Lab folklore and mythology: a look at SSK literature
Beyond lab folklore and mythology: What the future of science will look like if we’re bold enough to look beyond centuries-old models.
January 16, 2015
http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/01/beyond-lab-folklore-and-mythology.html
Labs where there was a shared common knowledge of how to do things, but where that shared culture never made it outside, not even to the lab down the hall. There’s no need to write it down or publish stuff that’s “obvious” or that “everyone knows.” As someone who is more familiar with literature than with biology labs, this behavior was immediately recognizable: we’re in the land of mythology, not science. Each lab has its own ritualized behavior that “works.” Whether it’s protocols, lucky machines, or common knowledge that’s picked up by every student in the lab (but which might not be the same from lab to lab), the process of doing science is an odd mixture of rigor and folklore. Everybody knows that you use 42 C for 45 seconds, but nobody really knows why. It’s just what you do.
Despite all of this, we’ve gotten fairly good at doing science. But to get even better, we have to go beyond mythology and folklore. And getting beyond folklore requires change: changes in how we record data, changes in how we describe experiments, and perhaps most importantly, changes in how we publish results.
Parallels with SSK:
I’d just like to point out some obvious references that I believe are worth bringing in these synbio/lab automation discussions (all are 30+years old). If I have time, I’ll put more ref and descriptions.
Latour: Anthropologist in the lab (1986)
Latour, B. (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press.
“concerns the way in which the daily activities of working scientists lead to the construction of scientific facts”
Chapter 2: An Anthropologist Visits the Laboratory
- literary inscription
- the culture of the laboratory
- documents and facts
Collins: Tacit Knowledge (1974)
Collins, H. (1974). The TEA set: Tacit knowledge and scientific networks. Science Studies, 165–185. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/284473
In Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, Collins develops a common conceptual language to bridge the concept’s disparate domains by explaining explicit knowledge and classifying tacit knowledge. Collins then teases apart the three very different meanings, which, until now, all fell under the umbrella of Polanyi’s term: relational tacit knowledge (things we could describe in principle if someone put effort into describing them), somatic tacit knowledge (things our bodies can do but we cannot describe how, like balancing on a bike), and collective tacit knowledge (knowledge we draw that is the property of society, such as the rules for language). Thus, bicycle riding consists of some somatic tacit knowledge and some collective tacit knowledge, such as the knowledge that allows us to navigate in traffic. The intermixing of the three kinds of tacit knowledge has led to confusion in the past; Collins’s book will at last unravel the complexities of the idea.
(http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo8461024.html)
Collins showed that Western laboratories long had difficulties in successfully replicating an experiment (in this case, measuring the quality, Q, factors of sapphire) which the team led by Vladimir Braginsky at Moscow State University had been conducting for twenty years. Western scientists became suspicious of the Russian results and it was only when Russian and Western scientists conducted the measurements collaboratively that the trust was reestablished. Collins argues that laboratory visits enhance the possibility for the transfer of tacit knowledge.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge)