Article ID: CBB000950508

Lab History: Reflections (2008)

unapi

Kohler, Robert E. (Author)


Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 99
Pages: 761--768


Publication Date: 2008
Edition Details: Focus Section: Laboratory History
Language: English

After a productive start in the 1980s, laboratory history is now surprisingly neglected---not lab science, but the lab as social institution. To restart interest, I suggest that we see labs as period specific (early modern, modern, postmodern) and of a piece with each era's dominant social institutions and practices. In the modern era, for example, labs have become powerful and ubiquitous because their operating principles are those of the nation-state and its consumerist political economy. Their educational function is crucial: labs have authority because they are an effective vehicle for educating en masse for life in modern states; they provide general entry to careers in scores of disciplines and a thousand occupations; and they embody prevailing ideals of a meritocracy of competence, transparency (through publication), and a universalistic logic of objectivity. An older microhistory of laboratory practices may thus be reborn as a systematic, macrosocial history of the lab.

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Description Contents:


Includes Series Articles

Article Klein, Ursula (2008) The Laboratory Challenge: Some Revisions of the Standard View of Early Modern Experimentation. Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (p. 769). unapi

Article Gooday, Graeme (2008) Placing or Replacing the Laboratory in the History of Science?. Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (p. 783). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000950508/

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Authors & Contributors
Machado, Cristina de Amorim
Lamarão, Sérgio Tadeu de Niemeyer
Lazos, Panagiotis
Barboza, Christina Helena da Motta
Findlen, Paula
Wylie, Caitlin Donahue
Concepts
Laboratories
Societies; institutions; academies
Physics
Scientific apparatus and instruments
Astronomical observatories
Museums
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
20th century, late
17th century
Renaissance
Places
Germany
Istanbul (Turkey)
England
United States
Spain
France
Institutions
Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (Spain)
Ministério da Ciência, Technologia, e Inovação
Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica (LNA)
Greek Philological Society of Constantinople
Pico dos Dias Observatory
University of Padua
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