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
Alberti, Samuel J. M. M.
Aubin, David
Barona, J. L.
Benson, Keith Rodney
Carletti, Christian
Chakrabarti, Pratik
Journals
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences
Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Archives of Natural History
Asclepio: Archivo Iberoamericano de Historia de la Medicina
Endeavour: Review of the Progress of Science
European Physical Journal H
Publishers
Brill
Harvard University Press
Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales: Residencia de Estudiantes
Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica (LNA)
Concepts
Societies; institutions; academies
Laboratories
Research institutes; research stations
Astronomical observatories
Government sponsored science
Science education and teaching
People
Majima, Rikou
Negrín López, Juan
Ochoa, Severo
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
20th century, late
17th century
18th century
Places
United States
Brazil
Great Britain
India
Ottoman Empire
France
Institutions
Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (Spain)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT
Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory
Tokyo Institute of Technology
Lincoln Laboratory
Prussian Academy of Sciences
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