( see See Symposium "The Varieties of Scientific Experience" June 19-22, 1997 ) Michael Hagner has started a book-length study of the history of `mental cultures.' To this end, he has focused on the histories of vertigo and of attention as an element of self-experimentation. Scientists' understanding of attention underwent a fundamental transformation in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These conceptualizations were linked to the role of the scientist as subject and as object in self-experiments, as well as to the establishment of attention as a fundamental virtue. The ambiguous character of attention lay in the dual role which it occupied as both an experimental tool and object of investigation. Similarly, until the eighteenth century, vertigo was regarded as a merely pathological phenomenon and thus a subject of interest only to physicians. In the late eighteenth century, however, empirical psychologists came to regard vertigo as a disturbance of the regular activity of the soul and thus began investigating it more closely. Henceforth the concepts of vertigo and attention became polarized. While the latter was defined as a state of orientation, vertigo was understood as disorientation. As a consequence, the history of these two phenomena became inseparably intertwined. This connection will be illustrated through three examples: late enlightenment self-observation, Romantic self-experimentation, and psychophysical research in the 1860's. These case studies may well show that the formation and the transformation of categories such as attention and vertigo became crucial for establishing new criteria of scientific experience. As a consequence, these categories were seen as essential for understanding and investigating the self as a `mind-body' unity.
Laboratories, along with the researchers, organisms, instruments, and experiments associated with these places of investigation, are not isolated from the world beyond their physical and institutional boundaries. Both laboratories and cities in which they are embedded are subject to change, as was most dramatically apparent in their dynamic and far-reaching transformation during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Using the example of Berlin and the institutionalization of experimental physiology by Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896), this project analyzes the interrelations between urban transformation and the laboratory revolution in physiology during the second half of the nineteenth century. The fundamental aim of the project is to understand how cities and laboratories form spaces of knowledge and cooperate in the production of scientific novelty. A main emphasis is to demonstrate how ongoing changes in urban life and society, industry, economy and technology entered Du Bois-Reymond's workplace and became part of the social and material culture of experimental physiology in Berlin. Rather than following a strict chronology, the study focuses on several themes which illustrate the effects of urbanization on laboratory life. These include (1) the networked city: the connected laboratory and the increasing dependence of experimental work on urban technological systems (water, gas, electricity); (2) city building and the establishment of scientific working places; (3) the city as a disruptive factor: public transportation and precision work in the laboratory; (4) the industrial city and labor: scientific instruments, the power of machines, and the evolution from manual work to mass production in the laboratory; (5) the nervous city and changes in public values: utilitarism, the American spirit, and the end of Biedermeier science; (6) the iron city and urban life style: sports, art, and the aesthetics of human bodies, machines, and experiments.
Epidemiology is among the oldest fields of scientific inquiry. Yet while much has been written about the history of public health and the social history of disease, relatively little attention has been paid to epidemics as objects of knowledge. Epidemiology is rich in traditions: historico-geographical, environmental, statistical, bacteriological, mathematical. Yet the focus of this project is less on these traditions as such, or on epidemiology as a discipline, than on the history of the `epidemic' as a scientific object at the intersection of myriad nineteenth and early twentieth-century institutions, technical practices, and fields of knowledge. The project asks in particular how the ancient entity `epidemic' was transformed by the rise of bureaucratic states, statistics, and that new object, population; and how epidemiology figured in the emergence of population sciences (ecology, genetics, evolution) after 1900. A paper completed in 1997 as part of the project (see bibliography) suggests that quantitative understanding and graphical analysis of the dynamics of epidemics preceded such an understanding and analysis of other biological mass phenomena. The late nineteenth-century epidemiologists' construction of population as a thing of changing densities and rates of interaction would appear to bridge the social statistics of the nineteenth century and the population sciences of the twentieth. A second focus of the project is on the way in which politics and culture shaped methods of investigating epidemics and theories of causation, and, conversely, how the subsequent development of those very techniques of inquiry into mass phenomena of health, disease, and death helped give such categories as the `social' and the `environmental' their modern form.
This project focuses on the `founder' of medical bacteriology, Robert Koch. Questions concern both the development of German bacteriology in the late nineteenth century and the biography of its central figure. One problem addressed is the extent and nature of medical research on bacteria prior to Koch's identification of the anthrax bacillus in 1875-76. Another issue concerns triangular relations between the Prussian Ministry of Culture, the pharmaceutical industries, and bacteriological laboratories, and the significance of these relations for Koch's career and for the early development of German bacteriology. One of the principal builders of the microcosm of bacteriology displayed a distinct desire for the macrocosm: among Koch's most notable biographic features is his enthusiasm for world travel. Another subject is the impact of bacteriology, apart from the etiological content emphasized in most studies, on contemporary pathological thinking. The project relies on source materials located in many archives, libraries, and other institutions in Berlin.
The project will result in a series of biographical studies of Koch. One aim is to confront the standard biographies of Koch with a more open concept of a historical personality which should not be treated as a given unity, but as an assembly of differing roles that vary in their degree of individuality.
Berna Eden, "The Mind as an Epistemic Object, or Why Did Psychology and Anthropology Become Dangerous to Logic?"; Peter Geimer, "The Photography of Invisible Phenomena around 1900"; Karlheinz Lüdtke, "Virus Research from the End of the Nineteenth Century to the 1960's", Jutta Schickore, "Investigating the Constitution of the Retina in Nineteenth Century Sensory Physiology" (see Activities of the Visiting Scholars and Research Fellows p. 190) .
The general aim of this incipient study, outlined only tentatively here, is to assess the specificity and role of the `theoretical' in the investigation of living things. Concept formation and the function of generalizations in biology will be analyzed from a number of different perspectives: the relation between physical and life sciences; the organizing function of concepts, especially over the longue durée; the heterogeneity of biological discourses; and the historicization of analytical categories such as reductionism, holism, and mechanism. Special emphasis will be placed on the pragmatic aspect of how concepts and generalizations work as tools in various historical contexts and on how they become embodied. Examples are the concept of species, from taxonomy to evolutionary biology to genetic engineering; the concept of information in the history of molecular biology; the concept of hereditary units in the convoluted history of genetics (see the book project of Peter Beurton in the research group of Jürgen Renn, See The Disintegration of Evolutionary Biology ). It is the recent `practical turn' in the history of science itself that makes the question of the theoretical once again interesting and investigable from a new perspective.
The relation between physical and life sciences has been a crucial problem since at least the seventeenth century. In each epoch the boundary between the realm of the living and that of the non-living was drawn differently, as the result of a negotiation that in itself is a first order problem for the history of science. Natural history and physiology in the eighteenth century drew this boundary in a distinctly different manner than romantic biology around 1800, or the biological disciplines of the nineteenth century such as cytology, sensory physiology, and evolutionary biology. Today, the realm of the organic is conceived as being the unique product of an evolutionary process and therefore irrevocably shaped by history. This may be an underlying reason for the fact that the history of bioscience since the late nineteenth century has not allotted as significant a role for `theoretical biology' and `theoretical medicine' as the history of physics has for theoretical physics.
Within this general framework, the role of organizing concepts is addressed, paying special attention to their stabilities and instabilities, and to their long-term appropriations and transformations. Two examples will be given in the projects listed below. One deals with the notion of `regulation' and its impact on the formation of molecular biology. The other traces such concepts as complexity, equilibrium, whole, system, and the `biological' itself as they came to pervade twentieth-century interwar scientific medicine. Such concepts appear to work without being firmly embedded in an overall theoretical framework, and their fruitfulness often appears to be bound to a lack of strict definition.
Another perspective on the problem of the theoretical derives from the complexity of the living as it has emerged fitfully in different fields since the creation of biology in the nineteenth century. As a consequence of this complexity, conceptualization of the living takes place on many different levels of organization. Access to, and therefore definition of, such levels has depended to a great degree on technologies which generally developed independently of the biological sciences. This adds a further dimension to the question as to how these levels of epistemic activity are connected. We suspect that the connections are largely ad hoc, due to historical contingencies. Heterogeneity of discourses results. Instead of joining the perennial quarrel over reducibility - of biology to physics at large, and of one level of analysis to another - projects in this field offer an investigation of the historical dynamics of such heterogeneity in its own right.
This project identifies a `biological transformation of Western medicine' in the overshadowed, allegedly stagnant period before molecular biology. In this transformation, simpler `medical' understandings of immunity, hereditary disease, infection, allergy, deficiency, cancer, and perhaps other concepts and entities gave way to what contemporaries called `complex' biological, ecological, populational, quantitative ones. The aim is to produce a narrative of scientific medicine in the first half of this century complementary to the story of the path to the double helix. In so doing, the project should help to answer the question as to how, after the Second World War, certain fields of medical science were so suddenly reconstructed - for example, when immunology, which had been dominated by a narrow immunochemistry, yielded the `immune system.' The participation of `narrow medical men' in those interwar trends which historians of biology have tended to call holistic also points to a wide context of change in the culture of life science - a change which perhaps has less to do with holism and organic metaphors per se than with quantitative conceptual structures (although often expressed in qualitative form: "equilibrium") and styles of causal explanation developed in the physical, social, and biological sciences alike. Three papers written in 1996-97 (see bibliography and list of lectures) confirm that contemporaries were at least as concerned with complexity - a concept whose own history will have to be charted - as with unity. The papers suggest, moreover, that standard categories of analysis, such as holism, mechanism and reductionism, fail to capture what changed conceptually during this period. Moreover, their definition, use, and applicability to particular domains of knowledge deserve investigation as a historical problem.
The project endeavors to trace some of the main conceptual shifts that occurred in the transition from experimental embryology at the beginning of the twentieth century to contemporary developmental biology. The focus is on the roles of the notions of `regulation' and `regulatory network.'
The notion of regulation occupies a central position in most fields of contemporary biology. Accordingly, several authors have addressed its history, especially with respect to the development of the concept of `regulatory gene' in the context of the rise of molecular genetics in the 1950's. However, the notion of regulation is clearly of much older origin and involves a wide variety of disciplines, including chemistry, physiology, and embryology.
Accordingly, one focus of the present project is on the notion of regulation in the work of experimental biologists in the first half of this century, such as Hans Driesch, T.H. Morgan, Hans Spemann, C.H. Waddington. Versions of the concept are then elucidated in conjunction with related embryological concepts such as `induction,' `field,' `epigenesis,' `canalization,' up to recent interpretations of embryonic development in terms of a spatio-temporal control of gene expression.
In the shadow of the new molecular biology, most of these embryological concepts went through a partial eclipse in the 1960's and 1970's, all but disappearing from embryological textbooks and mainstream publications. However, some of them (`gradient,' for example) continued to inspire the research of such theoretically inclined biologists as Lewis Wolpert and Hans Meinhardt as well as the research of some experimentalists working on regeneration (Alfred Gierer) and insect development (Klaus Sander). More recently, some of these concepts, notably `gradient' and `epigenesis', were redefined in molecular terms and reintroduced into the description of cell differentiation and embryonic development, while others, such as `canalization,' remained marginal.
Aiming to understand how the uses and successes of these concepts relate to specific experimental settings, model organisms, disciplines, and local cultures, this study emphasizes polysemy and shifts of meaning. The historical reconstruction will highlight the ways in which the study of embryogenesis was redefined and became integrated into the molecular framework.
Christina Brandt, "Linguistic and Informational Metaphors in the History of Molecular Biology" (see Activities of the Visiting Scholars and Research Fellows p. 190) .