Laboratory Life

The Construction of Scientific Facts

Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, Jonas Salk

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780691028323
  9780691094182
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400820412
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of science.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to Second Edition
• Dedication Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From Order to Disorder
• 2 An Anthropologist Visits the Laboratory
• Photograph File
• 3 The Construction of A Fact: The Case of TRF(H)
• 4 The Microprocessing of Facts
• 5 Cycles of Credit
• 6 The Creation of Order out of Disorder
• References
• Postscript to Second Edition (1986)
• Additional References
• Index