Technoscientific Imaginaries Fischer Marcus George

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George E. Marcus is professor of anthropology a tR ic e University. He is c oaut ho r o f

Anthropology as Cultural Critique

(University of Chicago Press,

1986)

and was the

inaugural editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago

60637

The University of Chi cago Press, Ltd., London

© 1995 by The University of Chicago

Ali rights reserved. Published 1995

Pr in ted in the United S tates of A rnerica

04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 I 2 3 4 5

ISBN: 0-226-50443-3 (c1oth)

0-226-50444-1

(paper)

ISSN: 1070-8987 (for Late Editions)

@The paper used in this publica tion mee ts the minimum requirements of the American

National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of P aper for Printed Library

Materiais, ANSI

Z39.48-1984.

c'1iJ-000

8

: l9

-. 10-6

Vil

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CONTENTS

Introduction

GEOR GE E. MARCUS

Scientists, Families, and Friends

11

1

Cornucopions of History: A Memoir of Sc ience and the

P ol it ic s o f P ri va te L iv es

L IV IA P O LÁNYI

13

2

E ye (I )i ng t he S cie nc es a nd T h ei r S ig ni fi ers (Language,

Tropes, Autobiographers): In terV ie win g fo r a

C ul tu ra l S tu dies o f S ci en ce a nd T ec hn ol og y

MICHAEL M . 1. FISCHER

43

Mind, Body, and Science

85

3

Twenty-first-Century PET: Looking for M ind and

Morality through the Eye of Technology

JOSEPH DUMIT

87

4

M edicine on the Ed ge: C onversations w ith O ncolo gists

MARY-J O D EL V E C CH IO G OO D , I RENE KUTE R, SIMON

PO W EL L, H ER BE RT C. HOOVER, JR ., M AR IA E .

C A RS O N, A N D R IT A L IN G G OO D

129

Science, Inc. 15 3

5

Re fle ctio ns o n F ieldw ork in A lam eda

P A UL R A B IN O W 15 5

6

In n oc en ce an d A wa ke nin g: C yb erdâmmerung at the

A sh ib e R es ea rc h L ab or at ory

ALLUCQUÉRE R O SA N N E S T ONE

17 7



viii

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

lX

7

Th e Wo r ld o f I nd u st ry -Un iv e rs it y-Gov e rnment:

A Look Forward:A Preview of Volume 3

52 5

R eim aginin g R &D as A meric a

8

I ma gi nin g I n-f or ma tio n: T he C om pl ex D is co nn ec ti on s

A RY L EE D OW N EY

19 7

o f C om pu te r N et wo rk s

52 7

rms and the Scientist

22 7

CHRISTOPHER POUND

8

T ru st b ut V eri fy : S ci en ce a nd P ol ic y N eg oti at in g

Contributors

54 9

uc le ar T estin g T re aties -In te rv iew s w ith

55 3

oger Eugene H ill

Index

D IA NA L. L . HILL

22 9

9

B eco min g a W eap on s S cien tist

HUGH GUSTERSON

25 5

Science and the Hope of Nations

27 5

R eh ab il it at in g S ci en ce, Imagining Bhopal

K IM LAUGHL IN

27 7

11

Of Beets-and Radishes: Desovietizing

L it hu an ia n S ci en ce

KATHRYN MILUN(AITIS )

3 3

12

A nd rz ej S ta ru sz kie wi cz , P hy sic is t

LESZEK KOCZANOWICZ

32 5

13

B ach iga i (O ut of P la ce) in Ib ara ki: T su ku ba S ci en ce

C it y, J ap an

SHARON TRAWEEK

35 5

Science Beheld

37 9

4

B i tt er F a it hs

K A T H LE EN S TE WA R T

38 1

5

C on fa bu la ti ng J ur as si c S ci en ce

MAR IO B IAG IOL

39 9

Discussions: Excerpts from the

Collective Editorial Meeting

43 3

A Look Backward: Perilous States Revisited

45 9

6

Ins urg en t U rb an ism : In tera ctiv e A rc hite cture a nd a

D ia lo gu e w it h C ra ig H od ge tt s

JAMESHOLSTON

46 1

7

K it h a nd K in i n B or de rl an ds

G U DR U N K L EI N

5 7



GEORGE E. MARCUS

INTRODUCTION

This is the second volume in a series of annuals, l as ting unt il the year 2000,

that is absorbed by end-of-the-century changes in society and culture world-

wide. It seeks a mode of exposing aspects of these changes to a general,

diverse readership that is both alternative and supplementary to the often pre-

emptory assimilation of events and experiences of contemporary social actors

through familiar categories employed by scholars, journalists, and others

whose task it is to explain and narrate the present world as i tunfolds. Indeed,

we are responding to what is certainly a widespread sense among even schol-

ars and exper ts that, more so than in the past, conceptual languages that are

available for describing social conditions and cultural states in various loca-

t ions are inadequate. And we believe that this sense of inadequacy of authori-

tat ive conceptual schemes has reached such a leveI that a simple denial or else

a mere hedged acknowledgment that imperfection is a standard condition of

describing or translating

any

si tuation wi ll no longer suff ice. Our wager i s

that staged and edited exposures of the words of persons in various strategic

sites of change will inform readers, who are willing to work through and

across the pieces in these volumes, in a way that not only supplements but

also therapeutical ly challenges the dominance of the authori tative concept or

theoretical construct of scholarly arguments.

We are not so much interested in producing conventional scholarly collec-

t ions in these annuals that intend to be comprehensive, authori tative, or even

representat ive in covering a field. Rather, each annual is a somewhat oppor-

tunistic assemblage around a broad theme that is intended to work primari ly

through the comparative resonance for readers of the materiaIs that are juxta-

posed. Thus our emphasis is upon the suggestion of unexpected or revealed

connections among clearly related subjects rather than the definit ive display

of systematic relat ionships that define a field, which is the much more usual

purpose of the scholarly collection.

The form that these volumes take is inspired partly by the wide-ranging



2

GEORGE E. MARCUS

ethnographic conversations of the anthropologist in the field with key in-

formants, and partly by the effectiveness for broad communication of the

journalistic interview or profile. We ask scholars of varied disciplinary back-

grounds (but with a heavy representation from anthropology) to provide such

relatively unmediated exposures of the embedded testimonies of subjects at

various sites and locations through the presentation of interviews, dialogues,

conversations, biographical profiles, and memoirs. Typically, interlocutors

and subjects heard from in this series will be the rough counterparts of the

participating, university-trained, middle-class scholars/correspondents who

produce pieces for these annuals, but otherwise in very different circum-

stances and from diverse backgrounds, embedded existentially in institu-

tional, geographical, and communal sites of distinctive transition andchange.

Of course, in this enterprise, how much is to be framed discursively by

authors, how much is to be exposed by dialogue, how much tolerance there

should be for loose ends -diffuse but interesting connections-are signa-

ture questions in producing pieces for this series that generate a constant ten-

sion for both its writers and readers. This genre aspect of the series is

nicelyexpressed in a comment by Michael Fischer, made at our collaborative

editorial meeting, on Kim Laughlin's piece included in this year's annual:

The whole point of the-what was the original word? entretien?-

was the notion that one could strategically position a conversation

with a person that would illuminate the larger context in which that

person lives and operates. The idea of presenting dialogue is not to

reinforce an ideology of authenticity to the spoken word or to the

interaction. Rather, the issue of context itself is indeed the central

questionoConversations are fascinating for the linkages they make

or suggest. Kim's text is so strong because of all the linkages it

makes-the way it brings us in, and its expansiveness is absolutely

crucial. Yet, at the same time, this speculative desire to see where

material takes us works against the notion of paring a piece down

through the focus on the dialogue itself, or on one particular aspect

ofthe text, or evena couple of aspects ofthe text. This is the visceral

tension of the problematic between careful framing and cutting and

letting the flow of conversation define its own often unanticipated

context that this whole series is trying to instantiate.

In Late Editions 1, Perilous

States,

the social actors focused upon were

caught up in traumatic ruptures of their societies. They were directly exposed

to events, unmediated by stable institutions, andtheir predicament wasthe

challengeof even imagining a futurein themidst of the reorganization of civil

societies. The fascination of these cases was perhaps in the details of the

uncertainty, the suspension into which these subjects were cast.

In this volume, the subjects of interviews andprofiles-scientists variously

INTRODUCTION

situated-are not asdirectly exposed to eventsof change. Rather, they expe-

rience the fin de siêcle within the routines of institutions and the frame of

rofessional practices, but that themselves are rapidly changing, and are in

fact the engines of long-term processes of change and innovation. This is thus

a very different set of predicaments for subjects, and overall, another angle

on this fin de siecle than that produced in Late Editions 1.

The various kinds of ambiguous and new locations for scientific work and

the ~sues these raise for subjects who no longer are doing science as usual

(or at least, as scientificcareers and practices might have occurred to them in

training or earlier in their professional lives) are what come through most

strongly in the papers of this volume, and consti~utet?e broad frame in whic?

we invite readers to create their own comparatrve, m-depth play of aSSOCl-

ations among the following profiles and interviews-for example, weapons

scientists at the end of the cold war;Lithuanian scientists set free of the Soviet

system and facing a strange, new world of multinational technoscience; the

creation of brave new science cities; V.S. scientists shaped less by the lab or

the university, but more directly than ever by the heady, creative, competitive

business of technology-driven capitalism, taking new forms where the scien- li

tist/businessman is now at the corporate center; scientist-become-activists at

the site of an environmental disaster; the lure of computer images for PET

scientists; the binds created for oncologists and patients by constantly emerg-

ingregimes of truth in medical science, andthe bittersweet retrospective view

of all of this-this world of largely bubble-boy science-by certain old-

world, older generation scientists.

In initial discussions about doing a Late Editions treatment of fin-de-siecle

conditions of work in science and technology, the term

Íwaginaly;

~m~rged

effortlessly and just seemed to fit the topic very well. Iíh lfik this might

have been because of immediate associations of scientific practice with the

visual, or imaging, on one hand, andwith visionary, innovative, imagi-

nation, on the other-an orientation to imagining futures and the fantastic.

Indeed, visualization has always been a defining aspect of Western scientific

c~on, and especially now with the increasing prominence of computer

graphics and simulation around which there has arisen a varied and intricate

microaesthetics of the visual.

As this volume has turned out, however, the technoscientific imaginaries

we have in mind here do not quite conform to either of the above senses

(although there are strong and representative papers on imaging in this vol-

ume, by Joseph Dumit, for example, and several of the papers do deal with

the imaginary in the large visionary sense). Indeed, there were questions at

our collective editorial meeting about what the predicaments of scientists

e..u~t in social changes-of forms of government, or of industry-had to

dowiththe imaginary. Such questions entailed a view of the imaginary which



4

GEORGE E. MARCUS

would place contemporary technoscient if ic thought on a h igher p lane of

pure ideas, f or example , juxtaposing the ref lec tive, visiona ry thoughts of

scientists to, say, contemporary or classical philosophy, on one side, and the

imaginat ion of science-f ic tion writ ers on the o ther. While this would have

been an interest ing t reatment of the theme of the imaginary in contemporary

science, we instead were much more interested in the imaginaries of scientists

t ied more closely to their current posit ionings, practices, and ambiguous 10-

cations in which the varied kinds of science they do ar e possible a t alI. This

is a socially and culturally embedded sense of the imaginary that indeed looks

to the future and future possibi li ty through technoscientific innovation but is

equalIy constrained by the very present conditions of sc ientific work. The

imaginary filIs in the cognitive gap and tension that the widespread perceived

inadequacy of working pract ices and concept s create with in so many inst itu -

tions and professions today.

This is indeed the notion of the imaginary tha t fits with the pe rvasive f in-

de-siêcle condi tion to which th is series sees i tsel f responding-of ten s logan-

ized as a crisis of representat ion, the fact that available discursive formations

fai l experiences of the present. Whereas the social actors in Late Editions 1

are currently blocked by traumatic polit ical events in even developing imagi-

naries in which they can inves t bel ief, those of Late Edi tions 2 are constant ly

trying to unders tand the present by borrowing from a cautious ly imagined

emergent future, f il Ied with vola ti lity, and uncer ta in ty , bu t in which fai th in

pract ices of technoscience become even more complexly and in terest ing ly

constructed in new locations of doing science.

The idea of the imaginary as s tructures of cont ingency, then, is what we

mostly have in mind in the fol lowing chapters. Our interest in the imaginary

is in how it is constituted at distinctively ambiguous fin-de-siêcle locat ions of

various kinds of scientific practice in their fulIy embedded social and cultural

contexts. This volume probes such locations in its diverse interviews, refíec-

tions, and profiles.

Note on a Retrodesign for the Reading of This Volume

I see no way of myself providing a distanced metaintegration of the folIowing

materiaIs, and thus I have avoided the conventional sort of introductory effort

to summarize themes or pick out unifying concepts for the reade r. Rat~er,

more in the specula tive spi rit o f the ser ies it se lf , we offer readers another ~md

of engagement that will substitute for the authoritative, unifying introductl~n,

common to col Iections : t ranscr ibed and edi ted excerpts f rom the col lective

editor ia l meeting in which earlier drafts of the folIowing pieces were ~is-

cussed. These substitute for the more conventional thematic integration which

the reader, after going through the papers, wilI be prepared to engage with-

INTRODUCTION 5

agreeing, disagreeing, noting gaps, offering different takes, personalIy sum-

ming up what connect s these papers, in the same way that the part ic ipan ts a t

this meeting did in their discussions.

Thus , we in tend the set of edi ted d iscuss ions fol lowing the papers to serve

as a deferred introduction, or , so to speak, a retroduction to the volume. For

example, Hugh Gusterson's crit ical d iscuss ion of Diana Hil I' s conversat ion

with her father , a physic is t in the communi ty of nuclear weapons scien ti st s,

and then Kim Laughlin's discussion of Guste rson's own explora tion of his

ethnographic work in th is community poses wide-ranging questions about the

ambigui ti es of such scien ti fi c careers that any reader wil l want to think about

in light of what he or she might have encountered in a f irst, inev it ab ly selec-

tive reading through of the dive rse contributions to this volume. And then,

in turn, cer ta in more synthet ic par ts of the d iscuss ions from the colIective

editorial meeting, like, for ins tance, the extended commentar ies of Sharon

Traweek on the quali ties of relat ionships in technoscientific communities and

networks, and of Paul Rabinow on the idea of biosociality, serve to further

contextuaJize or thematicalIy integrate other excerpted discussion fragments

like those of Gusterson, HilI, and Laughlin. This edited discussion section as

a whole is thus intended to serve as a thematic guide to the volume which

requires active response s from readers who have a lready had some degree

of famili ar ity with the materiaIs and their own impress ions of associa tions

among them. The discussions of the contributors about their chapte rs as a

k ind of retroduction are included in the volume to serve as the major inte-

grating device that i s normalIy expected of col Iections, even as diverse as

this one.

o ddi tional genda of This Particular Volume

While the parti cipant s in th is volume are at various s tages of their careers ,

have a variety of d isc ip linary backgrounds, and vary greatly in their research

interests, they share a kind of common identity inrelation to the STS (science,

technology, and society) field, the quite vigorous, multidisciplinary enter-

prise, institut ionali zed in academic depar tments in such U.S. univers it ies as

UeLA, the University of California at San Diego, MIT, RPI, and the Univer-

si ty of Pennsylvania , as wel l as various cen ters in Europe, that i s devoted to

the social studies of sc ience . Powered by a critic al position in re lation to

~rceptions of science a s neutral, objective, and hermetic-as the sacraliza-

t~onof rationality and moderni ty -th is f ie ld has made substan ti al cont ribu-

tIons in demonstrat ing the social constructedness of scientific cognition, and

the social embeddedness of scientists' careers and insti tutions. However, al-

m?s t in seek ing the r igor of scien ti fi c method i tse lf, these social s tudies of

SClencehave been ra ther forma l and nar row in per spec tive, favoring, for





8

)

GEORGE E. MARCUS

And it is certa inly no accident that the urge to expand the range of the

contexts of scientific activity probed by critical scholars of science is gener-

ated by the parallel kinds of changes afoot in the conditions of scientific wo~k

themselves. These are not unrelated to the nature of changes among those m

the social sciences and humanities motivated to pursue research on the physi-

cal and biological sciences. This series is indeed founded on such identi-

fications between interviewers and interlocutors, and further, on hoped-for

identifications between the resulting conversations and the readers of these

volumes.

A

Look Backward Perilous States Revisited

One

of the features of this series will bethe revisiting of the themes of earlier

volumes in later ones. Wewager that there will alwaysbe a context for so

doing, since our speculation is that the comparative resonances within.single

volumes will extend among all the volumes and will be most specifically

apparent in the revisiting sections such as this one. But as n~ted in La~e

Editions 1, the particular concern of

Perilous States-the

remaking of ~OC.I-

eties in the midst of great changes in long-standing political orders-wIll m

various guises be especially thematic for the entire series. The quite variable

relevance of nation-state organization in constituting contemporary social and

institutional orders at different locations, defined by geography, history, and

specific activities, isthe large' fin-de-siêcle issue that will take many forms

and replay many times through the quite diverse sites and concerns ~f the

social subjects expressed in these annuals. It is the revelatory ~ays and m.the

unexpected idioms that this large issue keeps reappearing m the matenals

of this series that give the latter its special cogency.

Both Jim Holston's interview with Craig Hodgetts and Gudrun Klein's

autobiographical reflection on her experience of postwar Germa~y in light.of

witnessingaspects of reunificationhave direct and obvious back-linkages w~th

the concerns ofLateEditions 1, but they shouldequally have resonances with

this volume. Holston's interview in particular extends technoscience imagi-

naries to the prospects for urban planning in Los Angeles, a site famous for

inspiring apocalyptic visions in fiction (for example, Nathan~elWest's Day of

the Locusts)

but also in fact, given the events of 1992which are the back-

ground for the probing of the contemporary predicamen~ of .the ~cientific

imaginary of planning in this unimaginable-or else multiply Imagmable-

city. Klein's piece, while far from the concerns of technosclence: resonates

with the memoir genre through which the lives of scientists are being probed

(for example, in Fischer's and Polányi's pieces) as a primary means of new

accessto how scientific activity is deeply embedded in culture.

INTRODUCTION

9

Look Forward a Preview of Late Editions3

Volume 3 of this series will concern fin-de-siêcle transformations in media,

especially visual media (the broad and varied uses of video technology,

changes in television, and the appearance of new film industries), computer

communication (the spread of the Net,' bulletin boards, and so on, and the

kinds of personal involvements and consequences for societies that this tech-

nology has engendered), and the interfaces between the two in the current

imaginingsand actual productions of virtual phenomena. A focus on media is

of course another way of getting at perilous states while touching again

upon technoscientific imaginaries. Just as Late Editions I presented social

subjects in unmediated existential relationships to traumatic, rapid events of

change in the organization of civil societies, and as Late Editions 2, in con-

trast, presented social subjects securely situated professionally within foun-

dational technoscientific institutions of modernity as the very engines of

innovation and change that are being reconfigured in uncertain and unex-

pected ways, so Late Editions 3 will present yet another set of fin-de-siêcle

locations, but which deal withthe

mediations

of events and structural changes

to social subjects themselves. That is, increasingly routinized channels of

communication through which (mostly middle-class) people daily participate

in great structural changes. Such global changes get expressed in and become

increasingly an integral part of the everyday lives of persons through new

technologiesof communication and visualization that have become for users

extensions of the body and self-identification.

As a preview of Late Editions 3, we include here a piece by an avid Net-

worker,at once skeptical, soberly realistic, playful, and committed, about the

~echa~istic extension of himself in which he seems inexorably and reflec-

tively mvolved. This might be the most perilous state of ali.



S C I E N T I S T S F M I L I E S

N D F R I E N D S

These contributions present the lives of scienti st s in the contexts of fami ly

relations and of historic shifts fil tered through the poignancy of generational

transitions. Livia Polányi's family memoi r connects U.S. science of this

fin-de-siêcle with European science of the previous one through the mature

perspect ive of the remarkable scientis ts in her family. Michael Fischer 's con-

tribution, which argues for the value of autobiography in the cultural s tudies

of science, does much the same as Polányi's in his assessment of his own

mother's autobiography, among others.



LIVIA POLÁNYI

1

CORNUCOPIONS OF HISTORY:

A MEMOIR OF SCIENCE ANO THE POLlTICS

OF PRIVATE L1VES

Cornucopions provide a way to duck the paradox engendered by

losing the information forever. It's a very fine

line;

said Dr.

Strominger, between saying that the information is lost, and say-

ing it's gone into a region of space-time where you'Il neve r get it

again.

I

\

Reading and Writing the Douhle Biography

I do not read very much for pleasure these days. Sometimes I feel as though

I read so much in my childhood and adolescence that I need my adult years

to absorb all of those words, those images, metaphors, and narratives of oth-

ers. In particular, I never read about the war. I never read about the bomb.

About the cold war. I never read about the Holocaust but I have read almost

every book about the Holocaust. I never admit that I am reading them. I stand

for hours in book stores denying that I am reading, but, when I leave the

shop, the book is no longer unread. One reason I can not read about the war

is that there is no new information about the war. It was all there. In the

newsreels, in my American-born mother's late evening conversations, in the

stories of borders, visas, exit permits, entrance visas, transit visas, temporary

visas, denied visas. But I did read one book this past summer. My father was

visiting me and we both read it:

Lawrence and Oppenheimer,

by Nuel Pharr

Davis, a double biography of Ernest O. Lawrence, father of the cyc1otron,

an.d1. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project. We fought over

this book, actually, very politely appropriating it when the other turned away

for a moment and affecting great ignorance when asked about the where-

~bouts of The Book. It had a hypnotic effect on us.? My life story, seemingly

m place, solid, became ftuid and ill def ined once again. I began to interro-

gate my father's ife, my uncle 's life, and ultimately my own ife-as lives

of scientists, lives shaped by the passions and the politics of the scientific



14

LIVIA POLÁNYI

microcosm and the external context of national and transnational poli tics in

which science functions.

Geminates

Big Science carne into being in the Uni ted States during the Second World

War. The Manhattan Project devoured money, men, materiais, and ideas and

produced the atomic bomb, a gol em which first poisoned the sands of the

Nevada desert and later transformed two Japanese cities to evocations of hor-

ror. A double biography of two lives in Big Physics is the topic of

Lawrence

and Oppenheimer,

the book which hovers in the background of this double

biography of two men in physics, my father and his brother , two trained

nuclear physicians who did not work on the Project.

My father and his brother. I am not an impartial reporter. Perhaps I can not

be t rusted to evaluate the relevance of thei r s tories to deepening our under-

standing of the nature of practicing science, the nature of the construc tion of

his tory, the nature of the product ion of biography, the nature of our centu:y.

The stories of these two men of physics will not be told as stories of physics

but as a story of this century, our dying century, this century of borders and

emigrés, the Holocaust, the Bomb, the Communist Experiment, and in the

arts, in physics, the social sciences and the humanities, the century of explor-

ing the inescapable determinacy of the position of the observer.

Two Brothers

My father and his brother were born in Hungary and grew up in fascist I taly.

They carne to the United Sta tes in 1942. For nearly ha lf a century, my father ,

trained as a theoretical physicist in Rome under Enrico Fermi, worked in rural

Massachusetts in the research laboratory of a prominent optical company de-

veloping medical instruments, primarily equipment for use in cardiology. His

brother, trained also by Fermi in the Institute of Physics at Rome, also work~d

in commercial research laboratories in New York and Massachusetts, first m

mass spect roscopy and la te r in laser physics. He toa made cont r~but ions ~o

medicine and is credited as the father of laser surgery for his work m

adapting laser technology for use in otolaryngology and gynecology. The t ' : 'o

men are now reti red. They l ive together with my uncle's wife in the woods m

a large wooden house at the top of a hill , with walls of glass facing the view.

There is a wood stove and a large open fireplace in the living room, and

everywhere there a re rugs: kazakhs, bokharas, ivory Chinese rugs with Chi-

nese blue in their ivory fields; runners, prayer rugs, wall rugs, and large rect-

angular room rugs on top of which the furni ture s its . There is a large garden.

My uncle gardens. He does the errands. He takes care of the others. He

CORNUCOPIONS OF HISTORY

15

d

a g

reat deal of time in his study where he is wr iting a history of laser

spen s . . .

Y

My father reads and reads and sleeps. He

IS

working on a new

surger .

invention.

The two brothers look very much al ike. People have found the resemblance

canny at times . Once they were confused about who was who themselves.

~alking down a long cor ridor in a hotel in Chicago each saw himself in the

irror walking towards him. The reftect ion grew larger the ciose r the mirror

carne. Halfway down the corridor, the image assumed i ts ful l s ize. I t was the

other, of course. Nei ther had real ized his brother would also be at the meet -

ing. They resemble each other closely, but they are actual ly ve:y diffe rent in

presentation. One is immaculate: neat ly dressed, perfectly coiffed, dapper,

and somewhat elegant. The other has never taken care wi th his appearance.

His clothes are casually assembled, often s tained from working on the car, in

the wood shop, in the lab. Not unl ike Lawrence and Oppenheimer, they are

forever bound together as much by thei r differences from one another as by

their common loves and concerns. But these twins have not entered the annals

of science or the pages of history. The Hungarian brothers pursuing thei r

lives, out of the tempest of Big Science made small but not insignificant

contributions. They understood the applicability of theoretical physics to

problems of medical diagnosis and t rea tment-as did Lawrence-and they

were never important targets for antileftist attacks, unlike Oppenheimer. Had

they been part of the Manhattan Project, would their lives have been very

different? In time, we wi ll speculate about those other l ives, those subjuncti-

va i l ives of these two men, in time, af ter we have told the story of the lives

that we wil l tell as if, indeed, these were the l ives that these two men did l ive.

On Voice and Language

A friend asked i f my father, my uncle, the other characters in this account

would speak in their own voices? The answer was no, I knew, not really.

The conce it of di rect speech is a li but unavailable to me. Much of my work

as a scientist involves artifacts constructed from attempts to capture natural

speech. Every um, every gulp, every detai l of the ta lk's prosody, each overlap

of ~ore than one speaker talking at once , every gesture wi th the hand, each

facial expression, or shift in body position or eye gaze direction is to find its

place, its meaning in the record, to reveal i ts s igni ficance in analysis. They

d~ not, of course. The transcripts do not reenact, let alone recreate, the situ-

at lOn?f the fragile moment. But the direct quota tion complete with verbs of

~esa.ld

and

she said

and off-line commentary about speech volume or attitude

IS

pamful to me. It is a tool which has been ali but eliminated from texts

which I write. While reading, I can barely read dia logue. The artifice humili-

ates me. I can not write it.





18

LIVIA POLÁNYI

his prosody, his syntax, he would have no voice. With his lexicon, his

prosody, his syntax, he would walk these pages into his tory as a caricature,

an absurd ventriloquist's dummy outfitted in ill-f itt ing paludaments of a lan-

guage he has never owned. As he could not cry out in pain over a broken

toe, Ihink in these pages h~ will rather remain silent, mumbling something

occasionally, which Iwill t ranslate to the reader. The voices of others will

whisper as well.

Language and Science

Ii rs t experienced my father as a scienti st some years ago when Iannounced

to him my intention of becoming a linguist. Knowing that Ihad no great

interest in ancient languages or, in fact , in modern languages per se, he was

concerned. You become what you do every day. He wanted to know what his

daughter was going to do every day, what she was going to become. He asked

me exactly what a linguist did. I gave him the standard reply. A linguist is a

scienti st who studies the st ructure of language in general, and, quite often,

specializes in the problems of one or another aspect of one particular lan-

guage. He looked puzzled. What sort of a science is linguistics? he

asked.

Science

was a term reserved for the systematic investigation of

natural

phenomena

and, he argued, linguistics can not be a natural science since

language does not exist in nature apar t from the human beings who use it.

Thus, he reasoned, language was an art ifact of human construct ion and not a

preexisting natural object. Language was thus like art and not like physics,

and linguist ics i s thus a humani ty concerned wi th exploring a human repre-

sentat ional scheme and not a science concerned wi th forces and structures

existing independent1y of human participation.

My father spoke of science with passion and conviction as a category of

activity not rooted in the social, the conventional. I was taken aback. In my

father's family, the talk was of politics not science. The conversation was

radical, amused, leftist , aloof, the analytical, cynical, pessimistic, absolute

moral conversation of the European fellow traveler. At breakfast, at lunch, at

dinner, Iying in the sun by the Lake, in the car, discussion of the events of

the day, events in the past, events in the future was our talk: a decades-Iong

moral disquisi tion on his tory and there is no history, my father said, but the

present. Science was not discussed; applied physics was practiced. At break-

fast, at lunch, at dinner, lying in the sun by the Lake, inthe car my father and

his brother sketched designs for apparatus and constructed sequences of equa-

t ions wi th long divisors, capita l and smal l roman let ters, deltas and sigmas.

My father has a lways told me, there is no his tory but present his tory; the re

can be no story of these men of their science, their lives or their polit ics that

is not the story of the teller. My work as a linguist has been concerned with

s tories , wi th exploring constraints on the s tory as told which arise from ihe


19

I

. uistic, social, and cultural forces present at the moment of telling. This

mg

· 1 d

wi

h I

t

ry

is thus necessan y an wit out apo ogy my own story, the story of a

So

family member, a wom~n, a scientist , a daughter, a wife, a political and social

c tor a mother, a l inguis t, a speaker and an act of speaking, a point in space-

~me defined by the physical , the social , the cultural , and the l inguis tic. This

essay, thus. about science, about politics, about my father, his brother, about

this

century and its events--the Communist trajectory, the Bomb, and the

Holocaust, which together resulted in the invention of genocide and the de-

velopment of a discourse of positioning-this present history is both an ex-

plorat ion and a chronicle of two men, one family, several other s and the

politics and science of the twentieth century. It is my history, her story as she

tells it

now

as a flat-weave rug, a kilim of many colored threads, many pat-

terns, many conjunctions. Without a clear center, a clear point which her

science tells her is a central requirement of appropriate storytelling, this flat-

weave is a gif t of the story of one generationset in one century to be passed

on to a next generation, which will learn to read it sometime in the future

when the century has turned and this time of present s torytel ling has i tse lf

become history.

Two Lives

in

Science

My father, I know, is a scientist. My mother uses the word with pride. A

physicist, she says carefully. He works in a laboratory. He calls it the

lab.

Iam curious about what a scienti st i s, what a physicist i s.

The physicist. She may have learned the word from the newsreels, made

the word her own from newspapers,

Life

magazine, the movies. For my fa-

ther, physics was a second choice. He had wanted to be an engineer. When

he~ent to register for the universi ty in Rome, he first tr ied to enroll in engi -

neenng. There was a

numerus clausus

in effect and, because he was a Jew,

hewould not be allowed to s tudy engineering. He tr ied physics . The line was

shorter, He enrolled. Immediately, he knew he was a physicist. He would

never have liked being an engineer.

He studied physics. Fermi , the grea t professor of the Inst itute of Physics ,

~ught the first-year course. Hundreds sat in the big hall to hear his opening

ectures. Few understood a word he said. He lectured to the few who could

understand him A th

f

th ..

s e year wore on, fewer and fewer students a ttended. My

hi

er got his degree in physics working with Fermi on cosmic rays. He had

~s kwork.He loved physics like everyone who was in awe of Fermi. Fermi.

e new 3 In addití hi .

and . . I íon to IS work m the lab, he spent a great deal of his time,

anf ~uc~ of his passion, with his friends, a small but very active group of

hi

1-

ascisi Communist intellec tuals . His brother a few years younger joined

rnatthl·

Th e nstJtute and in the laboratory.

e two Hungarian brothers did what young atomic physicist s did in those



20

LIVIA POLÁNYI


21

days at the Ins titute of Phys ics unt il they s igned on as deckhands on a Yugo-

slav fre ighter and lef t I ta ly in 1941. My father' s farewel l to the Inst itu te : the

porter tells him not to worry about the war. Fermi, the, man said, jerking

his thumb back up a t the building. The old man's got a pill. Don't worry

about the war. Fermi's got a pill.

My fa ther enjoyed the tr ip. He didn't worry about the war. He read and

slept. My uncle worked hard. 1 never heard if he enjoyed the trip. After a

week-Iong stop at Ellis Island, f orbidden to ente r the United S ta te s, they

sai led on to Cuba and jumped sh ip in Havana. My uncle found a j ob in a high

school teaching English. My fathe r spent his time in the cafe s talking about

politics, meeting the leftists, the radicais, the opposit ion of the capital. Soon

after arr iv ing in Cuba, he met Verdi 's grandson, an anarchi st. My father con-

fe ssed his regret at not having gone to Spain to fight aga inst F ranco. Ve rdi

laughed. The Stalin ist s would have kill ed you as soon as you got there , he

said. They kil l everyone who's not a Stalinist. I had not thought so before

but when he told me I knew immediately. What he was saying was right.

The next day my father went to Havana's Communist Par ty headquarters and

began to read, to hold in hi s hands and see the newspapers and repor ts forbid-

den in Mussolini's Italy. He read decades of Pravda, Communist communi-

qués, Comintern propaganda. A few days in the archives were enough. He

emerged a convinced anti-Stalinist. He did not worry about the war. Stalinism

was the t*eat to a Communis t I ta ly. He ta lked , he read, he argued: he needed

to get back to I ta ly, to warn his friends.

I t would be a long t ime before the Hungarian bro thers returned to visit the

country where they had been brought into exi le in 1919 . By the t ime my father

found his friends again they were building the Italian Communist Party, a new

Communist world. Today those fri ends who are s ti lll iving remain powerfu l

in the de-Stalinized, refurbished, Euro-Communist I ta li an Par ty . The par ty

they founded and guided for half a cen tury.

. fi tial and fiercely nationalist ic, many Hungarian Jews changed their

lfl

uen , . H· di . h

r

h or Russian patronyrrucs to more unganan soun mg names m t e

Po

IS

before the First World War. Thus d id Polachek emerge from the Pol ish

ye:~ussian shtet ls and enter Budapest society as Polányi. And though no one

be ing the name current ly l ives in Hungary, in Budapest, intellectuals today

de~te the thoughts of the two well-known Polányis, Karl and Michael, the

brothers of

my

grandfather, Adolf.

Karl, the eldest brother, was acknowledged to be the brilliant one. He is

ometimes known as the sociologist and sometimes as the economist. My

~atherhas always marvel led that he wrote a whole book about socia li sm with-

out mentioning socialism or Karl Marx by name. 1 don't know if that is true.

I have never read The Great Transformation. Michael was the younges t sono

In

the family, he was not conside red particula rly bright and was left to his

own devices. He became a medical doctor, a physical chemist, a well-known

philosopher, and the father of a Nobel Prize winner. He wrote several books.

His best known book, Personal Knowledge, is on my list. For some reason,

I find it unbearable to read the works of the se men.

My grandfather , who had a knack for languages, studied law, was deeply

interested in economics, became a journalist, and was in Yokohama at the

time of the great earthquake in 1906 . Whi le inJapan he wrote a bri ll iant shor t

monograph on the Japanese economy, and many, many years later, when my

father surprised me by eating with chopsticks with great proficiency, I learned

that my grandfather had taught his children to eat in the Japanese fashion at

anearly age. I can not imagine the scene as they ate with thei r eat ing s ti cks.

My grandmother had little sense of humor and none whatsoeve r where table

manners are concerned. Even today my uncle prefers to eat lobster with a

knife and fork as much as he cano Their mother was a superb cook in the

Austro-Hungarian tradition. Her delicious potatoes and perfectly fried Wiener

schnitzel were hardly suitable for eating in the oriental manner.

There was one Polányi sister, Laura, cal led Mousie by the fami ly . She was

the first woman to graduate f rom university in Budapes t and became a histo-

rian. In the early 1950s, on a trip to visit one of her sons who had returned to

Hungary from the United States aft er the war, she di scovered the d iary John

Smith had kept while a prisoner of the Turks. She thus became renowned

among American historians, and, c iting the need to cont inue her f ru it fu l re-

searches, was able to t ravei back and for th between New York and Budapest

during the years when traveI was ali but forbidden-by both s ides -bring ing

to her f iercely Communist son and daughter-in-Iaw the penicil lin, oranges,

~w~ered baby formula , and English de tec tive novels necessary to make

1 e m that ravaged city reasonably comfortable even for staunch members of

the Party.

Mousie had an exquisite speaking voice and an enchanting manner which

Origins

My father, my uncle, and I are among less than ten living individua Is bom

with the name Polányi. No one named Polányi has lived in Hungary for al-

most seventy years. We a re ali in the English-speaking world: Canada, the

United States, and England. Yet the name remains an importan t one in Hun-

gary even today. Recently, Hunga rian TV a ired a one-hour documentary

about the family with wel l-known Hungarian actors reading from family let -

ters against backdrops of youthful great-grandparents and dead aunts. Beyond

history, the program retel ls a contemporary story.

Hungarian Jewish inte ll ec tual s have been at the cen ter of the cul tu ra l e li te

in Budapest since the turn of the century. Always described as wealthy,



22

LIVIA POLÁNYI

made anyone with whom she spoke feel specially treasured, fascinating, the

center of the universe. She used all of her charm and her many connections

in 1937 to extricate her daughter fr om a S talinist prison. He r daughter re-

turned the favor soon after, using he r great beau ty and powerful presence to

persuade the British Red Cross to move heaven and earth to get her mother

released from the Nazis. Mousie was a great beauty even in her seventies

when I first knew her. Among the socially desirable beautiful Jewish wornen

of ~u~apest, her only r ival for physicalloveliness was my grandmother, the

Soc.Jahst daughter of the owner of the first Fr ench laundry in the Hungarian

capItal. My grandfather pursued her v igorously. For years she refused his

advances. My grandfather wrote to her often from Japan and they marr ied

afte.r his return. Dur ing his absence she led her own employees out on strike

agamst her parents. My own mother, an I ta lian-American born in New York

City, who owned a successful factory during the war had similar values-she

~nsisted that her workers join the union, she wouldn't employ nonunion labor

m her shop. My grandmother was also a public act iv ist. She served as the

Hungarian delegate to the First Women 's Internat ional Socia lis t Convention

~nVienna, where she caught the eye of Angelika Balibanov, one of the most

lmporta~t figures of the Russian Revolution. Balibanov carne to I ta ly soon

after bemg ~lowed to leave Russia in the 1920s and carne to visit the f amily

settled then m Rome, where they had gone after leaving Hungary in 1919.

My grandfather, a mini st er for Béla Kun, had had to leave immediately after

the fal l of the revolutionary government. Like all of the functionaries of that

E~stern European commune, he fled f irst to Vienna by the Orient Express. In

Vienna, half of the tra in went East to Russia, half to the West. Those who

went East ftourished for some yea rs and then were swallowed by the purges;

~hose who went West spread out across the world, a thin red diaspora whose

mftuence has far exceeded thei r numbers or the relat ive insignificance of the

Central European nation from which they carne.

My grandfather and his wife and four childr en went to Ita ly. The family

wa~ moved to a small white house in Castel Gandolfo, the Pope's summer

res idence on Lago Albano. Castello was a paradise for the two boys, the

younger children. They swam and hiked and ran with the village children.

When my grandmother first went swimming in the lake, a rumor spread that

~ circus was in town. Swimming ladies inrurall ta ly were not a common sight

just

af ter the Great War, whi le in Hungary and Aus tr ia, which were in the

grip of a massive physical culture fad along with much of northern Europe, a

woman who did not swim was not considered truly modern, and my grand-

mother, a Socialist and advocate of wornen's rights, was quite the modero

woman. Her polit ical convictions did not stop her from waiting on her chil-

dren and husband and even on my grandfather and his second wife when they

visited us many years la ter in New York.


23

My grandfather worke.d as an engineer, a civil engineer of some sort. He

ok the train everyday mto Rome from Castello and returned home in the

~~ening. Eventually he did = return home but moved t~ Genoa to be with

the heavy-featured young Viennese woman who became his second wife. Af-

ter [iving in Genoa for many years, but quite before any unpleasantness in

Europe, he moved to Brazil with his bride where he designed boilers for

steam-powered electrical generation plants. His f irst wife and four children he

abandoned to their fa te . All eventually survived the war. Soon after the end

ofhosti ities, my grandmother and my father's eldest sister arrived in Chicago

after several years in South America. My grandmother remembered the flocks

of flying wild flamingos, pink clouds in the jungle sky; my aunt remembered

being lonely and poor and frightened. A trained doctor, she had supported her

mother and herself working in a hospital in Paraguay performing full medical

duties for the wage of an aide.

There was a second daughter as well. A beautiful young woman but heavy,

indolent, she had returned to Hungary soon after the family evacuated to Italy

and later married a young man who died in the street, shot to death by the

Germans in front of her eyes. She survived the war in Budapest as many

Hungarian Jews did-somehow-and eventually moved to Brazil herself af-

ter the war ended. She never needed to work. She was supported for the rest

of her ife by pens ions from the German and Soviet governments which had

commandeered her comfortable apartment in Pest's fashionable thirteenth dis-

trict at different times in the 1940s. She and my grandfa ther both lived in

Brazil, but they were not very dose, I think. They l ived in d if ferent c ities and

did not see one another often. My aunt lived on her pensions, my grand-

father supported himsel f th rough designing high-pressure steam generation

equipment.

I know a bit about bo ilers and a bit about engineering. My first husband,

now the curator of power machinery at a large museum, specialized in steam

technology. I l earned from him that generating steam is not easy. Boilers

must be des igned to specific tolerances and turbines must be crafted to fit

perfect l~ on their site in power generat ion facil it ies, and then must actually

do .the Job-heating up large quantit ies of water to very hot temperatures

whí h' . '

I c lS then piped as ste am to spin the blades of the turbine. I know how

carne .to know this but I cannot imagine how my grandfather managed

to acquue even this much arcane knowledge, let alone the real expe rtise

needed to carry out the task of boiler designo For me, even today, this remains

one of the m teri fi .

Bél ys enes o iving by your wits. How th is lawyer and minis ter of

a Kun learned to des ign boilers for electrical generation plants is still

~~t ~~lt~e deep secr.ets of my family's history. No one else has ever found

at ali. dd. I somehmes wonder if any of these stories ever really happened





26

LIVIA POLÁNYI

sian s tatues which I remember s tar ing down on me from the tal l bookcase in

the study when I would sleep over on visits to my uncle's home a few years

later. By then he lived in Bayside, in Queens, and was working in physics

on

mass spectroscopy at Sylvania Research Labs. He was approached about get-

ting a securi ty c learance. Nothing carne of i t. My father was not approached.

The situation was serious. The House Un-American Activities Committee and

McCarthy were abroad in the land. The promised land. America. There was

no place else to go.

The two brothers worked in indust rial laboratories . My father put away his

books, hiding them in cardboard boxes to be stored with my mother's rela-

tives in the Bronx, on Long Island, the volumes of histories of the Communist

Party of the Soviet Union, the wri tings of Bukharin, Trotsky, and Lenin, the

novels by James T. Farrel l and other progressive writers. The FBI vis ited.

They interviewed my mother. They interviewed the neighbors. Theyappeared

at the lab in Norwalk, Connect icut, where my father was working for Ameri-

can Optical. They carne and they went. My father and mother separated. I

learned f rom my mother deep in the night about the camps, about the Holo-

caust. Stalin died. My grandfather carne to visit from South America. He

brought my mother a geranium. There were arguments about Stalin. There

were discuss ions of the hearings . My father continued to work at American

Optical. He moved with the lab to Southbridge, Massachusetts. He lived on

a lake. Like my father who grew up on Lago Albano so many years ago, I

passed my summers, too, at the Lake. Reading and reading and reading the

books which appeared rehabil itated on the bookshelves released from the

boxes hidden in Long Island and the Bronx.

I remember especial ly the t ranscripts of the Doctors' Trial in Moscow and

the books and short stories by American black writers. I read most American

proletarian literature and began to explore the volumes of history and politics

and sociology which grew and grew almost as I read. Dreyfus, gulag prison

guards, the Scottsboro Boys, Father Divine, S tuds Lonigan, Ange lika Bali -

banov, the Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution, the Knights of

Malta, the Medicis, Cotton Mather along with Nancy Drew and Freud bor-

rowed from the local l ibrary accompanied me eventual ly onto the dock and

competed for my attention with the fish which could be seen through the

cracks between the boards swimming in the clear water. We both read. My

father and I. We never discussed what I was reading. We discussed politics.

history, this strange place, America. Sometimes we talked about fiber optics

and how you could use these strange new devices to understand the process~s

of the human body. Then my father would begin to draw on the edges of hís

newspaper with a leaky cartridge pen and I would understand something about

the wavelength and differential absorption, but not much.

When his brother carne to visit as he did every summer for a few days,


27

. n n g

down by the Lake between swims there would be more talk and more

SltI . . h 1 fif . h . . 1 1

d more talk. At one pomt m t e ate ties t e conversanon grew especia y

~cited. My father and his brother talked and talked in English and I talian,

metimes in Spanish, they ta lked through the night, through breakfast and

the dinners we ate each evening outs ide by the Lake bringing down the meal

carefully cooked in the kitchen, the dishes , glasses, cutlery, napkins and

tablecloth and then carrying all back upstairs again after an espresso, Chico?

Qne day when my uncle was there Eli carne over. On a beauti ful Sunday

aftemo

on

, he carne to the Lake alone, without bringing Shir ley, his wife, and

the

five children over to swim. Eli, a bri ll iant physicis t-a really brilliant

physicist. My father had worked to ?et hi~ hired after ?earin~ him on .the

radio testify at the McCarthy Heanngs, time and agam taking the Fifth

Amendment refusing to implicate himself, his friends, his brother, any of the

others whom he had known in the Party at the Universi ty of Chicago.

My father was a fel low traveler , a le ft is t, a progressive. He was always

opposed to the Party . In the United States. In the Soviet Union. In Italy. He

did like Eli, however, and he l iked his courage. A young physicist wi th the

potential for a brilliant career wi th five smal l children under the age of seven,

EIi had been fired from several university positions and was alI but black-

baIled from physics when my father contac ted him, argued wi th the managers

at the Lab, and arranged for Eli to come to work at American Optical.

By that Sunday at the Lake, Eli was settled in at the Lab and was working

on neodymium lasers . Get ting the machine to lase was a major e ffort. Eli and

his people worked day and night. Around the clock, weekends and holidays.

Competition with the ruby laser and the new gas CO

2

lasers was intense. My

father, my uncle, and Eli talked and talked and talked. A few weeks la te r, my

aunt and uncle returned to the Lake. Eli carne again. The men talked and

taIked. Paper napkins and pads of paper were filled with diagrams, equations,

doodles, and numbers, stained from endless coffees and the ashes of my

uncle's cigarettes. Soon af terwards, my uncle switched f rom mass spectro-

s~opy

and

began to work in lasers. A few years later, he talked la te into the

lllght again and again with his si ster , my aunt, my father 's s is te r, the doc tor.

lase taught him about physiology, anatomy. He began to work on surgical

~ers and to grow very successful professionally. Soon he left General Tele-

~ one-~he company which had bought the Sylvania Company and changed

~ workmg atmosphere substantially-and moved on to become the chief

t

~lentist of Lasers Incorporated, a new division of American Optical. For a

lme the

t

b h .

n

.'. wo rot ers, the two brothers and Eh, worked for the same orga-

lZatlOn and h L .

h ' w en asers Incorporated was c losed and moved to Framíng-

aro to become divisi f he rnai .. .

three a IVISlOno temam Amencan Optical Laboratones, the

A_ ~en worked in the same bui lding. My uncle and Eli were Bubble Boys,

nJnertcan styl . .

e scientrsts , My father never hustled l ike that.



28

LIVIA POLÁNYI

Lives in the Bubble

Once Lawrence ordered Dennis Gardner and me-Dennis later dis-

covered art ificial mesons and died of beryllium poisoning-to build

a calutron power source, recalls Roger Hildebrand. He said we

were to get it done in a day and a half. Iconsider i t now a task that

should have taken two people sever al weeks. But we didn't sleep

and we improvised and in thirty-six hour s we got the power supply

going (Davis 1986: 133).

My first husband, John Bowditch, is a Bowditch of Boston. A direct de-

scendent of the Great Navigator, John's family has been prominent in Boston

for centuries. John himself is an eccentric. He has always been an eccen tr ic.

Imet him in college. Iwas not yet eighteen when we met, he a few months

shy of twenty-one. We began to go together immediately, driving down from

Vermont in the dead of winter to go to the oper a. John had season tickets to

the Boston Opera Company, as did h is paren ts. They described themselves as

sturdy

New England types. They had recognized very early that John, their

th ird child, was d if ferent f rom other chi ldren. Their present to him on his

fourth bi rthday , among toe usual toys and c1othes, was permission to wire

electr ic p lugs without superv is iono Free at l as t He was free to expand his

explorations in elect ri city, to wind his own armatures and build hi s own ra-

dios, make his own elect ri c fuses for explos ives and kludge together hi s own

electric tools and motors.

When

I

met him, John was consumed with two principal desires: to build a

steam driven motorcycle and to generate a million-volt spark. When not pur-

suing leads on old boile rs or tracking down rumors about large capacitors

available f rom radio amateurs who could get them air force surplus through

the MARS Program, he spent his college years building his own state-of-the-

art 1923 telephone company , complete with an automatic, stronger switch,

central office under our bed and telephone polls connecting the various

subscribers with scrounged te lephone wires and recla imed heavy glass insu-

lators. Collect ing acoustic operatic and orchestral recordings made before the

in~ention of amplification and discovering early Iight bulbs and electrical gen-

era ting equipment also c1aimed some atten tion. Vas t amounts of time were

spent hauling heavy objects, storing the objects, reclaiming the objects, c1ean-

ing the objects , and wait ing , wait ing , wait ing for one or another detai l to fali

into p lace . John has sometimes wai ted decades to obtain jus t the r ight par t to

make an early piece of equipment operational. For he is not just a coUecto

r

,

he describes himself as a historical engineer. As he told me, back then wh~n

we were so very young, he was not an antiquarian or someone interested rn

the past. No. He was inter ested in a specific past. I am a very up-to-date

young man of the 1880's, he would say and then begin anothe r endles

s


29

adventure involving objects made of ten of cas t i ron. Incredibly heavy. Enor-

mously fragile.

1

willingly entered into these adventures with him.

I

spent hours and hours

. cold, drafty, musty, dark places, handing wrenches about and slowly

1ll • d ith

winching tons of cast iron covere wit one hundred years of grease away

frorn its cozy but threa tened home and into a new life among John's stuff. I

enjoyed it, of cou.r~e: I would not ~ave done it ha~ I not enjoyed it. 1 was

fascinated to be

vísitmg

a world

which

was

fantastic,

and totally absorbing.

Th e

world had its rules-how and when outside reality might be accommo-

dated; its villains-those people who were being mean to one or another

motor-generator set rusting away happily in a New England field; its he-

roes- that guy who had one of two exi sting autogyros and twenty-three Stutz

automobiles including three Bearcats; it s rhy thms-move some por tion of the

stuff to Vermont in the fali, t ake it back to John 's paren ts' house in Foxboro

in the spring. Move the stuff into the crawl spaces, att ics and garage when the

parents are in church. Hurry to wash up and look presentable for the wonder-

fui

Sunday dinner.

Connected to the concerns of everyday life only tangentially, the world we

lived in was totally compelling. Fragile like a soap bubble blown by a child,

this world demanded complete loyalty. I f we doubted, it would disappear.

When it was necessary to earn money, one did so but without involvement.

The power of the project, the power of the bubble in which that project

arbitrated the meaning of ali ac tion was total. John was emperor, citizen, and

slave;Iwith my body, my interest, and wil lingness to respect the rules was a

<>Ieratedconsort as long as Idid not disturb, did not requir e attention or

mtroduce my own desires, ambitions, or private realities.

How young men do science in the United States is not particularly different

~m how t~ey do art or engineering or rel igion or hobbies. Whether they are

m the lab, in the studio, behind the keyboard, in the medi ta tion cell or in the

bac~yard or garage, they are spending long periods of time in a highly con-

st~ned, highly restricted world in which almos t every action , every relation-

~IP, every utterance is interpreted relative to one model and one model

one-:-the abstract semantic world of the projec t, be it a complex titration

eti·xpenment,a metal sculpture, a database subroutine package, a contempla-

ve retreat librat i

ab . or ca I raung the flyball governor on an old mill engine. The

i1ySO~thlon,Ithough cathected onto external objects and processes, is primar-

WIt the self Th del

i

hi h . . .

abst . . e mo e 10 w IC action IS assigned meaning is highly

effo:c~, hlghly structured, and very jealous. The prized teamwork of such

PlIrti~

IS

b~ought about by col lective embracing of a reduced reality. Each

clpant IS const tI I .

effort det . .an y eva uated, h is loyal ty to the group and to the group's

lnersio .ermmed m part by the others' eva luation of the totality of his im-

n in the project bubble world.



30

LIVIA POLÁNYI

When in the project, the young scientist, like his counterparts in other pur.

suits, wilI often work sixteen or eighteen hours a day, forgoing sleep, eating

badly, and neither copulating nor participating in the arrangement of a social

constel lation with others of appropriate gender which would lead to copula-

tion. Working at such a feverish pace, the guys are capable of making rela.

tively rapid progress on their projects. ( The boys realIy hustle, my father

says.) The rapidity of progress defined as success permits the successful to

set the evaluation cri teria for others in their fields.

The successful become key men. Men like Emest Lawrence; men like Rob-

ert Oppenheimer. Key people, of course, do not live in the lab. They live on

peer review councils, on the editorial boards of journals, on planes going to

and from scientific meetings; they work with other keys-maneuvering for

funding and prestige . They live in the key bubbIe, of power, prestige and

inftuence: like Lawrence, like Robert Oppenheimer. If a woman wants into

the game, she must play by the rules or get out.

Tales of Two Sisters

Of course, some women survive apprenticeship in the bubble of bubble boy

science. We will take one example, a scient ist o f my acquaintance who rejects

fervent ly the idea of femin ism and ishorr if ied by ta lk of women's science.

She insists that her science, her life as a scientist, is exactly the same as that

of her male colleagues. The details of he r life tell another story.

This woman has three children; the youngest, three years old, is st il l nurs-

ing. The scientist runs her lab, does her experiments, oversees her graduate

students-lives within the bubble and then she runs the household, makes the

arrangements for people to stay with the children when she and her husband

are away, f igures out the chi ldren's transpor ta tion to and from school, orga-

nizes the registration for school, for extended care, for vacation camp, makes

sure that her chi ldren have their cough medicine and asp ir in when they have

a cold, arranges that they see the doctor for their regular checkups, get to the

dentist twice a year, to their friends' b ir thday par ties equipped with a wrapped

birthday present, and every day is r esponsible for see ing that they are fed,

clothed, and provided with the lunch boxes, T-shirts, and toys necessary for

a child to be an ordinary child among others. There are ma le pe rsons who

may also provide for home and children outside the bubble as this woman

does. But overwhelmingly those persons who live in this way are women and

not men. Those women who do not live this way-who choose to live

inside the bubble-are censured by their farnilies and often distrusted by their

colleagues; while the men who choose to live outside the bubble in this

way a re known to be sabotaging their car eers and ruining their lives. They

will neve r get to be one of the key people in the field.


31

I do know one woman, let's call her Pani, who made it through to become

a key person in the f ie ld -a. ve~y s~alI and abstruse comer of theoretical

mathematics. Her s tory, her hfe rn science, her encounter with the bubble is

no t a simple tale.

I f irst learned the de tails of Pani's story from her when she was my roorn-

mate. Paní was bom in south India someplace. She was always fairly good in

maths, as she put it. First in her year out of 200,000 university math students.

Having finished her f irst degree, she had married a young man whom her

parents had picked out for her. At about this time she was invited to apply for

a p lace at India's famed Tata Institute for Advanced Studies, where the most

eminent mathematicians in the country work. Each year three or four very

promising student s are accepted. She applied and heard nothing. One day,

while tucking her husband's lunch into his briefcase, she found a let ter f rom

the Tata Institute addressed to her. The letter, postmarked weeks earlier, had

been opened. In it was the information that she had been accep ted for an

interview to take place that very next week. Her husband told her when she

confronted him with the letter that he and his mother had decided tha t since

they had decided that they would not allow her to accept a position if one

were to be offered, they had dec ided not to tell her of the interview. She made

a

tomasha.

She went to the interview and was accepted. It was not what you

answered- they were simple problems- it was how you went about answer-

ing them. Her mother-in-law decided she could go on when she learned that

Pani would be paid a handsome stipend for attending the institute. There were

stipulations: she had to live at home, she had to turn over her whole stipend

to her husband 's family, had to do her share of the housework before she left

for the insti tute. This involved getting up at 3:30 every rnorning, cooking

three complete ~eals for a household of fourteen peopIe, taking a bus for two

hours and arnvmg at the institute at nine o'c lock ready to start work with the

~ ther s tudents-all male and all unmarried-who had risen much later en-

:y:; ~ lei.surely breakf~st prepared by some~ne else, an.d then walked 'over

lhe o nstttu~e from their nearby rooms. Pani loved the institute. She loved

ppor tunuy to disappear into the bubble for hours on end-quiet ab-

stract tot I B . ,

C() , a. ut outside those hours she was entirely of the world. In the

frou~ of her years of study, Pani bor e two children. Both were taken away

andmhoer ~y her mother-in-Iaw and given to her husband's childless brother

ISw ife to rais D o hback Th e. espite er attempts, she was never able to get them

ics Sh ere was always the threat that she would have to give up mathemat-

o oe could not do that.

Panl ha s since le ft I di

malhem ti n Ia, come to the Uni ted States, become a professor of

a ICSand a key o h fi ..

morning 0 1 person m t e eld. She si ts quie tly f rom seven in the

unti SIXat n i ht o h b bble doi .

and serv

19

m er u ble doing mathe rna tics. She travels widely

es on the panel d di . I

s an e

itona

boards. Her children do not talk to her.



32

LIVIA POLÁNYI

She abandoned them, they say. Her mathematics was more importan t to her

than they were. They do not forgive her. She works in her bubble from seven

to six. She has a broken hea rt.

Physics beyond lhe Bubble

The Institute of Physics in Rome under Ferrni was not a world of bubble

boys. Thir ty years la ter, the Ins ti tute of Phys ics in Rome was not f il1ed

with

bubble boys either. Tom Toffoli , a highly innovative researcher on the physics

of computing now atM.1. T. 's Laboratory for Computer Science was a student

in high energy physics in Rome in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I asked

him about the work environment the re. Did the guys serious about physic s

work all night? Did they focus their ene rgies and conversation around the

pro ject? Did they def ine themselves in terms of their commi tment to science

or will ingness to abandon other interest s for the good of the work going on in

the lab? He knew wha t I was talking about.

Wel l, sometimes we spent the n ight a t Frascat i when we were doing

our experiments. We were parasites of the beam and we had to be

there so we could get on. It was other people's money, so we didn't

have much choice . But o therwise, work was important to me, but

not existentially important. There was the res t of my l ife, f riends and

family. You didn't see people spending day and night on their se i-

ence though there were some who did. Maybe one out of twenty.

The othe r people resented them. It's unfair. You have family, your

friends. Why should somebody set standards that are inhuman so that

you become inhuman?

The Tom I know is def initely a bubble boy. He agrees he has that tendency.

I really learned to work ike that at graduate school at the University of

Michigan. Then I worked al1 night and all day. H e does that at his lab at

M.1. T., too, but always finds the time for his kids, his brothe rs and sisters

and friends like me who come into town. When you break into the bubble,

you find Tom happy but apologetic. He works like a bubble boy, but he does

not think i t i s r igh t.

L ives in Corporate Research

My father has always had a compiex react ion to the bubble boys. They really

hus tl e. The boys really hus tle , he would say with a mix ture of wonder and

incredu ity. In Rome he had spent more and more time while at the university

involved with the anti-Fascists. His work in the lab was never the center of

his experience. His brother was different. He sympathized with those working

against the government , but he concentrated h is energ ies more ful1y on his


33

eriments, on ife in the lab. In la ter l ife, he hustl ed : work-

di

on

the

exp . h

stu íes . . ht every weekend getting up early to dnve over to t e

.nto the mg .

ing late I h. gs out Life was for years a se rie s of e rne rgenc ie s when the

d check t m . ..

lab

an ,

I e when the power supply did not dehver the nght power,

wouldn t as , . I

íaser . lato rs would come back f rom the shop with the wrong to er-

h

the mampu .

w en and there would be a crucial demonstratíon the next day to a key man

~~: field Often at those times, Gus, the glassblower, would appear and, as

m . ·1 create a piece of equipment and save the day .

in a fairy ta e,

f .

ifi I

ho i Hungarian like many of the best blowers o scienti c g ass,

Gus w o ISa, .

ed

nele from one lab to another, f rom one company to another,

followe

rny

u . di

ct

roscopy into laser research and from laser research mto me 1-

[comrnass spe . famil

desi and production Gus and Bob have been the re with the arm y

callaser esign . .

t

· e 11·&eBob my unele's engineer and nght-hand man, together

for my en Ir 1. .

ith K his wife, have always been almost member s of the family. The

Wl aye, . fi detail th

l

. ·mportant of course A good engmeer, a ne etai man, e

a most ISI ,. , , . . .

bes t there i swhen it comes to putt ing someth i~g. together , Bob ISpraIse~ m

many ways. But not for his ideas . Never for h lS ideas . That was the provmce

ofthe brothers who always consulted each other, always talked thro~gh every

idea with one anothe r before making an important change, an lmport.ant

design move, an important car eer decision. Bob a lways ~ame a long, im -

plemented the decisions and was buf feted about by t~e winds of resea rch

management which might one day decide to end a project they had pushed

heavily for many years. Bob, instead of moving on to another project , another

manager, always fol1owed along my une le' s pa th. Gus would accept all the

changes, al1 the shifts in policy, but somehow he would always show up at

the next company as if nothing had ever happened.

Corporate research is a special world. My father and unele spent their

whole productive careers in such environments. I learned firsthand about the

pleasures and terrors of the corporate research environment when I worked

for several yea rs in Boston as a scient ist for an engineering consu lt ing f irmo

At its best it is a comfortable l ife ~l th good resources and great f texibil ity in

regulating your personal working environment. As a researcher, no one no-

t ices when you come in, when you go home. A few days extra time away

tacked onto a conference, trade show, or business trip will always be ove r-

looked . The question is a lways one of your perceived usefulness. I t a lways

Surprised me that my father remained working without confti ct for one com-

pany for over thir ty-five years despite an erratic working style; my unele,

much more dependable, predictable and observably hard working, had a

much rougher time.

Sorry . No idea. Haven't seen him around. Never know where he i s. Never

tel ls us h is plans. He mumbled something when he left but I didn't catch it.

He' ll show up at Some point.



34

LIVIA POLÁNYI

This is what his coworkers and bosses would say of my father. And even-

tualIy, he always did reappear after an hour, an afternoon, a da~, a we~k.

Since he worked in the research department of an optical firm, his work m-

volved the applica tion of opt ical technologies and properties to whatever he

found most interest ing and was able to persuade research management held

promise of reaching the marketplace as a commercial device. Although he

began his work designing equipment for measuring eyesight, over the years

he worked on many medical instruments, largely for monitoring blood gases.

He worked closely with doctor s and surgeons in Boston and New York and

became knowledgeable about many aspects of physiology and medica l prac-

tice. He enjoyed his work immensely and took particula r pleasure in finding

a new twist. Something which wouldjust do things differently and, hopefully,

better. Yankee ingenuity. When he needed inspiration he went to the five-and-

ten. EventualIy he would buy some glue, a few pieces of rubber and some

screws, and return to the lab.

My

father i s often del ighted. Snowfall in Apri l, get ting stuck in sand on an

obscure back road and wait ing to see what would happen (something always

turns up), getting lost and ending up at an auct ion of machine tools, thinking

up exact ly the right Chris tmas present and wrapping i tup in newspaper t? put

under the t ree. Science held the promise of del ight for him. Understandmg a

new problem, coming up with the r ight set of equations to capture a previ-

ously ill-understood phenomenon, building a piece of equipment which realIy

could do the trick. For my uncle, science was always more serious. Problems

were set which kept one on the knife edge. Anxiety and the possibility of

fai lure were always there. Always as possible as a Rome winter day wi thout

fuel for the stove to ward off the chil l.

The family had been poor in Italy. My grandmother repaired oriental ~gs

to keep the family fed and the boys in school. My father remembers w~lkmg

al l over Rome carrying the rugs from customers to his home for repair and

back to their owners' vil las when the job was done. He enjoyed the walks and

enjoyed the rugs. Throughout his life, oriental rugs have remained an active

passion. The family was poor in Italy. My aunts were sent .back to ~udapest

to live as poor relations so that the boys could complete their educations.

My

father showed l itt le academic promise and spent his days cut ting school and

exploring the backst reets of Rome with the kids in the neighborhood. Even-

tualIy he was sent to a trade school and became a machinist. He entered

university late by special examination. My aunt was recalled frorn Budapes

t

to tutor him in Lat in for the tes t and after several miserable months he pas

sed

and was admitted. His brother was a good boy, a good student. He wen

t

through school and entered the university a t the right t ime. The two brothers

studied together and many, many years later they worked in the same resear

ch

laboratory for a whi le. My uncJe had a big off ice, a private secretary, a tearn


35

of engineers and technicians working for him in several labs. My father had a

smaJl office, a smalllaboratory, and one technician, Dave, a man just my age

who began to work in my father' s lab when he was sti ll in high school. When

the laboratory was moved to upstate New York, Dave and my father were

tapped to go. My father had had enough. He was over s ixty. He persuaded

the bosses to fire him. The severance pay, unemployment, and pension were

enough to begin a new adventure. He and Dave went into business on a shoe-

string, setting up shop to manufacture fiber optic catheters for cardiac diag-

nosis and angioplasty. Thei r turnkey operat ion was housed in the abandoned

ceJlar of Dave's childhood home, where his father had once operated a tavern

for the Pol ish workers in town. Although the business was always wildly

undercapitalized, they never owed money to anyone. Much of their equipment

was scrounged, bought a t auct ion or at f1ea markets, or somehow assembled

out of nothing. They had few employees and each batch of catheters was made

by hand , My father became a smalI business man, a capitalist in the sixth

decade of his li fe. They may still be in business. It is hard to telI with my

father. He never tells anyone where he's going or what his plans are.

About the time my father went into business, my uncJe was named presi -

dent of a start-up company making surgicallasers. Bob, his engineer, became

chief engineer. ~hey set up in one room at first, building the machines by

hand and then flying to Atlanta to work wi th a prominent ear , nose , and throat

specialist. The taIk at the dinner table shif ted to discuss ions of contracts and

equity. Cancer, never a s ubject

I

had heard mentioned, became a regular topic

over coffe~ and toasted thick-crusted bread prepared at the table by my father

who happily burned the bread almost every time. Eventually the laser proved

very effective against throat cancer s and the names of new doctors and new

~osPitalS in di~erent c.ities dominated the taIk. Lasers, i t seemed, held prom-

se to be effective agamst vaginal and ovarian cancers as well. I found it odd

b

t

o

hear these men who had had the greates t di ff icul ty discuss ing the need for

athroo . h h

. ms wit t e architects while the house in the woods was being built

talking about these matters over drinks near the fireplace. Martinis for my

aunt and uncJe, and for my father? I 've fixed you a vermouth, Chico.

Memories of Unlived Lives

Onecan only specul t f

Ifmy

c

h a e, o course, about a future that never became the past

rar er had e t d h b .

have h . n ere t e ubble, what would have changed? What would

appened

if

the b h .

hattan Pr . rot ers,

if

even one brother had worked on the Man-

have be oJect? .~ould there have been a career in Big Science? Would the FBI

en so dlSlOter t d . .

reading a d . . es e

1 1

our hves and act ivi ties? Would I have grown up

n SWlmmmg d '. .

clear clear an swimmmg and reading by the s ide of the lake with

, water?



36

LIVIA POLÁNYI

There are many poss ible futures which did not occur. Radiation sickness

involuntary steri ization, birth defects in children conceived after exposure to

radiation, very high cancer rates, and accidental death from radioactive poi-

soning were ali attested to in statistically signif icant numbers among the

physicists and other workers at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge , Trinity, Bikini,

Berkeley labs, and the other sites of the Manhattan Project. In one future, my

father or his brother do not survive the war but die of sc ience, or my father's

child is bom affticted, bom dead, or not bom at ali.

In a more likely postwar future, my father and his brother, my father or his

brother prosper in Big Physics. The important connections, the important

organizations put in place during the war became available resources for them

as physicists who had done well at project labs while others outside the bubble

would not ge t the opportuni ty to do the big projects in high-energy physics

which would require major expenditures for equipment and research assis-

tants. The conduits f rom the project bubbles of the atomic bomb to the big

science power bubbles of the postwar world were direc t and they can tap into

them. The funding agencies were s ta ffed wi th thei r colleagues , researchers

who had been through the project and who would share thei r understanding

of the technologies and problem areas deemed to be a t the cutting edge. The

lat te r were those which had been developed during highly classi fied bomb

development- technologies and problems being pursued after the war, often

at the very highly c lassi fied labs where the project was carr ied out. And se-

curity after the war was, if anything, even tighter than security during the war.

Secur ity Files Live Long Lives

Throughout the years of my childhood and adolescence, I attended the same

private school in Stamford, Connecticut, where I had begun in kindergarten

when my father was s til l working a t American Optical in Norwalk. My father

never lost his job, the FBI never intruded. My father and his brother built

their careers, their lives both inside and outside of science with relatively lit tle

interference. While my uncle settled into his ife, his work, his world, anxious

about his career, his project, ali those things which men must find disturbing,

my father , who has lived in the same small apartment over looking the lake

for forty years, never shed the a ir of someone about to pack a small val ise and

never return.

Securi ty agencies have long memories . In the fif tie s and sixties, the labo-

ratory at American Optical did some classified work; parts of the Sidewinder

missile system were designed and produced there. Security officers were

around. One day my father was stopped in the hall. How is Alex? he was

asked. And Aunt Mousie, how is she doing? They were checking up on

the first husband of my father 's cousin, Eva Zeisel , daughter of his father 's


37

d

briefty the wife of Alex W., a Communist hero of the Warsaw

. t r an very .

SIS

e d chitect of the t rucks for Jews schemes which exchanged Hun-

ghe.tto~w~for Russian Army trucks. Eichmann was the negotiator for the

ganan My father had met Alex a few times twenty-five years before. He

Germ

ans

d

that he'd ret ired and owned a number of apartment houses in Ro-

had ~earAs for his aunt, he had not spoken with her for many years. He

manl

a

b

'

l

d something in reply. The agent did not quite understand what he

mum e id A . O· I d h .

said- He did not repeat what h~ h.adSai. mencan ptica soon move t eir

secure operation to another building.

Brothers in Big Physics: Fratricide, Betrayal, Disgrace

S urity files live long ives. Security agencies have long memories. Consider

;: matter of 1. Robert and Frank Oppenheimer, brothers by blood, and Frank

Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence, both ~assi?nate experimenters, disdain-

fui oftheory (Davis 1986: 115), brothers m science:

In June of 1954, Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic

bomb, the man most responsible for the development of the Amer-

ican nuclear capability, was stripped of his security clearance as a

result of hearings before the Atomic Energy Commission investigat-

ing his connections with Communists, Communist functionaries

and Communists who did engage in espionage. One voice against

him was that of his Berkeley and Manhattan Project colleague, Er-

nest Lawrence, who left Berkeley to appear at the hearing : He

was keyed up to tes ti fy agains t Oppenhe imer and he meant to do i t,

but he was really ill. He was bleeding badly. Even wi thout Law-

rence's personal testimony the judgment went against Oppenheimer:

The record contains no direct evidence that Dr. Oppenheimer gave

secrets to a foreign na tion or that he is dis loyal to the United States.

However, the record does contain substantial evidence of Dr. Oppen-

heimer's association wi th Communists, Communist functionaries,

and Communists who did engage in espionage. (Davis 1986:

348-49)

.One of the Communists 1. Robert Oppenheimer was guilty of associating

Wlthwas his brother, Frank. Robert Oppenheimer knew that Frank was a

Co~unist. When he had discussed wi th Lawrence the poss ibili ty of the

ex~nmentalist hiring his brother to work on the cyclotron, Oppenheimer had

adml~ed that Frank's been in a lot of lef t-wing activity. So Lawrence, too,

:rtalO~y ~new of Frank's poli tical leanings when he agreed to take him on in

fi

e radlatlOn laboratory in 1940 after he had been fired f rom his job at Stan-

ord

fi .

.or radical talk. And though Lawrence knew Frank well and was

~ore líke him than either was l ike Oppenheimer, when the issue of securi ty

earance arose modestly for [Robert] Oppenheimer in the spring of 1947,



38

LIVIA POLÁNYI

Lawrence fired [Frank] out of hand with a quick brutality that st il l alters the

voices of the physicists when they talk of it. As soon as Frank had any diffi-

cu1ty, Lawrence forbade him to come to the lab and visit. Do you have any

idea how quite unusual a thing that is among scientists? asks Bethe, the

noted atomic physicist (David 1986: 115,273).

Lawrence betrayed Frank Oppenheimer and was determined to destroy his

brother as well. Whi le Lawrence continued to be honored and respected dur-

ing his life time, the men he vilif ied lived long enough to see him almost

forgotten. Ernes t O. Lawrence, whose name for many is l it tle more than the

first name of the Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratory, died in August

1958, his body destroyed by constant hemorrhaging from ulcerative colitis.

As for Robert Oppenheimer, on February 18, 1957, he died an official

security risk in a state of official disgrace (Davis 1986: 354). Frank, Robert

Oppenheimer's brother, went on to become the direc tor of the Exploratorium

in San Francisco a fter years of internal exile in Colorado. He never again

returned to physics.

The Refugee Brothers: The Emigré and the Immigrant

My unc1e immigrated to the United States in 1941. He adjusted, settled in,

made a home for h imsel f. My fathe r has arrived only very recent1y.

My father first went back to Europe for a visit around 1960. There was no

big emergency. A scientific conference. He would give a paper at an interna-

tional conference. Visa, passports, tickets, borders emptied of terror. A be-

trayal almost of the others, all the others. He returned from his trip elated at

the journey, disappointed with the results. His friends from the university, the

young anti-Fasci st s by now grown older, remained faithful Party l iners.

Nil

dia s ine

linea,

he would say, quoting the motto of the founder of the Boy

Scouts- never a day without a l ine.

Sine

linea, he would repeat, always

amused at the pun, always disappointed in his friends.

My father, an emigré since earliest childhood, has finally immigrated. His

ear li es t memory i s leav ing Hungary, taking the Orient Expre ss west to Vi-

enna. He has lived all of his life in exile, an exile with no dream of re turn.

Familiar as every apartment interior, every conversat ion on every street comer

was to h im when he f inal ly returned to the city of h is b ir th, Budapest was not

home, nor was I ta ly. Much as he loves I ta ly, he was never I talian. You speak

very good Italian, people still say. Very very good I ta lian. But you are not

from here. Not f rom anywhere unti l very recen t1y. 1beli eve now, after over

f if ty years in this count ry, my father has come home, home to America. It

took the end of the Soviet Union, the death of the dream of socialism as

embodied throughout mos t of thi s cen tury by Russia and her dependents to

bring him home. Seven years before the end of the cen tury, seventy-four year

s


39

in the diaspora, my father has come h?me. It's ~ quiet homecoming, I think,

ith some melancholy and loss, but his brother IS here, his daughter is here,

h

~1 work, his friends, a first grandchild. It's over, he says from time to

IS 11 H '

t ime. I t's gone. It's rea y over. e s come home. The war has ended. He

is at work on a new invention.

Notes

I. Cornucopions, explained Dr. Banks, would look to the outside world as though

they were a simple point in space, just one Planck constant in diameter. Inside, how-

ever, they would contain infinitely long throats that one could think of as an endless

horn or cornucopia.

That gives you a place to store lots of information, said Dr. Banks. Everything

that fell int o the black hole might leave behind t races. Those traces might run away

down that horn at the speed of Iight and you d never be able to f ind out about them

from outside, but t hey wouldn't d is appear. Quoted Taube, 1993.

2. And perhaps on others as well. For example, t here is no explanation of the

decision to re issue in 1986, no preface or introductory mater ial beyond the author's

extensive Iist of acknowledgments fr om 1968. I can only speculate that someone must

have read the book and fallen as much under its spell as I did, as did my father, my

husband, my best friend, and decided to reissue it. The book has an odd effect on

people. I bo rr owed a copy originally from my friend Ellen Zweig, for whom one

sentence became the basis o f a major intermedia wo rk in

text,

video, still photography,

and performance. I have based this memoi r of my father and my unele on this book. I

donot think I would have ever been motivated to descend into the horn of space-tirne

of memory otherwise. I a lso o rdered the

book

fr om a bookseller in multiple copies,

kept one and gave a copy each to my father and to two of my elosest friends. This i s

the sort

of

thing I often think of doing, bu t never in f act do.

3. 'I suppose nobody i n t he world ever completel y mastered both the theoretical

and the experimental fields except the ltalian Fermi' (Davis 1986: 79).

e 4. . Du~ing the week after. Pearl Harbor, midyear g raduating seniors took their

,,~ammatlOns. One of the blithest was a young physics major, Roger Hildebrand:

W hen I went into the hal l [a fter f inishing t he exam] Lawrence grabbed me by the

shoulder ' h 'I '.

, e says. t was a most aggressive physical form ofrecruiting.' (Davis

1986: 121).

~. In 1943 at my corporation laboratories I was working on a successfol research

proJect unrela ted to t he bomb when ... the vice -pr es ident in charge of research carne

an~,asked me how I 'd l ik e to spend some t ime a t Berke ley wi th Lawrence.

Fme 1 id

be

' Sal, m two or three months t he proj ect here will be wound up so 1'11

ready to leave.

He looked disturbed. You'Il need to leave in two or thr ee days, he said. Law-

rence says he's fed up wi th t he conti ngent of physicists we have out there now. He

\Vantsnew blood.

di My plane landed me in Cal if ornia air-sick on a Sunday morning. Some of our

Isapproved contingent stood wait ing a t the runway wi th a wo rr ied subdued look on



40

uvtx POLÁNyr

their faces .... Within two hours I had a mop in my hand and a bucket at my fee t and

was swabbing out the decks of the c alutrons. So far as I could teIl, this work was to

be permanent. A day la te r I located some rubber boo ts. A fortnight later the vice.

president f tew out to see me.

This is a great job you are doing for us here, he said. Lawrence likes it. The

president wants you to know we appreciate i t. ... Look, I've got good news for you.

Remember tha t electronics patent you turned over to us last year? The corpor at ion is

sending you a check for i t. A great big check, he said. I know how you feel.

Oh, you don't, I said. If you did, I know what you'd do. Lawrence wants

Ph.Ds. The corporation has plenty of good janitors. Why don't you give half a dozen

of them honorary Ph.Ds and send them out here? Lawrence would never know the

difference (Davis 1986: 198-99).

6. At the beginning of 1942, Lawrence and , a fter him, Compton were the prime

movers .... The question was where to locat e the plutonium reactor programo ...

Lawrence wanted it at Berkeley; Compton wanted it a t Chicago .... Compton steeled

his nerves and told Lawrence he was moving the project to Chicago [After]

Lawrence went back to his calutron, Compton ... began organizing the Metal-

lurgical Laboratory and caIled Oppenheimer t o a conference defining its two programs,

plutonium and bomb designo The MetaIlurgical Laboratory took shape with quivering

anxiety about the German nuclear threat. ... The laboratory senior staff was made up

largely of refugees with nerves on edge from watching the coIlapse o f nations. Comp-

ton did less to calm them than did one of their own number, Fermi, who decJared that

the Germans could not fight a war and build the bomb at the same time. Even so,

Fermi had given thought to what country he should escape to next after this one felI

(Davis 1986: 125).

7. It's impossible. They can't realIy be that naíve. But in a count ry where every-

body drinks whiskey, they voted in you know what. You've heard me tell this story a

million times.

8. Maybe we should use paper plates and cook out on the fire?

It 's a l it tl e lowbrow.

Maybe. But it's a lot easier than carry ing all this stuff up and down the s teps three

times a day.

Perhaps, but a little lowbrow.

References

Davis, Nuel Pharr. 1968. Lawrence and Oppenheimer. New York: Simon and Schus-

ter. Repr. 1986. New York: Da Capo Press. Page refs . are to 1986 edition.

Polányi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation. New York, Toronto: Farrar and Rine-

hart, Inc.

Polányi, Michael. 1958. Personal Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taube, G. A. 1993. The Case of the Disappearing Black Ho1es. New York T imes,

30 Mar., p. 88.



D

o

Fig. I. Cartoon by Levon Abrahamian depicting Giordorno Bruno. (The cartoons scattered

throughout volume I of La te Edi tions a re by Abrahamian as well.)

43

MICHAEL M. J. FISCHER n

-----~íI-

EYE(I)ING THE SCIENCES ANO THEIR SIGNIFIERS

(LANGUAGE, TROPES, AUTOBIOGRAPHERS):

INTERVIEWING FOR A CULTURAL STUOIES

OF SCIENCE ANO TECHNOLOGY

How does any information-processing system answer questions

about what i t is doing? It sets up within itself a model of itself and

then examines that mode .

-Martin Eger

Like every intelIectual pursuit, physics has both a writ ten and an oral

tradition.

- Victor Weisskopf

The car toon by Armenian anthropologis t Levon Abrahamian (fig. I) is of

Giordomo Bruno as a chess bishop being burned at the stake (religious wars

of early modem Europe; ethnic strife aft er the colIapse of the Soviet Union).

The balloon above his head shows his theor etical mode l of the wor ld: it is

round, not ftat (ethnic str ife is archaic , i rrat ional, based on nonscient if ic

ideas). But the bishop lives on the chess board: the wor ld may be round, but

not in this case.

Anthropology often works its insights through double plays: putting com-

parative cultural and social empiri cal deta ils (places, institutions, generations,

cultures) in play against universalizing philosophical, theoretical, or moral

:ehe-,nas as c~iti~ues of the latter's applicabil it ies and limitat ions; putting

, r,tchexpenentIal and emotional complexit ies of individual l ives into play

wlthinand against social patterns so as to ilIuminate both the power and weak-

:: of the latter; putting the forms of narration and explanation that individ-

alternan~ groups invoke for their a ctions and motivations in play against

•••••• ah~e narratives and explanations. The fin de siêcle of the twentieth cen-

- .1-st IlI [ ' r f

lDd

' ts ee l llg rorn the aftermaths of the second European World War

I cold war . '.

lhe third . . sequeI; and slmultaneously engaged

III

the euphor ia of

oIogy_ lndustnal revolution, that is, of the silicon chip and molecular bi-

seems an appropriate moment to reevaluate the promises and chal-

44

MICHAEL M. J. FrSCHER

EYE(l)ING THE SCIENCES

45



lenges of that sort of anthropology. A key arena for such reevaluation is the

emergent anthropology of science and technology.

Science and technological innovation have been central to the construction

of modernity over the past three centuries. It is odd that the quintessentia1Jy

modernist discipline of anthropology should have found so relatively lit tle to

say beyond the philosophy of science contributions in the 1930s about the

ways in which systems of investigation protect themselves from falsification,

the contr ibutions of the 1950s and 1960s about the ways in which classifica-

tory and analogical logics operate, a general interest in the sociology of

knowledge, and a serious ethnographic interest in traditional healing systems

and their associated botanical, psychiatric, and medical knowledges. But this

may be changing, as a new generat ion of anthropologis ts begins s tudies of

scientific laboratories, biotechnology corporations, science cities, engineer.

ing schools, public debates over reproductive and genetic technologies, eco-

logical i ssues , public epidemiology, nuc lear and chemica l waste, and the

increasing need for public counterauthorities to government funding and con-

trol of information about alI these issues.

Among the variety of sources for anthropologists to draw upon in engaging

science and technology issues are first person accounts by scient is ts about

their own fields, as ways of linking narratives of science to lives of scientists,

as ways of locating the scientific imaginary in social communities, cultural

anxiety structures, and moral tradition-reworking speculations.'

PreTexts: PostModern Times and MetaPhysical Lives

Who will reassemble these pieces, continued Plato, and restore to us

the robe of Socrates?

-Denis Diderot, Les Bijous indiscrets

At the beginning of Modern Times-in, as it were, a premonition for a

Charlie Chaplin script-Denis Diderot sat ir ized the new empirica l sciences

in an alIegorical tale about an inquisitive Sultan Mangogul whose dreams and

diverse forms of experiment seemed only to deconstruc t the foundat ions of

deductive, rationalist philosophy. This empirical science,it seemed, could not

provide any new eternal synthesis to replace systematic philosophy, only ten-

tative, provisional constructions requiring constant further testing and secur-

ing in the physical properties of nature. The constant further testing was

alIegorized as a continuation of

The Thousand and One Nights

Shahrazad's

mult iple subst itut ions and diversions that keep her ta le and li fe viable and

even redemptive to the society around her. The st ructure of Sul tan Mang

o

-

gul's scopic and sonic perception is voyeuristic, panoptic, third-person listen-

ing. I t i s an obsessive quest of des ire, which Diderot l ite ral izes through a ta~e

of a magic ring that allows the Sultan to stage and hear the desires of

his

women, ambiguously playing upon whether his presence otherwise

hafe~ or would nor be any more distorting than this magical instrument of

~ou

íry:

sexual desire and

libido sciendi

[ the desire to know], as Suzanne

;:;u i ~uts it (1990: 157), are alIegorizations of one another. The Sultan (the

b

C~ecthe knower, the wielder of the instruments of power and surveillance

5U~ , . , ,

the self) in these tales (both Diderot s and

The Thousand and One Nights),

Pucci points out, is a perceptual subject [who] is reacted upon by the prop-

erties of the physical world and in conjunct ion wi th his own physiological

processes (his dreams; 159); he is, in rela tion to his experiments , a third

party (Shahrazad's tales a re told to her s is te r Dinarzad while the sultan Sha-

beiyar listens) who explores the worlds, unknowable directly, through sound-

ing and projecting instruments:

To the aged philosophers described as garbed in the tat te red pieces

of Socrates' sacred mantle Mangogul' s dream juxtaposes an alle-

gorical figure, an unintimidat ing infant who nevertheless as he ap-

proaches the temple of philosophy grows to giant proport ions ,

becoming the colossus of 'Experiment/Experience.' 'In the progress

of his subsequent growth, he appeared to me in a hundred different

fonns; I saw him direct a long telescope toward the sky, es timate

with the aid of a pendulum the falI of bodies, ascertain by a tube

filled with mercury the weight of air; and with a prism in his hand

deeompose light.' (Diderot,

Bijoux indiscrets,

ci ted in Pucc i 1990~

158.)2

If the~~is a paralIel between the eighteenth-century sensibilities-a feeling

I

f ~51tIon frorn stable knowledge no longer viable as a worldly guide into

~ msecure world knowable only through multiple probes and perspec-

b~es-and those of the twentieth century, it does not help to colIapse the

difIen;;:ees. The .late t~ent ieth centu~y is di fferent from the eighteenth cen- : I

' Y .

.e romannc penod, and the nineteenth century, in part, through the V

m~mg cultural diversi ty and plural ized perspect ives tha t are no longer

b

Onet~51dedorientaliz ing) fantas ies or projec tions (about a Sultan Mangogul)

u mternaí realitie . .

Ge . s on mcreasingly large demographic scales (migrations of

bighnnanand l.talIan scientists to the

U.

S. and Russia in the 1930s and 1940s·

er edUeatlOnof I di .. . '

P

Iay th n ian scienti st s m the V.S. or Britain), with effects that

emselves out not I· fi d .. .

but ais . . on y m re ne cosrnopolitanisms of liberal desire

o m devastatmg co fi· t d . . . '

tion throu h n lCs generate by political reorganizations, disrup-

cidents g ddev~lopment schemes and wars, economic competition and ac-

an epldemiolo· I· h '

(Colorado) W gica cnses sue as Chernobyl, Bhopal, Rocky Flats

to represen't. TOh~ur:(Ma~sachusetts), or Love Canal (New York) have come

longer fun ti g ndering of metaphors about nature and science also no

e ion as refiex f . h

0 C c u 1 t

fore fi es o a rug equal struggle against natural magic and

es gured as fe I

3

F .. . . .

ma e. emimst cntiques of science writ ing and

46

MICHAEL M. 1. FlSCHER

EYE(I)lNG THE SCIENCES



feminist science fiction writing have exposed the contradictions in the tradí.

tion of reducing science to pure reason as a metaphysical desire for escaping

the body refigured today as downloading information in the brain or in the

rnemory banks of cul ture into silicon-based or other hardware. Feminist

writing has rather explor ed how alte rnative ways of encoding information

entails alternative implications for embodiment. Or as Don Ihde puts the

con-

t radict ion of escap ing the body: users want what the technology gives, but

. . . not ... the limits, the transformations that a technologically extended

body implies.

4

One way to probe these changes of the contemporary world is to use auto-

biographical and life-history frames to examine the ways the social processes

of identity, moral understanding, and scientific worldview are be ing r epro-

duced and transformed. Autobiographical f rames themselves are not given

genres: if we wish to use them to extend social theory, to understand the

changes of the contemporary world (ra ther than reaff irming the p ieties of the

past) , we need to be att en tive to the var iant , cul tu ra lly d iverse formats they

may inhabit. Among these are not only autobiographically figured texts

(memoirs, the third genre of scientific l iterature or semipopular ac-

counts by scient is ts of conceptual breakthroughs meant to heal the two-cul-

tures gap, biographical texts done by scientists projecting their own dilemmas

onto those of an exempla ry, demonized, or confticted

other),>

but also more

discursively new languages of science that claim to move beyond modernist

sciences-proposed by both scientists, in efforts to seriously bridge the t ,: ,o

cultures gap, and by humanist s and social scien ti sts who would engage m

exchange relations with postmodernist sciences.

ConTexts: Bomb, ProGram, Cybe rnetic s, Chip, Gene,

and Other Zones of Cultural Implosion

Gene, seed, fetus, chip , bra in, bomb . . . I'm not interested in

boundary crossings, but ra ther in zones of implosion of nature into

culture, o f materia l and t rope, sites of transformation tha~ ge~erate

narratives of possible worlds and new agencies. Storytelhng IS~ot

opinion, not ali storie s are equally good. Gene, seed, fetus, ChIP,

brain, bomb are densi ties a t zones of implosion.

-Donna Haraway

Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements form a rhizome ...

Something else entirely is going on .... a capture of code, su, ,I~S

value of code ... a virus can ... move mto the cells of an enure y

different species but not without bringing with it genetic inf?rma~

tion from the f irst host . . . our v iruses cause us to form a rhizom

with other animais. As Francois Jacob says . . . .

-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattan

7

ntemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in rela-

~e ~othe most elemental processes of informat ion within the living

~;.~ .~ . the entire f ie ld covered by the cyb~rn~tic p:ogram wil l be

th f ie ld of wri ting. If the theory of cybernetics IS by itself to oust ali

e

t

physical content-which until recently served to separate the

mea . t h' f ..

machine frorn

man,

it mus conserve t e .n~tlOn o ~ntI~g, trace,

rnrne [writ ten mark], or grapheme, until ItS own historico-rneta-

~sica l char acter is a lso exposed .

p -Jacques Derrida

As anthropologists begin seriously to undertake studies of the role of the

sciences and contemporary technologies, there is at the same time an interest-

ing cross-fertilization between new ideas in the lead sciences of the day (mo-

Iecular biology, computer sciences), and new formulations in the humanities

an d social sciences. The day -Iong, large auditorium filled sessions on C -

bo Anthropology at the American Anthropological Association meetings

m 199 and 1993 may be symptomatic.? Elic it ed by fast-paced developments

in the biological and information technosciences which promise to radically

and

rhizomatically reshape the moral, political, and psychological spaces in

wbich we l ive, and also playfully invoking the popular-culture speculations

of science fiction, this new anthropology links biological, social, linguistic,

an d cultural anthropologies in new ways, rewiring the humanities and social

sciences. The range of papers at these sessions included efforts to characterize

lhe changing social organization of modernity or of the late twentieth century;

etbnographically situated and cross-culturally juxtaposed accounts of techno-

lagical sites of mediation (between law and medicine, psychia try and com-

puter technology; uItrasound in Greece and in New

York:

law and medicine

in Bhopal and in Los Angeles); studies of cohorts (generational, national,

gender) of scientists and engineers; and probings of the relations between

popular c~l tu re and various spheres of authori tative science, including the

roles of sciencs ina democratic socie ty.

~ver~ featur~s seem to characterize this new cultural anthropology of sei-

: ; : e . an IDtere.stI~ the .diversity and variants of scientific practices; a mapping

the ways this diversirv and sub-versions can rechannel the scientific imagi-

: ; l a t o make new kinds of connect ions across profess ional boundar ies and

in_.~

Worlds; a focus on the materiality of scientific knowledge in terms of

-UJuents killlhe SOcial' ,s

.1

s'. a nd hum~ networks; an acknowledgment of debates over

- h ImphcatlOns of science and technology led by scientists and engi-

rat er than h'

informar an or enng of these actors; and an attention to the modes of

C8peciaIllo~production and diffusion of the new sciences and technologies

llarawa YI~the visual and electronic media (see Fischer 1991; Rouse 1993;

I .. e s s

Y

2,1993).

o ft en noted are the al'l I . h d f sci

par e s wit tra itions o scientifically informed

48

MICHAEL M. J. FISCHER

EYE(I)ING THE SCIENCES



philosophical speculations such as those of the history of science tradi~ion to

which Michel Foucault belongs (Gaston Bachelard, Georges CangUllhem,

Fernand Hallyn) or the post-structuralist writings of Serres, Derrida, and De-

leuze and Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, foreground the work

of Francois Jacob in the opening pages of

A Thousand Plateaus,

and draw a

series of their philosophical concepts from microbiology. It is important to

their project (and, I think, to the new anthropology) that this new conceptual

vocabulary has at least dual (if not multiple) genealogies, only one of whieh

is in the new biology, the other coming as often from medieval and baroque

philosophy. Thus

fold

and

expression

both refer to genetics-the folding to-

gether of the double helix structure of DNA-and also to Spinoza. The point

of this doubling of genealogical references initially is to test whether

recon.

figurations of conceptual boundaries can be productive and ~seful. Donna

Haraway's use of the term

lively languages

for the metaphoncal structures

that science draws upon in both its workaday and its promotional faces is

similar, and she, too, foregrounds this

liveliness

and promiscuity in order

to intervene, to draw attention to alternative routings of thought to wh ich the

concepts and the social implica tions of science might be put. ~ parallel

st rategy is pursued by Michel Serres in his play upon

parasite

as simultane-

ously a te rm of biology, human relations, and information theory. This par-

t icular t riplet has been put to good use in Bruno Latour' s .study .of h~w

Pasteur's success was a funct ion of his synergistically becoming allied with

popular hygenic movements, and inserting the bacteriologicallabor~tory as a

s ite for making visible a leveI of interactions that redefine human social bonds

below normal human awareness in the nineteenth century:

The tribunal punishes a criminal with one year' s punishment, but he

pays for his brief spell in the cell with his lif e. When a m~n fol~ows

a woman to her hotel, he thinks he is settling the transacnon with a

coin and ends his days in an asylum .... When you bring a wom.an

to birth, you think you are in the presence of three agents-the mid-

wife, the baby, and the mother-but a fourth takes advantage of the

situation to pass from your hands to the woman's wounds .... Yo u

organize a demonstration of Eskimos in the museu~. They go out to

meet the public, but they also meet cholera and die. (1988: 32-33)

In more abst ract terms formulated as a challenge to traditional social theory,

., di

t or sepa- the exact sciences elude SOCialanalysis not because they are Istan. _

. . . h

cepnon of so

rated from soc ie ty but because they revolutionize t e very con

, . S that one

ciety and what it comprises (38). He concludes, quotmg erres,

eliminates a parasite only by introducing another more powerful one (39)f ' m

. di fferent ro

The notions of paras ite , leverage, power ratios, are not so I de-

Foucault's notions of micropolitics, Derrida's notions of displace~ent,·c or

construction by iteration with a difference, Deleuze's molecular rhizorn'

49

vira antigenealo~ies: and perhaps, .i~ ant~ropol~gy, Michael Taussig's ner-

systern's mímenc (also a repentíon with a difference, a slippage, a sha-

~ . f ,-

e ehange). These nonons are o interest anthropologically insofar as they

roam . h' I I' .

not mere philosop

ica

or iterary tactics, but seek their elucidation in ,

~e ls of ordinary scientific knowledge on a microlevel that mold social rela-~ l~

:ons. yet operate below the pur~h~se of traditional socia l and cultural theory

coneepts. Deleuze and Guattan differentiate between molar and molecular

approaehes, the latter indicating a stress on multiplicities, the former on ho-

Iism and uni ties; they advocate the molecular in a provocative way, but by

doing so problematize the faith

of

molecular biology in severe reductionism

a s weIlas the faith of social theory in ei ther simple individualism (utilitarian

or voluntarist theories) or s imple social constructivism (Durkheimian or Witt-

gensteinian theories). It has been noted by a number of critics of molecular

biology that its reductionism effaces the leveI of the body, of the organism,

an d

l eads to both moral dilemmas and ecological ones. This is a point made

by anthropologist Paul Rabinow's studies of recombinant DNA technologies.

And it begins toraise serious issues about the locus for moral agency.

Sherry Turkle's studies of mul tiple selves focuses these issues on a series

oflevels. On the one side, second selves created by students through com-

puters ean be therapeutic role-playing as well as cognitive play with new ways

of working out a sense of self and personhood. On the other side, post-trau-

matie stress dissociative disorders (including multiple personality disorders)

~ painful dysfunctions, and seem to be increasing as the postmodern'

~r ~f the nineties. Is this a func tion of changing diagnostic questions,

ar w.'~ VIrtual worlds' role-playing, and wi th middlebrow books and media

=elty abo~t multiple ~ersonality disorders, are these dysfunctions more

a u J expresslble and a~·tJculatable as cultural forms? Further, repression of

abuse. as a .cau~e

m

these dysfunctions, as it comes into public view,

~tes dlssemmatmg anxieties and probings with complicated epistemo-

caI.eonund~a and ethics of determining what is real, imagined, therapeu-

, or latrogelllc.

~ to yet another leveI: i s there a paral le l between the assymetry be-

n dlsembodied a d b di d .

P

Il1c:IIla.I·. n em o

te

selves

m

computer play versus multiple

rty dlsorder and h h h .

01

.

on

t e ot er and, the use of smart weapons

-m

ogleal warfar h h G .

. e Sue as t e ulf War agamst Iraq and the kind of post-

?

u 8t

t

~orahty-theology called for by sueh thinkers as Emmanuel Levi-

na 18the status f b di d consci .

.- lDeJrel '. o em o te conscious human beings: need the choice

y a duahshc o f h .

'CaI ne o t e madequacy of agency of egos in large tech-

,,8Y8~7ms(the transgressive play of those who toy with the idea of

as posthuma b' '

be IOdg d . n su jecüvities 8) versus the responsibility that can-

and ae

g

m any but such egos? Or are there mult iple goals of responsi-

eney that ar b th diff I

e o nrerent y e~bo.9ied and potentially eonftict

50



51



with one another? The technological information socie ty i s not just one of

simulacra, and not all simulacra are morally equivalent. Whi le there may bea

connection between computer games and computer-assisted missi le guidance

technologies, their use rs and usages are still subject to mora l evaluation.

While it is true that humans ar e now enmeshed in transgenetic, genetically

engineered, and chimerically constructed biological modificat ions to pros.

thetically engineered external capacit ies, the questions of humanism remain

and directly affect the rules of the polit ies, ecologies, cultural categories, and

public cultures we wish to create for ourselves.

As Byron Good reminds us in his critique of biomedical models of illness

which easily incorporate various kinds of cyborgian technologies, a ll medi-

c ine joins rational and deeply ir ra tional e lements, combin ing an att en tion to

the .material body with a concern for the moral dimensions of sickness and

suffering. . . . It is thus both the privilege and the obligation of medical

anthropology to bring renewed attention to human experience, to suffering,

to meaning and interpretat ion, to the role of narratives and historici ty, as well

as to the role of socia l formations and inst itutions (1993: 52-53) . These

moral and narra tive d imens ions are all the more important under condi tions

in which medicine and molecular biology are tending to recast the body as

an effect of a molecule, an extension or supplement to the death less bit of

immanence that is DNA, in Deleuze 's t erms, a v ir tual body that is both

consti tu ted in the interfaces of wetwares, softwares, and hardwares of a post-

vital body, and whose secr et of life increasingly implodes into new

dimensions of coding, a v ir tual abyss or vanishing point within the or-

ganism (Doyle 1993:9).

Deleuze and Guat tari work, in par t, with a vocabulary drawn f rom the

boundaries between the human and the substratum of the molecular structures

that compose humans and other biological species; Haraway's cyborg vocabu-

lary works, in part, by focus ing on hybr idization between humans and me-

chanical or computational prostheses. Haraway is concerned with the three

boundaries affecting human beings: external cyborg (machine-human) rela-

tions , internal b iolog ical ones, and those between us and other animals . She

poses poli tical and moral questions by commi tting herself to a ser ies o~~u-

tually interrupting and revaluing (Serres's pa rasitic ) agendas (soclahs

t

,

feminist, alternative narrational, and commi tment to no-nonsense accounts

of the real world ). It is this that generates her search for new metaph?rs,

bo th that they del ight and capture attent ion (publi ci ty ), a lso that they artlcU-

la te new political r ela tions and possibilitie s. As she put it at the end of t~e

day in San Francisco, I 'rn not interested in boundary crossings, but rather in

zones of implosion, of nature into culture, of the mater ia l wor ld into tropes,

as s it es of t rans formations that generate narra tive poss ib le worlds and ne

w

. This sort of storytelling, she went on to remind, is not the same

lcrencles. .

.. roere opinion: not all stones are equal ly good . Gene, seed, fetus, chip,

: a m , and bomb are key te~ms ~t th.emoment. They are key nodes invested

\Vitb densities o~ cult~ral lmagmatlOn and work. . .

1be I inguistic vlrtuoslt~ of .H~away, Deleuze, Serres, or Derrida IS not

ftashy attention seeking; rt IS also a senous att empt to f ind conceptual-

:ns for a world in which the t~adi~ion~l boundar ies and categor ies are

upset and reworked by the technoscientific mfrastructure of organic l ife, so-

cial relations, and communications. Derrida, like Deleuze, draws upon the

revolution in molecular b iology , which happened roughly at the same t ime as

lhe revolution of structuralism and post-s tructura lism in the humani ti es . In a

chapter on Derrida's conceptual vocabula ry drawn from the life sc ience s,

Christopher Johnson notes that Derr ida devoted a series of seminars to Fran-

cois Jacob (who with Jacques Monod and Andre Lwoff won the 1965 Nobel

Prize for thei r work on the role of RNA). This conceptual vocabulary works

similarly to Haraway's gene , seed, fetus, chip, br ain, and bomb. Some of

Derrida's terms are articulation ( from anatomy and topology; incIud ing f ig-

ures ofligature and ligament), invagination (from pathology and embryology,

as welI as from sexual anatomy), tympan (convoluted pathways complicating

lhe distinctions between inner and outer , limi t, boundary, marg in), atom,

seed,

germ

and termo Thus, for instance, Derrida shadows Hegel's notion

of seed as a unitary anticipation of the tree, the conceptual figure of circular

movement, a cIosed monad, unfolding of a concept, a restr icted economy,

and ~e return of mind to itself after i ts passage through nature or experience.

Derrida pluralizes, turning seed into dissemination- There is no first in-

~ation. The semen is already swarming. (1972: 304)-and turning the

~cted ~conomy into a gene ral economy in which there are remainders

:Ch deviate from the path of predetermination or unfolding, that generates

~nce, new forms, muta tions. IncIuded in the se t of terms with seed and

~ IS aI.so pro gram: the geneti c and cyberneti c codes (programs), both

~ect ~olDterference, to parasi tes, diverting the message or let ter for i ts own

in

5,

like the molecular formations of cutting and sequencing, citing, iterat-

~ ~d c~nsta~tly altering. Whi le Johnson sees Derrida as merely drawing

••••••.th

e

blOlo~lcal, Derrida's German translator, Hans-Jorg Rheinberger ar-

e_ at Derrld ' . .. .

- - = _ a s wntmg IS the matenal form of molecular biology and

-,..-Iunenta l mode . .

of disc rn science m general, that science is no longe r a proce ss

Writin·ov(e

G

ry

of. a world apart, but is quite literally an experimental f orm of

. enetíc mat . I· I· I

lIId di erra IS itera ly cut and resp liced in order to understand

scover, thereby h I· . .

~tand ' owever, a so actively creatmg the reality that it

In s.)

an analysis of th I f I

e p ay u metaphors used by operators of DNA sequenc-

52



53



ers (connected to Macintosh computers), Deborah Heath points out that tech.

nicians are referred to as hands -as in Don't you get it: techs don't lalk

techs are hands -and that this is a double entendre: good hands are\th~

tacit skills that make experiments work, and that intuit new solutions to proj,

lems. It is this doubleness that makes techs different from chimeras. Chimeras

are mergings of cosmids (microorganisms that ac t as vec tors for part icular

stretches of DNA) with fragments of another organism's DNA. Chimeras

c a n

be cloned, and potentially there is also a doubleness to chimera as Deleuze

and Guat tar i remind with respec t to al i sorts of rhizomat ic forms: As Fra n.

cois Jacob says, transfers of genetic material by viruses or through other

procedures, fusions of cells originating in different species, have results

analogous to those of 'the abominable couplings dear to antiquity and the

Middle Ages' (1987: 10-11). But chimeras as a technical unit in miem,

biology do not have the same agency and ethical responsibility as good

hands. Heath' s ethnographic attention to the humor and metaphorics of the

techs-notions like g ood hands, but also naming practices with a point

such as Lana

(anal

spelled backwards) for one of the sequencers-seems

a promising opening to the back-and-forth flow of metaphors, rather than the

older hierarchical models of popularizing and degradation of knowledge

from experts to publics.

I t i s the interplay of various kinds of cultural rational ities or logics rather

than just agons among interest groups or ca1culations of risk assessment that

promise to open up the social worlds of specialized knowledges. Complemen-

tary work is being done in such cul tural s tudies analyses of middlebrow, new

age, and various other sociological constellations of theorizing about science

and technology (Ross 1991; Penley and Ross 1991) . At issue in some of the

feminist contributions to this literature is the relation between systematic but

covert rhetorical codings of social power relations in the ways technoscience

is deployed. Donna Haraway's tone of modest determination is admirable:

Ferninist discourses and anti-colonial discourse are engaged in this very

subtle and de licate effort to bui ld connect ions and aff init ies , and not to

pro-

duce one's own or another 's experience as a resource for a closed narrative.

These are difficult issues and 'we' fail frequently (1991: 113).

Generations, Genders, Institutions, Places, Cultures,

and Narratíves

Visvanathan argues that the l ife his tories of the major nuclea r phy-

s ic is ts in this century have been a movement from innocence, free-

dom and conviviality-from play, discovery and communitas-

to

the tyranny of secrecy, control and in some cases e la tory nihi li sm-

[Their] biographies reflect . .. the prototypical relationships between

cience and the scientists' self-defined social responsibility,

nu~lehar. turn reflects the culturally defined relationship between

WhlC

tn .

h d UT

I dge an d power m t e mo em west.

knOW

e

-Ashis Nandy

fi tions in the previous sections highlight the contemporary cultural

If ~e ~o: physics as th~ lead scienc~ to molec.ular bio~~gy and computer

~ and thereby [ndirectly such sites as Pans and Si licon Val ley, other

SClences'fcontemporary reflec tion on the development of the sc iences have

genres to sketch out anthropologically more usable understandings of previous

begun tíons and places of scientific development. The new hybrid cultural and

::cal studies of scienc~ (Lat~ur, Shapin and ~hafe~, Gol~nski, Biagioli,

Kõrner) aswell asscience-m-fictton novels (Banvtlle, Djerassi) have begun to

draw co~nections between science as a pecul iar set of pract ices and interven-

tions in 1argercultural worlds (public demonstrations of experiments carefully

staged and controlled; piggybacking science on larger and more diffuse social

movements; construction of public roles under diverse institutional regimes)

Ihat begin to t race out the degrees to which scienti fic understandings were

central to new emergent cultural consensus, and the degrees to which individ-

uals who practiced science also l ived in worlds governed by qui te other con-

ceptua l

regimes (back to Levon Abrahamian' s cartoon parable of

Giordorno

Bruno).

Scientists' autobiographies might provide a series of texts in which the

construction of an autonomous heroic ego or genius can be placed in ten-

sion with the collective expansion of the aes the tics of rat ional ity which is

o f t e n

the outcome of fallible cooperation and competition, playing games,

including at times deceit, as wel l as often becoming captive of s ta te , market ,

or corporation-driven rationales. James Watson's

Double Helix

(1968) was

one of the first autobiographical accounts of science that helped demystify the

actuaI process of scientific discovery in the popular imagination. Rita Levi-

Montalcini, 1986 Nobel laurea te in tnedic ine for the discovery wi th Stanley

~n of nerve growth factor, entitles her autobiography

In Praise of Imper-

;::::n:o underscore that making educative mistakes advances science. And

fram

C01S

Jacob builds his autobiography,

The Statue Within

(1987), around a

Oikee~ork of psychological anxieties both individual and formed culturally

World~ntalcini) in the pressures of being a secular European Jew dur ing

S C i e n

ar I~.These and other autobiographies from the ascendant biological

intere~

(Crick 1988; Komberg 1989; Snyder 1989; Djerassi 1992) might

ofan ~ fjngl

y

b~ read against more general efforts to trace back the emergence

m OnnatlOn . . -. ---

1993, Py h Soclety smce the nineteenth century (Latour 1988; Richards

, nc on 1973). - -

MUChof the ' ,-. '. .

~nmg discussion about the nature of science is, however,

52



53



ers (connected to Macintosh computers), Deborah Heath points out

that

teeh_

nic ians are referred to as hands -as in Don t you get it: techs don r lalk

techs are hands -and that this is a double entendre: good hands are\th~

tacit skills that make experiments work, and that intuit new solutions to prob_


are mergings of cosmids (microorganisms that ac t as vectors for particular

stretches of DNA) with fragments of another organism's DNA. Chimeras

ca n

be cloned, and potentially there is also a doubleness to

chimera

as Deleuze

and Guat ta ri remind wi th respect to a li sorts of rhizomat ic forms: As Fran-

cois Jacob says, tr ansfers of genetic material by viruses or through other

procedures, fusions of cells originating in different species, have

resu lu

analogous to those of

'the

abominable coupl ings dear to antiqui ty and the

Middle Ages' (1987: 1O-11). But chimeras as a technical unit in micro.

biology do not have the same agency and ethical responsibility as

g ood

hands. Heath' s ethnographic attention to the humor and metaphorics of lhe

techs-notions l ike

good

hands , but a lso naming prac tices wi th a

po int

such as Lana

(anal

spelled backwards) for one of the sequencers-seems

a promising opening to the back-and-forth ftow of metaphors , rather than lhe



I t i s the interplay of various kinds of cultural rat ional ities or logics rather

than just agons among interest groups or calculations of risk assessment that

promise to open up the social worlds of specialized knowledges. Complemen-

tary work is being done in such cultura l studies analyses of middlebrow, new



feminist contributions to this literature is the relation between systematic but


is deployed. Donna Haraway's tone of modest determina tion is admirable:

Feminist discourses and anti-colonial discourse are engaged in this very

subt le and del icate e ffort to bui ld connect ions and affini ties , and not to pro-

duce one 's own or another 's experience as a resource for a closed narrat ive.

These are difficult issues and 'we' fail frequently (1991: 113).


and Narratíves?

Visvanathan argues that the l ife his tories of the major nuclea r phy-

s ici sts in this century have been a movement from innocence , free-

dom and conviviality-from pIay, discovery and communitas-

to

the tyranny of secrecy, cont rol and in some cases elatory nihil ism.

[Their] biographies reftect ... the prototypical relationships between

ience and the scientists' self-defined social responsibility,

nu~lehar.

e

turn reftects the culturally defined relationship between

whíc m . h d U

1 dge and power

m

t e mo em

west.

kno

w

e -Ashis Nandy

fi tions in

the

previous sections highlight the contemporary cultural

li

~e : 0 : physics as th~ lead scienc~ to molec.ular bio~~gy and computer

~ and thereby [ndirectly such

srtes

as Pans and Sil icon Valley, other

SClences'fcontemporary ref tection on the development of the sciences have

genres

to

sketch out anthropologically more usable understandings of previous

beguntions and places of scientific development. The new hybrid cultural and

~cal studies of scienc~ (Lat~ur, Shapin and ~hafe~, Gol~nski, Biagioli,

({õrner) aswell as science-m-fictlon novels (Banville, Djerassi) have begun to

dra w

connections between science as a pecul iar se t of prac tices and

interven-

tions

in

larger cultural worlds (public demonstrations of experiments carefully

staged

and controlled; piggybacking science on larger and more diffuse social


tha t

begin to trace out the degrees to which scientif ic unders tandings were


uaIs

who practiced science also l ived in worlds

governed

by quite other

con-

ce ptua1

regimes (back to Levon Abrahamian ' s cartoon parable of

Giordorno

Bruno).


CODStructionf an autonomous heroic ego or

genius'

can be placed in

ten-

sion with the collective expansion of the aes thet ics of rat iona li ty which is

often the outcome of fallible cooperation and competition, playing games,

including attimes dece it , a s well as often becoming captive of s ta te , market ,

or corporation-driven rationales. James Watson's

Double Helix

(1968) was

one

of

the first autobiographical accounts of science that helped demystify the

actuaI

process of scientif ic discovery in the popular imagination. Rita

Levi-

Montalcini, 1986 Nobel laureate in medicine for the discovery wi th Stanley

~n

of

nerve

growth

factor, entitles her autobiography

In Praise of Imper-

::::: :: '. to undersc?re th~t making educative mistakes advances science. And

~s Jacob builds hIS autobiography,

The Statue Within

(1987), a round a

II:L_ Mo

rk

of Psychological anxieties both individual and formed culturally

\U Ç

ontal )'

WorIdw : cmi m the pressures of being a secular European Jew during

S C i e n

ar I~. These and other autobiographies from the ascendant biological

~~ (Cnck 1988; Kornberg 1989; Snyder 1989; Dje rassi 1992) might

ofao

~ ~

~ read ~gain~t 1110regeneral efforts to trace back the emergence

1993, Py h

atlOn

socrerv since the nineteenth century (Latour 1988; Richards

, nc on 1973). .

Much of the r i ..rn: · . .

~nmg discussion about the nature of science is, however,

52



53



ers (connected to Macintosh computers), Deborah Heath points out that tech_

nicians are referred to as hands -as in Don't you get it: techs don't talk

techs are hands -and that this is a double entendre: good

hands

are\th'

tacit skills that make experiments work, and that intuit new solutions to prob~


are mergings of cosmids (microorganisms that act as vec tors for particular

s tretches of DNA) with fragments of another organism's DNA. Chimeras can

be cloned, and potential ly there is also a doubleness to

chimera

as Deleuze

and Guat tar i remind wi th respect to all sorts of rhizomatic forms: As

Fra n.

cois Jacob says, transfers of genetic material by viruses or through other

procedures, fusions of cells or iginating in different species, have results

analogous to those of 'the abominable couplings dear to antiquity and the

Middle Ages' (1987: 10-11). But chimeras as a technical unit in

rnicro.

biology do not have the same agency and ethical r esponsibility as good

hands. Heath' s ethnographic attention to the humor and metaphorics of the

techs-notions like good hands, but also naming practices with a point

such as Lana

(anal

spe lled backwards) for one of the sequencers-seems

a promising opening to the back-and-forth flow of metaphors, rather than the



I t i s the inte rplay of various kinds of cultural rat ional it ie s or logics rather

than jus t agons among inte res t groups or calculations of risk assessment that

promise to open up the social worlds of specialized knowledges. Cornplemen-

t ary work is being done in such cultural s tudies analyses of middlebrow, new



feminist contributions to this literature is the relat ion between systemat ic but


is deployed. Donna Haraway' s tone of modest determination is admirable:

Feminist discourses and anti-colonial discourse are engaged in this very

subtle and del icate effort to bui ld connect ions and affini ties, and not to pro-

duce one's own or another's experience as a resource for a closed narrative.

These are difficult issues and we fail frequently (1991: 113).


and Narratives?

Visvanathan argues that the l ife his tories of the major nuclear phy-

s icist s in this century have been a movement from innocence , free-

dom and conviviality- from play, discovery and communi t as-to

the tyranny of secrecy, control and in some cases elatory nihilism.

[Their] biographies reflect ... the prototypical relationships between

1ar science and the scientists' self-defined social responsibility,

nUh~

h

in mrn reflects the cultural ly defined relat ionship between

w le . h d \

knowledg

e

an d

power

10

t e mo em

west, .

- Ashis

Nandy

th

refleetio

ns

in

the

previous sections highlight the contemporary cultural

If~

from physics as the lead sc ience to molecular biology and computer

s. ces and thereby indirectly such sites as Paris and Silicon Valley other

SCIen ,. '

ores of eontemporary reflection on the development of the sciences have

: : g u n to sketch out anthrop~lo~ically more usable understandings of previous

generations and places ?f scientific develop~ent. The new hybrid cultural and

bistorieal studies of

science

(Latour, Shapin and Shafer, Golinski, Biagioli,

Kõrner), aswell as science-in-fiction novels (Banville, Djerassi) have begun to

dr aw

eonnections between science as a peculiar set of pract ices and

interven-

tions in larger cultural worlds (public demonstrations of experiments carefully

staged and controlled; piggybacking science on larger and more diffuse social


tba t begin to trace out the degrees to which scienti fic understandings were


uaIs who praeticed science also lived in worlds governed by qui te other con-

ceptua1regimes (back to Levon Abrahamian' s cartoon parable of Giordorno

Bruno).


~tru.etion of an au~onomous heroic ego or genius can be placed in ten-

SIODwith the collective expansion of the aesthetics of rationality which is

~n ~e outcome of fallible cooperation and competition, playing games,

mcludmg a~times deceit, as well as often becoming captive of state, market,

or corporatlOn-driven rationales. James Watson's

Double Helix

(1968) was

one of the first autobiographical accounts of science that helped demystify the

actuaJ.p~ess of scient if ic discovery in the popular imagination. Rita Levi-

c:

talcml

,1986 Nobel laureate in tnedicine for the discovery wi th Stanley

fectio

n of nerve growth factor, entitles her autobiography

In Praise of

Imper-

Fran

. to underscore that making educat ive mis takes advances science And

rra:

lS

~acob builds his autobiography,

The Statue Within

(1987), aro~nd a

Oike M

wor

of. P~y~hological anxieties both individual and formed culturally

ontalclm) 10 th .

orl d V I: I e pressures of being a secular European Jew during

SCiencesar(C~.These and other autobiographies from the ascendant biological

rick

1988· K b .IIlterestingl b ,om erg 1989; Snyder 1989; Djerassi 1992) might

y

e read agaí t

o f a o in~orm. . IOS more general efforts to trace back the emergence

I ation so

t . - -

1993· Pyn h ele

y

since the níneteenth century (Latour 1988· Richards

, e on 1973) - - '

M U C h

of the reidfi i· .. .

-=I ng dlScusslOn about the nature of seience is, however,

54



55



built around the experience of twentieth-century physics. Shiv Visvanathan

drawing upon the Viennese science writ er Rober t Jungk, uses the lives o r

physicists to construct a matrix of competing positions on the relatior,

b e -

tween poli tical democracy and big science:

Jungk is a mas ter of what anthropologists cal l th ick description. Th e

multi tude of anecdotes he provides coalesce into a choreography

of

positions available to science in relation to the violence of the atom

bomb as a social fact. Within such a perspective scientists like Ein-

stein, Szilard, Teller, Bohr, and Oppenheimer appear not as idiosyn-

cra ti c f igures but as permutat ions with in a scien ti fi c code. Names

become role tags l ist ing various possibilities as the table shows. (Vis-

vanathan 1988: 116)

Thus, Enrico Fermi stands for an apartheid science-aloof from politics.

( Don't bother me about your conscientious scruples. After alI, the thing is

beautiful physics ); Niels Bohr stands for the social organization of science

itself as a mode l of communitas ( Pure sc ience had managed to avoid the

v io lence of war by sublimating it into agonal play. The scientific paper was a

precious gift, and i t c irculated in joyous exchanges .... Every conference

was a kind of pot la tch, each scientist showering the others with knowledge

in exchange for eponymous recognition. The internationalization of science

withstood the pressures of wa r. ); Edward TelIer embodies the scientist as

a pol it ical lobbyis t p laying on mi li tary and poli tical fears to obtain larger

financial sanctions for research ; Szilard and Franck in contrast

urged

greater public understanding and control of science (Visvanathao

1988: 116-18). The most compelIing and disturbing portrai ts are the co ntra

dictory

l ives of such men as Kar l Fuchs (who, like Prometheus, stole the gifts

of nuclear fire and gave them to the Russians that a monopoly of terror be

broken), Hans Be the who opposed armaments research after Hiroshima yet

by 1951 was seduced back into H-bomb research, and the most fascinating

figure in this danse macabre, Robert Oppenheimer, a humanist Haml

el

struggling against a scientific Prometheus. Sociologically, Jungk

an d

Vi~-

vanathan argue, alI these differ ent lives were caught in a threefold shift o

the nature of science: the degener ation of science as a play form; the shlft

within science from epistemic uncertainty to vivisectionist hegemony; andlhe

displacement of science from the university to the company town. Ali thre

e

,

Visvanathan continues,

are syrnptomatic of the transformation of Western libera lism into oc-

cidental despotism, heralding the coming of the Atomstaat. ... For

liberalism, the private was sacr ed and the public was open and ac-

cessible. In biza rre inversion, vivisectionist sc ience has open~d. u~

the privacy of the body and souI to the public scrut iny of the chm

c

while science as public knowledge has become increasingly

gaze't an d forced into the most monstrous of total institutions-the

secre . h

ch cities of the twentie t century.... As a mode of produc-

~[the nuclear energy regime] demands a fail-safe system of se-

bon, h ..

ty and super uman precision .... However the human body

cun .. ,

ís a reluctant machine. (130, 146, 148)

jsVaJUlthanand his col.leagues in New Delhi are not antiscience Luddites:

ence ís not evil, but rt must be controlled, redeemed through spiritualIy,

ecologicaIly, and d~mocratically sound va lue.s. A~ong the ways suggested by

jsVaJUlthanand his colIeagues are alternative sciences, updated traditional

scieJICCS, and , above alI, bicul tu ra l perspectives which constantly juxtapose

needs of different communities and ecologies in different parts of the

sIobe 50 as to try not to alIow one perspective to overr ide the o thers. Ashis

aody:

Contemporary India, by virtue of its bicultural experience, manages

to epi tomize the g lobal problem of knowledge and power in our

times . There i s a continuity between the Indian experience of an

increasingly violent modern science, encroaching upon other tradi-

dons of knowledge and socia ll ife [ Iike the r is ing debate over large-

scale dams that displace thousands, can erode the landscape and

cause

long-term

ecological damage, and transform the nature of

agrarian relations], and the Western experience with modem science

as the dominant cul tu ra l principI e re sisting the emergence of new

cultures of ~nowledge [Iike the resistence to investing in exploration

and production of alternative forms of ene rgy] . (l I)

yisv,: athan illustrates, the use of lives containing the principled con-

ons 10 the transformations of modern science can be a valuable tool

of explorations .of the institutions and socia l organ izat ions of science,

~ of

the narrative devices by which scient ist s make sense of their own

~ties.

the following pages I I k .

. . want to 00 at several science autobiographies and

ver y :ehmmary f ashion probe some of the ways they a re str uc tured, and

fi : s.ome ~f the reasons for their structuring have to do with the

t me Sh

m

which their authors participate: that their form as welI as their

ay ave som thi 1I

and th e mg to te us. I look first at autobiographical

open-

, en at a couple of middle passages.

way to get a

f

I

c '.

gs of . ee lor ranges of autobiographical style is to read the

a vanety of t t B . .

of c h ex s. eginnmgs are wonderful places to examine

o erence the d h' .

c:oherent I' egree to w ich autobiographers feel themse lves to

se ves or na rrati th . h'

acknoWled .ves, e ways m w ich other autobiographers

ge decentered

fi

t d d' . .

multi l e . c~n .IC e. ,.con~r~ ~ctory, falhble selves POSI-

P parts vis-a-vis linguistic, libidinal, social, historical, fa-

56

MICHAEL M.

J\

FISCHER

EYE( l) ING THE SCIENCES

7



milial, generational, ethnic, gendered, technological, intercultural, or other

processes; the ways in which at tention is given to the media or vehicles of

memory and forgetting, desire and information, documentation and impres_

sion. Some autobiographies enact, are performatives, in ways their authors

perhaps do not realize, and that, too, is interesting, and is often signalIed

in

beginníngs.'?

For instance, just to take a quick unsystematic sample of the openings of

six recent autobiographies (of five scientists and one philosopher of science):

Hideki Yukawa, Philip Morse, Irene Fischer, Karl Popper, Norbert Wiener,

S. E. Luria. Two of these begin with visual tableaux or set-piece dramatic

scenes that work as emblems of the text to come; two begin wi th meditations

on the cIiche that only when a life is nearly over can one hope to find a pattem

because human life stories are recursive, hermeneutic, ever-changing;

and

two begin with meditations on the problems and problematics of writing a u -

tobiographies of lives rooted in scientific careers for nonscientific audiences.

Of these, two come across as sel f-cente red in ways that caution the reader to

the fac t that the narra tor perhaps is not to be ful ly t rusted, a lthough enacting

the grounds on which trust and distrust might be evaluated. Karl Popper is

one of those wonderful characters whose philosophy is perfectIy rational and

democratic in ways that he himsel f may not a lways live up to: one is amused

by his posturing and yet reassured by the expl ic itness of the arguments he

makes. Norbert Wiener is more sel f-aware of what may seem like arrogance,

calling constant a ttention to i thimself . Wiener is one of the two who uses the

meditation on the difficulties of writ ing a scientist's autobiography: the

diffi-

culty for him centers on the difficulty of writing science nontechnically and

there are repeated explicit put-downs of laymen and unconscious insistence

that only males are scientists. By contrast, Luria's meditat ion on the

difficul-

ties of writing a scientist's autobiography focuses on the chal lenges of

pre-

sent ing personalities from multiple perspectives: Pasteur's religious fai.th,

Darwin's neurasthenia and Newton's mental iIIness are keys to un derstandinê

these powerful personalities at work; to examine Pasteur without his root~in

French provincial bourgeois life, or Einstein without his relation to Iudaism

is to diminish thern : personality should emerge as a landscape compos~d

of many vistas like ... a Breughel panorama of peasant life (1984: 3). Luna

has formulated here, of course, a neat criterion that distinguishes uninteres

t

-

ing autobiographies from those that are in fact i lluminat ing about the ~ro-

cesses of life that go into the making of science. (Compare his compatnol,

Rita Levi-Montalcini's autobiography, discussed below.) .

Thus, one can distinguish also be tween the two examples using opemng

tableaux or dramatic scenes as emblems: Karl

Popper'

s is the story of

ho w he

apprenticed himself to a carpenter, and how this craftsman taught him ~ve;~-

thing; it is a nose-thumbing gesture to be repeated in the autobiography use ,

f the main themes is to insist that he is very, very different from

wbete one o V· C' I h .

. al positivists of the ienna ire e, w en m fact much of what he

tbe

10gtC

di I thei . I .

_ his personal

iscovery

was a so

eir

perspecnve. rene Fischer's

claíJDS

as the other hand is of her ret irement party, of the ftood of memories

tableau

00 .

e to her at that moment, of the stones she began to share with the

tbat

caro h I . II .

people who had been er ong-time co eagues, which were commented

~y the foIlowing days and weeks, and in turn stimulated the writing

of

her

~=tifiC memoirs. Here there is an interesting generative process: story tell-

:8 and shared experience .as themarker~ of tra~itional soIidarity, and yet this

scientist, almost uniquely m these autobiographíes, grounds the s tr ing of s to-

ries

by faithfuI consultation with diaries, work logs, correspondence files, and

published papers. Refere~ce to these punctuate the text, with a rhythm of

coJIegiality, at once narrative and documentary.

Of the two scientif ic biographies that begin wi th meditat ions on Iooking

back at a Iifeas i tcomes to some sort of point of retrospective, Morse explic-

itly alludes to a theme that arises less expl ic it ly in several of the others: that

is, a key motive for writing and understanding the lives of scientists, i s that i t

is increasingly imperative for governments, industrialists, and citizens to un-

derstand the workings of science ,in a wor ld where the links coupling basic

research and final application are becoming cIoser, and the conditions of ev-

eryday l ife a re becoming more dependent upon those Iinkages, incIuding the

possibilities of gross disaster if the linkages are misused.

_~deki Yukawa is the other meditator on the retrospect ive point of I ife, but

bis

t~

a.much more hermeneutic, scientific account of multiple perspectives.

And

it

ISthat, too, that I find fascinating: the demonstration that the distance

between sc~entific perspectives and humanistic ones is not opposed as so

~o~y IS a~sumed. It i s an exquis ite text wi th mult iple openings, each

_tammgrnultiple frames, seemmg to paralIel the multiple alternative expla-

:oos and per~pectivaI, partial models in physics. There are four openings

IlansJapanese gift boxes: a forward, a chronology, an introduction by the

lator,

an d

the opening chapter.

The foreword only t . .

-.: ,wo pages,

IS

an extraordinary collage of shifting per-

-r-uves Rashamo d . bi .

be

-: n one m eu rst style, not just four points of view It

gIns wíth th

r· .

cen

e me a?out now that he ISfifty years oId, he can review

half

a

lhe tury. The expectanon of a coherent narrat ive thereby set up is disrupted in

next sentences whi h d· . .

IDiddl I'

IC

me itate on his two lives which are one-the easy

e-c ass life of th

f

Darrate. d h e son o a geology professor, easy enough, that is to

, an t e acade . I'C h' h . '

lives and mie Ire w

IC

ISnot so easy to ana lyze; yet both these

paths are one Th I'C f h . .

0IIe hand . e Ire o p ysics ISfurthe r refrac ted in two: on the

••1-. '

one could desc·b· t

·1 . ..

-.ug ° h . n e I easi y enough, as a life that was just carned

n t e tide of a sei h . .

lW e e tt

y

ience t at was rapidly changing m this century (a

IDodest met h c

ap or ror someone who Iater does admit that he helped

58

MICHAEL M.~. FISCHER




shape the course of that science); but, on the other hand, this neat metapho

r

i s d ispell ed in the observation that holds both for phys ics and for n~rrating a

life: today's t ruths may tomorrow be disproved, and that i s why, from time

to time, we must look backwards in order to find the path we must take to-

morrow.' Note thi s recursiveness i s l ike the s tream in to which one can never

s tep twice; one looks backwards not to achieve closure, bu t to track a COurse

into the future; i t is l ike the hermeneutical circ1e which never achieves c10sure

since each new reading generates awareness of further horizons.

The pace of the text does not pause: again softly it notes that th is parti cular

l ife has already had mul tiple accounts of i t writ ten, bo th by Yukawa himself

and in the form of b iographies by others. Gently the au thor suggest s that

the

public has an image, and he wants to offer more information so that that image

can be judged. Note again the imagery being used: this is not the normal

public masque, private interior dichotomy, nor the correcting of a false public

impression (the binary logic of public and private, right and wrong); instead

it is a modern scientific sensibility of triangulation amidst more and more

kinds of data, an image of increasing approximation, increasing comprehen.

sion of complexity.

Next the interior/public, subjectivity/ob jectivi ty t rope is muddied. The No-

bellaureate c1aims to have trouble expressing himself', t o tend to v iew matters

subjectively, and to know that ifhe tries to view things

objectively

he may

betray

himself. Objectivity and subjectivity

here,

of

course,

are not the

popular body/rnind, reali ty/erno tion , hard/soft binarisrns, but rather some-

thing more like simplistic reification versus perspectival truth. In any case,

the text hastens on, not even I can perceive c1early what is about to take

shape (1982: vi): indeterminacy, and note that here he is talking not of the

future, bu t of the nature of the text that the reader i s about to commence.

The fal si ty of proper names is next. Names are not what they seem, espe -

cially in Japan: we learn that Hideki Yukawa is Hideki Ogawa. Ogawa is his

father's family name: upon marriage, he took his wife's family name, Yu-

kawa. Moreover, eventually we learn that h is father had done the sarne, an d

that name in turn was also such a name. A lovely regression of ever receding

uxorilineal nominations.

Finally, the foreword ends with a lyr ical sen tence that br ings temporary

closure to the opening sentence: Hideki Ogawa was born in 1907 at old

Tokyo's Ichibei-cho Azabu. The house smelled of plum blossoms each

spring. But, of course, later in chapter 1 we learn that this is but a reported

description, e li cit ed from his mother , about a b ir thhouse of which he had no

memory, cer ta inly no olfactory one, a b ir thhouse moreover that no long

ef

existed, having been burned in World War 11. (Derridean traces of the

ineffable.) . eS

I won't go on with the descrip tion of the text , except to say that it conun

u

5 9

ia tbis fashion, insisting o~ ~e multipl icity of truth, perspective, and model-

, g' and to suggest that this ISnot a function of writing style, or of simple

~dean post-structuralist reading on my part, but that it reflects a funda-

mental modern scientific perspective on reali ty; and finally to suggest that the

result of multiplicity is not (as Allan Bloom fears) the undermining ofknowl-

edge, but the incre.ase of pu~ch~se on tru~h and knowledge, by identifying the

sources of uncertamty, the limits of particular angles of vision, and by trian-

guIating them to~ether. . .

Sciences are d iverse

in

thei r procedures, methods, aesthetics, and organi-

zational structures. Let us look at some middle passages of two scienti t

hi

f .

IS S

autobiograp ies, one rom a science, geodesy, that is closer to the a I' d

. d f h . pp te

~maltlcs en h

O

l~fiecodntmuum, ~d one from a science, neurobiology,

~ IS

c os~r to t e I e an human sC.lencesends. Such juxtapositioning of

~nt sciences may help pos~ quesuons about the varieti es of models and

practices of knowledge production we ~all science. Geodesy is a particularly

clear example of procedures of modeling mapping indirect

, . ',measurement

an d mcreasmg degrees of approximation or accuracy Neurobi 1 . 1 '

tba.. .

10ogy ISCoser

to t.other ~mage o~~c~enceas almost anarchistically experimental, trial and

b i o c

e n o r h

~uctJve e~pIrICISm, leavened, of

c o u r s e ,

in this case with analytical

emical detection of molecular weight and other physioch . 1

Th e n o ti fi'

r .

ermca proper-

, . íons o mu tI~ ictty ~n~ tnangulat ion, invoked by Hideki Yukawa

:n also ;~h~se t~o sciences m mteresting variants: triangulation is a literal

~:ts ;du~~ mhgeo~esy, whil~ the complementarity of neurobiological

besinning to e I oc eml~al analys is was the s ine qua non for iso la ting and

lIOWth factor f~~::i:~eR~tIll-m~s terious ~o~monal mechanisms of the nerve

1986 Nobel Prize i .~aLevl-Monta1cml and Stanley Cohen received the

ze in medlcme.

1bese two autobiographie (f R' .

of Irene Fischer the ~ o. It~ Levl-Monta1cini, the neurobiologist,

in the emer in figeo es is t) might a ls~ be usefully jux taposed to ac-

Olher frames gf gfi elds of studies of science and technology both to

o re erence with h' h '

hies, but also to id I ~ IC cntIcally to interrogate the auto-

(albeit, importantl pr~;1 e a ~ealIty ch.eck to the theorizing by nonscien-

fOl'Cedo leave th y, . ten sClence-tramed persons who either chose or

éIiacoveryand acco: sl~lhencecareer fast track) about what drives scientists

~. p IS ment (No seriou th I

natIve aCCOunts t

f

s an ropo ogy or even journal-

,t can be credible w~tho~e v~lu~, yet no ant~ropological or journalistic

I:'~Qarv foíl, for instance i t bUI1~mg upon native perspectives.) A useful

four temptations' ' d~provided by Donna Haraways' (1989) survey

each m stu ies of scienc fi .

vaítd

up to a o' e, our tempting perspectives on

ves, p int, but dangerous if allowed to silence the other

first tempta .

hon-usefuI t d . .

o rea agamst Rita Levi-Monta1cini 's quite

60

MICHAEL M. 1. FISCHER

EYE(l)lNG THE SCIENCES

61



different perspective-is the social constructivist view of science that inquir_

ies into the power relations that affect the progress of particular lines of

inquiry, particular careers, and, in its strongest form, the ways in which sei-

entific knowledge policies i ts own boundaries against new ideas or new in .

formation that it cannot easily incorporate. In its strongest versions, sueh

as that elaborated by Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar in Laboratory

Li fe

(1979), the social constructivist view rejects ordinary notions of realism, Or-

dinary separations of what is t echnical f rom what i s social, and regards the

criteria of pragmatic feedback from success in the world to scientific models

as fundamentally underestimating the ways in which science can protect itself

from falsi ficat ion. Latour and Woolgar see science as a tactic of redueing

conflicting interpretations of messy reality into unambiguous facts through

various methods of transcription, translating into equations, and machine out-

puts. (Or to take a c1earer example of how scientific facts operate from a

nonsocial constructivist, Sharon Traweek's s tudy of high-energy physieists,

what gets defined as elementary partic1es and the equations of their relation.

ships, after all, are observed only through the construction of machines, ac-

celerators, devices for turning the imperceptible into traces that can be

recorded, inscribed, ca1culated, and modeled.) Over time, say Latour and

Woolgar, what began as probabilities, tentative generalizations, or appr oxi -

mations are incorporated into later stages of model building as undisputed

facts. In the competit ion for success, scientists becom e invested in power

struggles, defined in part as simply raising the cost to competi tors of desta-

bilizing reigning accounts so high as to be unworthwhile pursuing. Haraway

rightly calls such a description of science both attract ive and dangerous:

draw-

ing attention to the const ructedness and contingent nature of reigning seien-

tific ideas, but wildly overstated if treated as a complete account.

I wil l come back to put Rita Levi-Monta1cini 's observations in fuller con -

text, but want to simply observe here that she-like many scientists-

foregrounds and revels in the contingency of scientific knowledge. Latour and

Woolgar's demystifying account is only demyst ifying to popular accou~l~

of genius and absolute truth, not to working scientists. But Levi-Montalcill

l

places a different set of implications on this contingency: it is part of a larg

ec

picture of both science and life as an evolutionary process created throug

h

.

a

capricious game of mutations and selection. She notes both in life and.In

science the necessity oftentimes of repressing knowledge that cannot

be in -

corporated and that can be self-destructive: thus immersing herself in her

experiments while the Nazis raged around her was one form of healthy.C~-

. .. h 1 . AI d

r

Lurt

a

S

pression, but also she cites Russian neuropsyc o o gist exan e . e

law of disregard of negative information in being able to repress neg

aUV

. 1 ars lal

eC

,

experimental resul ts that she would not be able to expIam unti ye

and that, had she focused on it, might have derai led her.work. Fu~~;rrno~:

retrospective histories of science often inc1ude, as LevI-Monta1cml s doe

1

tions ofpowerful ideas that provided false confirmation for what were

expan

a

. .. be sci

ht at particular pomts m time to e scientific results: thus she cites the

~g . d

of gestalt theones as provi mg suppor t to Karl Lashley's experiments

way

hat the canaci

hich seemed to suggest t at e capacity to learn and memorize was not

~izable in particular ~ar:tsof the co~tex. From a scientists' po in t of v iew,

men, the social constructlvlst .accou~t IS larg~ly true but trivial, not very in-

tereSting (not adding systemanc new inforrnation).

If social constructivism is Haraways' first temptation, her second tempta-

don

ís

a political mediat ion is t v iew of science that inquires into the ways in

which language, laboratory hierarchies, industrial or governmental patron-

age. and so on, structure the perspectives through which t ruth is recognized.

1bis could be taken as a variant of the social constructivist inquiries, and

di1fersprimarily in its concern to expose the systematic political, state- and

money-generated patternings of what otherwise might seem to be more indi-

vidualistic, contingent outcomes of strong personalities and organizations, or

effects of measuring and inscribing devices. Haraway derives her version of

lhe political mediationist questions from Marxist, feminist, and minority ob-

servations that t~e co~~ictual and inegalitarian relations of society are often

opaque to those m positions of systematic domination and power; what seems

10 be true from one perspective may conceal prob lems that are visible from

odIer positions. Weak and relatively trivial versions of the mediationist ac-

c:oun~of science are descriptions, for instance, of how popularizing accounts

ofsclence draw upon sexist imagery, Emily Martin's work (1987) on medical

Iextbooks' metaphors for the b io logy of human reproduction is an example

Ibat

foregro~nds

important

ways in which the laity and the poor may be dis-

=~e~.

m

their ?wn thinking about reproduction or in their interactions

~ YSlcla~s, s~clal workers, and others by the circulation of such meta-

Ameri but this points up more about the poverty of scientific literacy in

D IO d e I ca

H

o

r

of translation languages, than about the trajectory of scientific

-.. s.

araway herself has a f ie ld day wi th the metaphors that have struc-

-~ re&earchprog . .

Science) . '.

rams m pnmatology from the days

of Man

the Hunter

(of

-mdlvldualisf t t f .

Alcei h . IC es s o manhood by such science explorers as

gun

eYfiw ° w~nt mto the wilds to shoot great apes wi th gun and camera

or speclmens .th

}-.to the 1970 ' WI . camera to preserve without destroying na-

Stru

B

· s when National Geographic popularized Jane Goodall

m, lrute G

ldik . ,

Science)

c

a

I

as, and Diane Fossey as Woman the Nurturer

• ,lor example of h d

and thus beí ,orp ane apes, females being closer to na-

beings dmgfible to provide the conditions for animaIs to approach

,an or huma b

(Meanwh'l n emgs to reapproach the secret garden of na-

Ie, says H h

and ape araway, t e cameras recording/ shooting these

s

were

held b th . h .

divided l y eir usbands and consorts m good traditional

ro es )

Ibore . .

senous Part of H ' . ...

a raway s Primate Visions IS the corre la tion of

MICHAEL M, J, FISCHER




, ith more general cultural anxieties: lhe

' .n pnmatology WI .

research para igms I . d .th fear of decadence, stressmg preserva_

concern in the 1890-1930 peno WI

(i I

ding eugenics and racial purity).

ti of pure nature mc u . . ,

tion and conserva IOn. . h b olescence and str ess

m

an mcreas_

. th 1940s instead wit os. ,

the concern

m .

e in molecular biology, systems engmeenng,

ingly technologized age, stres~ g ts of human-nonhuman cyborg

.. th t human beings are par . c d

the recogmnon a f social control (focusing on 100 ,sex,

systems, and management systems o) . Iving a movement f rom laboratory

dominance-subordination, hor~ones mv o (condition ing learning, behavior

. with chimpanzees '. .

experimental settmgs . . nimals in created colomes, m nature,

modification) to watching free-ranging ~ the post- World War II period with

es the concern m

and in nature preserv. '. and a biological anthropology that supported

antiracism and decolonization, bei s centering itself on populatlOn

d lity of all human emgs, ( . h

the unity an equa.1 ff tional anatomy and culture upn g I

biology and adaptatlve.complexes 0

1 1

U~Ctlh 1970s and 1980s a sociolobiol-

1 g);

and fina y me.

bipedalism and toa usm '. . l ity) that paral leled the rise of yuppie

ogy (genetic cal~~lus~ st~a~eglci:~IOna I y

stress on compentive individual . k I dges that in the course of lhe

. t tly Haraway ac now e d I ed

But most Impor an, . . I thropology genetics, an re at

development of primatology, bIO~~g~ca. an in the knowledge base and

b ai posinvist mcrease I

fields, ~he~e h as ~en a re ined b either the popularizing metaphors

~r

sophistication tha t IS not conta . iltural anxieties of the age. Hence agam

the correlations with en~ompas.s~ng

eu

diationalist accounts of science h~ve

her recognition. t~at while .POhtl.cal~~: ld that i s so prone to be a projectl.ve

a degree of val id ity (especially m I s chology, physiology, and socia-

screen for thinking about ~~man eu tu~~, t ~: last third of the book on f~ur

bility-and hence her critical focus . t the field and its generaliz-

. h have helped reonen ts

of

women pr imatologists w o if l lowed to s il ence o ther accoun

ing implications), they are dangerous I a

. M talcini's a c-

cience. . to j xtapose Rita Levi- on th

y

Again it is perhaps interesting o JU. ti t write popular accounts .e

' . h t n when scien IS s d . Slst-

count, both to remind t a eve Martin and Haraway foregroun

.m

r-

ften eschew the kinds of metaphors . and also, more Impo

~ngon

simplified

yet t 'hnico1:~::~;~;~~~U~ ~~een

ordinary life ~~

tantly, to note th.e enactm:~ ta~ti c forces and a sphere of inquiry wh:~:d. In-

metaphors, emotions, and ly interrogated and contr f her

ences and implic ati~n~ are more ::;:~~o concentra te her account ~ional

deed , Levi-Mon~alcml g.oes so ~f her autobiography, with only oC~milial,

scientific career m t.he ~~Irdd~:~opments themselves in other m~re ;esting

1Y

references to the scienti c . Irene Fischer' s a ccount inte sÍJll

. I historical sections. . '1 I insist on

organizational, o:. f se regat ion, but does sirm ar y ~ hich

[ l I C

does not engage m this sor.t o I guage pointing out the ways 10 w

plified yet technically pr ecise ang ,

63

, oduced for popularizing fun (as in the case of the pear-shaped

raph~? mtranalog ically apt or no r. Haraway's field of observation, primatol-

earth ) are oted one particularly subject to popularizing projections, and the

isas

n

, ..

ogy,

subfield of sociobiology has had a spate of pra cnt íone-, who have been

rece~t Sl

u

1 promiscuous and delibera te ly provocative in their use of popular-

••••tlcuary h' 1

d

i .

y-:- th t shift ambiguously between tec mca an mappropnate connota-

zatIons a

. anings (for example, in the use of the word altruism).

tive me . . h 1 Ch d M

More strictly politica l econ~my inquines ml~ t a. so pursu~ an ra u-

ee's suggestion that sc ient is ts a t work .on big science projects (oceanog-

kerj the supercollider, the genome projecr) are a reserve labor force of

raph~ available to government, which can by selective funding ensure both

expes to the expertise it needs and reduce the threat from expertise that might

:: ine its own

policies.

Scientistscan

rernain

autonomou,in lhedetails

of the ir work while being simultaneously dependent m the major guidelines

of their work; science in this sense is politics wri t in a larger sense than the

politics of labs and indi.vid.u~ls fighti.ng ~or the prizes of recognition, or in t~e

various strategies that individual sc iennsrs use to ext ract resources for their

ow n pro ject s in the interstices of large science and bureaucracy (again, see

Levi-MontaIcini on the loss of interes t in I ta ly in neurobiology, yet its con-

tinuation, and also her comments on the differences in individualism-greater

in ItaIy than in the U.S.-and publishing demands in I ta ly that affect the

course of r isks and innovations scientists attempt),

The third of Haraway' s four temptations i s the accounts of science by scien-

tists themselves, which Haraway describes as usually realist and positivist.

These accounts c1aim for science a degree of autonomy frorn the realitie s of

their institutional and political settings which are freely acknowledged to af-

feet theprogress of science. These accounts also frequently remind us that the

Dletaphorsof popular science are bu t very rough approximations of relation-

lbips that can often only be accurately rendered in the technical l anguage of

lllathematical functions, that the two kinds of language do not translate very

1It lI, and that therefore to critique sc ience by critiquing only the popular

llletaphors by which it is approxima ted is not tenable. Scientists distinguish

6etw

een

discovery (which may be serendipitous) and confirmation/falsifica_

, between the sociology of science and the content of science, between

1beoretical models that are simplified approximations of reality and reality

.~' between levels of precision and pragmatic feedback provided by the

~~ to predict or control outcomes, between probabilistic truth and particu-

Iteknowledge. Science is heuristic, pragmatic, partial, approximate, evi-

-relational, and modeling; all of which may involve reductionism,

inistic causality, mechanical as well as sta tistica l models, but le ss a s

.

tng aCCOuntsthan as components within larger modeling intentions. In-

seientists' accounts are temptations (insufficient by themselves) in-

6 4



65



sofar as they ignore or downplay the sociological and political environments

that enable them, or insofar as they

te ll

the story of science discovery self-

servingly from a particular individual's or group's point of view.

Finally, the fourth of the temptations is to conside r sc ience as a specie s of

s tory tel ling , which immediate ly opens the possibility that the same science

may be narr ated in multiple ways. The attraction of trying to tell multiple

narr ations of sc ience is that it p rov ides a sense of how coherence is created

whi le drawing att en tion to perspectival and approximative tactics, or,

as

Haraway puts it, individually having no power to claim unique or closed read-

ings. To problematize and describe science in terms of the various stories

(such as the four temptations) that can be told about the histories of discovery,

the relat ion between science and nonscience parts of cultural understanding,

the uses and abuses of scientific knowledge, unintended consequences and

implications, and so on, is a rela tivizing move quite popular for cultural cri-

tique. To cast the fir st and second temptations above as stories is in part to

rel ieve them of their arrogance or sense of claiming to be the whole truth

rather than important a spec ts of the truth. But the temptation of

turning

ali

accounts of science into the status of mere storytelling, of course, must be

resi sted: the chemical effects of drugs, or the geometry of the earth, or the

physics of atmosphere are not just stories.

One of the compelling characteristics of good science autobiographies is

that they are not dry accounts in terms of the third temptation, but that they

involve several, i f not all, of the four temptations or perspectives or stories,

as well as others such as the historical and personal resonances between sei-

entific activit ies and other par ts of scien ti sts' lives, including such weIl-

crafted allegories of methodology and meaning as cited above from Hideki

Yukawa. Resonances between scientific activit ies and other par ts of scientists'

lives is a pa rt of the social and cultural constructedness of science that often

is screened out by social science accounts such as the Latour and Woolgar

study, but which can cont ribute to an understanding not on ly of the psychol-

ogy or motivation of scient is ts, but a lso to the larger aes theti cs that in forms

and encompasses thei r work. Let me

turn

then briefty to the autobiographies

of Rita Levi-Montalcini and Irene Fischer. Both are wri tten by women with

European backgrounds, fea tures which might be read against those mono-

chromatic feminist cri tiques of the science establishments that emphasize t~e

difficult ies for women in pursuing scientific careers: not to dismiss those dif-

ficulties, but rather to emphasize Rita Levi-Montalcini's philosophical obs~r~

vation that more important to success in scientific research than either specI~

in te lligence or the abi lity to be precise or thorough are the quali ti es of dedl-

cation and optimistic underestimation of difficulties.

The beginning of Rita Levi-Montalcini 's autobiography is, l ike other op~-

ings already cited, emblematic of the account to follow. I t i s a threefold me 1-

ta tion on lhe object of her science (nerve cells and nerve growth factors), on

. nce and technology, and on the relation betwee~ rationality and life-each

scle

three an analogue of the other two, all

fitting

a model of

ca pricious

ofthes

e

di' I .

of mutations an se ection, an evo utionary process

m w hic h

advan-

garnesare built upon so that retrospectively there is a l ine of ir revers ib le prog-

tag es This is a facilita ting frame for an account of the development of

re ss· biology involving the interplay between the availabili ty of techniques

=:me-silver impregnation so that ne rve cells stand out), technology (the

eIecttO

n

microscope which allowed one to see synapses, cathode-ray

oscillo-

sc ope , and camera), the complementarity ~etween biochemistry (to analyze

nature of snake venom and mouse sahvary gland se rum, and to purif y

fractions of these, which were important steps in identi fy ing nerve growth

factor) and neurobiolog y ( to explore experimentally the spectrum of action of

tbese

protein molecules by injecting them in developing organisms and in

clift erentiatedorganisms), including a number of false leads. There is place

both for the expansion of knowledge and rationali ty, a sense of historical

horizons (what was possible and/or conceivable at different points in time),

for the chaos of reality. She sees progress as s temming from imperfec-

doa-in technology she contrasts the eff ic iency of the b icycle which has not

evoIved

much from its introduction as against propul sion mechanisms that

evolved in speed and efficiency; in science she says of herself that she

strong powers of logical thought, lacked aptitude for math and physics,

s o on, but nonetheless thanks to such characteristics as determination and

aaderestimating difficulties was able to make major contributions. Indeed her

t in the third part of the book where she chronicles both her own career

~ advances ~nneurobiology that led to the explorations of nerve growth

.18 one of trial and error, of complementarity of competences between

1DVeStigators,

of

putting

aside

intractable problems and results that could not

.:: v~ until further advances. had _been ma~e : .~nd in an unintentional

the book, she enacts dialectics of fallibilities and cont radiction as

first.denying emotional complexes and proceding immediately to enu-

lIeIate

childhood '. . .

d anxletIes (tendencies to sohtude, neurotic fears of wind-up

ao mustaches) and complex emotional relations with parents siblings

Dlentors· or·.

. anel:

,more Importantly

m

the present context , argu ing against

c. Joumals (and life histories?) as vanities, yet at the same time

lor the re tum f 1 tt h' h

of

her u o e ers w lC both allowed her to relive intense

er life and ali d h .

owe er to construct key portions of the present

I oever d evelo d h .

keeping ao k

pe

t e hablt-nor do I regret not having done so-of

f

Inemory ~asl~d of record, ~tilll~ss a.diar because I believe that,

a

could o t ot taken the indelible rmpnnt of a given event then

. o and should b b . ' .

1Vitness I belo not e rought back to life by mere wnt ten

caUses,'if 001 leve, in f~ct, that t~e ve y act of recording an event

y unconsclOusly, a distortion resulting from the blatant

66

MICHAEL M. 1. F1SCHER

desire of the dia rist to make use of it as an account to be exhibited




to third parties, as a way of re living in old age a particular moment

and of making one' s descendants partake in it or even, if one i~

especially vain, for i ts value to posteri ty. (170)

Having never kept a diary, I was very pleased when, in June 1980

Viktor Hamburger sent me a large envelope conta in ing all the let~

ters-carefully preserved for so many years-that he had received

from me during the period I spent in Rio, from September 1952 to

the end of January 1953 .... In reading them, I have rel ived one of

the most in tense per iods of my l ife in which moments of enthusiasm

and despair alternated with the regularity of a biological cycle. (154)

The phi losophy and the picture of knowledge and science here is one

of ~haos, ~nd often adversity (l.a~k of funds, bureaucratic opposition, war),

agamst which the dnve to creanvity leads to lasting results. She ends with a

tr ibute to Primo Levi, and his citation, in the midst of concentration ca mp

adversi ty, of Dante's Ulysses, You were not born to live as brutes, a motto

that holds as well for the promise that neurobiology and the nerve growth

factor studies may eventually bring cures for nervous system disorders. There

is, to be sure, a cert ain kind of heroic t rope here, but it is a markedly humble

one, neither the macho version critiqued by Haraway, nor one that sees the

scientist as a lone genius. The scientists descr ibed are all fallible creatures

creating a collective understanding which itself is historically situated and

contingent, i f no less remarkable and promising for all that.

Levi-Montalcini's book is one in a series sponsored by the Alf red P. Sloan

Foundat ion which are largely popular accounts rather than attempts at sys-

tematic inquiries into the sciences themselves or their histories, though one

does get capsule histories as in Levi-Montalcini. I rene Fischer's Geodesy?

What's That? My Personal Involvement in the Age-Old Quest for the Size

and Shape of the Earth, with a Running Commentary on Lif e in a Government

Research Office is a more concentra ted and sustained account of the deve -

opment of a scientific field and car eer ove r a twenty-five year period, rhe

pe riod of the creative expansion of the field from an extension of surveying

technology to the age of the satellite which transformed its methods. Unlike

Levi-Montalcini's book, which tends to segregate the account of the science

in one section, Fischer's text is characterized by an interlacing rhythm of

personallife, technical scientific problems, collegial relat ions (both comple-

mentary and competitive), publications, bureaucratic difficult ies, accomplish-

ments, and rewards. Although at first sight the text may seem a fores

t

of

names of people, articles, and groups, as one reads it takes on an almos

t

mimetic rhythm of the social networks and step by step so lu tion of the larg

e

puzzles posed by measuring the earth, a ided by hints in the literature, per-

sonal interactions, technological breakthroughs, patient da ta accumul

ation

,

culatio

ns

and reconceptualizations as new thresholds of descriptive com-

are achieved.

. e Levi_Montalcini's ambivalence toward diaries, this text is built on

doCumentation of diari~s, c?rrespondence, and publications, allowing a

interIacing of stones like Haraway's temptations (particularly the

_....•~_ •.8nd .; third), as well as personal .and world-histor ical s to ries. Each chapter

.'~_lUUlcted a round an advance

m

terms of the scientific puzzle of being

meas

ure

and/or model the ear th's si ze and shape: the advance of sur-

fdongthe e~h's su~ace, ~hedifferent results t.hat one obtains from dif-

astrogeodetlc, gravlmetnc, and oceanographic measuring techniques,

to fínd a best-fi tting ellipsoid to the irregularities measured on the

earth, the efforts to piece together geoid maps for different parts of the

mto

a unified world datum (of which the F ischer North American Geoid

was the first to cover the North American continent, the Mercury Datum

ber 1960 Ellipsoid became the official NASA and Department of De-

world datum, and the Fischer South American Datum was the f irst to

tbe var ious effor ts of Latin American countries together), and the revo-

introduced by satellite technology (fig. 2). This strand of the account

from

chapter to chapter as an incremental ser ies of historical snapshots

sual history of the creat ion of more complete, more secure, and

Ike(:ltUalizedknowledge.

chapter

interlaces such scientific advances with accounts of the com-

and c~perat ion among different government agencies, scientists and

staff, different countries, and individuaI s ( the third voice the so-

and socia l c~nstructivist narrations). There is a traject~ry to this

~m the espnt de corps of a tiny pioneering group within a larger

set ting

of.gender, race, and nat ional ity consciousness, to, toward the

tbe autobiography, assessments of the effects of changing government

nt

r·

~ ICle.son the conduct of science. Each chapter also plays off

y

an~ rmrmgranr consciousness not only of the author but of a sei-

world m the U S f

nT

I . . '

'. a ter wor d War 11, invigor ated by the inflow of

scle~t~sts and of closer international cooperation and competition

ontalcml's book I ibu tes to th i .

ncl d a so contn utes to this story-her medical school

o

u ed Salvador Lur ia, Rena to Dulbecco and Rudolfo Amprino

wn caree be fi ' ,

and R r ne ted from cooperation between St. Louis, Rio de

11 home-but she focuses reflect ively on this primari ly regarding

s ment of sei . Isei ience m taly after the war, not in the sea change of

rence and academia.)

\Veresti ll the d

not t ays when the author could be told by a fellow fema le

°

work so hard b

l wh . . ecause women would never advance beyond a

FlSCherl~~~ Mlhtary Air Transpor t s teward refused to bel ieve that the

s e on his flight roste r to be boarded first could be a woman,




(a)

sea

ea>:th

tOPog>:aph

~~------... ellt SOtã

- - - -eoiã

(b)

N·N

(e)

,

.

69

1957 Meritorious Civil ian Award pin was designed to be worn only

~hen h: jacket lapel but ton hole ( subsequent awards corrected this over-

~ a mT~ese are remembered as only amusing markers of breaking through

Slgh~). Somewhat more serious were the time a paper had removed her

bamers. author because the bureaucrats thought i t unseemly or unl ikely tha t a

name n should be the author (rnuch to the embarrassment o f her superiors),

: ; n :

earlier loss of a job at Harvard as an assistant to Vassily Leontieff

wbe ~dents found out and protested that a wornan was grading their papers.

n : tudents of Norbert Wiener d id no t s imil arly object when she graded

~im. Working for John Rule at MIT developing stereoscopic slides, she

excitedly tried to show them to ~orbert Wiener on ly. to lea rn that he had ~nly

one functioning eye, and so without depth percepnon could not appreciate

tbese three-dimensional figures.) More poignant still are memories of trying

to break segregation patterns-women ate lunch together to celebrate p ro-

motions but blacks were usually not invited; this was morally unacceptable to

a .Jewishrefugee f rom racist persecution, and so on her first promotion she

IDvitedalIher coworkers to a party a t her home only to have one black woman

show on a particularly t1imsy excuse.

ne immigrant s ensibility provides a useful bifocal vision, a constant sense

alternative perspectives, a reality check and stabilizing force. A charis-

. mentor, John O'Keefe initiated and taught her wha t she needed to know

podesy and surveying, but i n an envi ronmen t o f the esprit of a small elite

JIUUP

where she proved herself by deriving fo rmulas during a placement quiz

bypas sing a series of covert informal tests of knowledge. The g roup of

or so inc luded a German speaker who knew of the Vienna Circle, of

she had been a junior follower, which made her feel at home. It also

illclludc~another refugee, the former head of a geodesy organ izati on in

Yu-

'a, saved from a dead-end bureaucratic job by O'Keefe . Tha t she could

the basic Jordan-Eggert geodesy text in the o riginal German helped

was only a partial in-house translation in English availab le at the time,

by

another German refugee), and her Viennese training proved superior

~ w.

ays

. The philosophy of Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann a lso

tbat

IDgOOd

s tead both againsr show-off methodology for methodology's

got others into unnecessary t roub le, and agains t lack o f in terest i n

o ::s she felt important, and that she was willing doggedly to pursue

realized the relevance (for example, surveyors never thought the

of the earth important enough for the ir purposes, and this implica-

- F ischer 's ske t h

(ti) lhe three c es of (a) the first long sur ve y ares used toeons true t a wor ld

(11II

eq .surfae~s of the actual tOpographie surf ac e of the earth, the irregular surfaee

ulPOtenllaJ grav] .

ids ravlmetne sUrfaee) , and a best-f it ting ellipsoid to the geoid; and

each fit be . ,

ing tter dlfferent par ts o f the i rregular geo id .

70

MICHAEL M. J. FlSCHER

tion was carri ed over into ear ly geodetic mode ls as well, an absurdity that


calcula tions of the shape of the ear th showed it to be more pear



Fischer r efused to let lie and eventualIy, as the field progressed, the faet be-

carne important and required expl ic it incorporation [cont rast the foreshort_

ened t ime frame and unduly pessimist ic thoughts ofLatour and Woolgar about

the freezing of facts, and compa re Levi-Montalcini's similar perspective

to Fischer's]):

Propose wha t is true. Write so that it is c1ear, and f ight for it to the

death. (Bring vor was wahr isto Schreib so dass es klar isto Und

verfichi s bis es mit dir gar ist.)

Amused by a colIeague whose fancy math alIowed him to set up

19 9

simuí .

taneous equations with just as many unknowns, in contrast to her own step-

by-step

compilation for the same task of

30 0

equations but with only three,

four, or five unknowns which could be solved with a simple desk calculator,

she alIowed herself the comment, An American scientist would rather bite

of f his own tongue before he permi ts his t echnical work to appear in easy

detailed steps. Their r esults disagreed and it took him months to find his

error. Another friendly saying in German, by Einstein, also helped her keep

her equanimity between conflict ing geodetic and astronomic methods based

on unexamined different a priori assumptions, Der Herrgott ist mutwilling,

aber nicht boeswillig [the Almighty God is mischievous, but not malicious].

Scientific life, in this account, in other words, was not just a wonderful

puzzle-solving delight, but a network of intelIectuallineages, historically cre-

ated assumptions that could not be taken for granted, personali ties, protoeols,

and bureaucracies, ranging from the genial Brigadier Guy Bomford who used

his outsi zed belIy to teach students about the equatorial bulge, to the indirec-

t ion needed to get answers f rom the Russ ians. In one case, she asked which

of two methods the Russians had used ina

1939

paper: the Russian

geodesists

at the international meetings c1aimed not to know, so she presented calcula-

t ions based on two possibilities. Then a few months later she read the report

on the meetings, in which they only gave one of her calcula tions: the one

based on the correct method.

Indirection and competition, of course, were not only across internationaI

and .cold-war lines: there was the case of the computation divis ion with in her

own agency which under much pressure finalIy agreed to teach the research~rs

how to program the new VNIVAC computer, only to discover when

they

trte~

to run some real computations that the computer people jealous to proteet Ihelr

expertise had taught them a no longer operational program; and there was lhe

b

ha

v

-

case of the rival agency in the V.S. government that squelched them Y h I

ing the ir work c1assified so it could not circulate, and another age~cy 1 ; 8

plagiari zed thei r work . More amusing i s the case of Charl ie Brown:

Jll

19

, . nferen

ce

the Vanguard satell ite went up, and O Keefe explained to a news co

W

tbat the ne . .

.L_--I than

round- This

showed up

m

a Charles Schultz cartoon of Charl ie

I I I J I I I happy with a new globe until L inus told him the earth was not round

B J O w n

shaped. Later when Fischer wanted to use this car toon in a publica-

bOt ~hultz'S syndicator refused permission, c1aiming it as his/their own

tiOD

U

'

tua property. This, of course, did not prevent Fischer from using a

mte

ec

h . .. I·

o of vegetable metap ors i n t ra in í ng manua s and m speeches, such as

:~e to the American Philosophical Socie ty delivered at the Cosmos Club,

~ women were at the time not officialIy alIowed. On the more coopera-

\'C side, Fischer was able to locate and return materia Is from the famous

1927-35

Sven Hedin expedi tion that were secreted away in Washington to

B r i k Norin of Sweden, who was putting the final touches decades later on a

book to

accompany the Hedin atlas. And in

1965

she won a vote of applause

ofthe

Organization of American States by managing to break the competi tive

lP.Iiam since

1944

on cooperating with data by showing how a uni fi ed South

American Datum could be constructed and thereby generat ing the enthusiasm

fo r ali to contribute their information. Even more impressive, perhaps, given

o nalist sensitivities, was her skill in getting Argentinian cooperation: ac-

ledging their wariness of alIowing thei r work simply to be appropriated

others, she invit ed the Argent in ians to come to Washing ton for t ra in ing

lIId

to

use computer facilities, and they in

turn

were wil Iing to share thei r

no t with Fischer's agency (a part of the Defense Depar tment ) but with

personaIly for the scientific purposes of the Figure of the Earth and the

American

Datum

(2 46) .

~, only this initial t as te of the text wi ll have to suffice here, enough to

lhe historical richness of the presenta tion of the evolut ion of a bas ic

of

research needed among other things for aI l satelIite and space

tech-

; lhe analogical util ity of this model of science both in constructing this

~ as.one of several model s of science involv ing mapping, degrees of

~tion, modeling, triangulation , col Ia tion of mul tip le perspectives,

t measuremen~, constructivist-pragmatic approaches to knowledge; the

o

dram~, comic and serious, falIible yet cumulative result producing,

qy l l l n c a II l lI Y s i t u a t e d in world-hi stor ical t erms as well as sociologicalIy and

o ~ de~ndent upon ind ividuali sti c persons but in a colIective enter-

s an lhe joyful optimism of so much scientific endeavor which alI too

CODtrastswith the d . .

o • our , SUSplClOUS,ven angry affect of much social

msCCIftiqueof science. The capsu le accounts of changing methods and

rom aetual m I'

_ •••• 0•• _ mod I easurements on and, m the sea, and from spaee to

,.JtaCeR be t~ s and ~easuring irregular reali ty as deviations from theoretical

to c Ile~ geoldal equipotential surfaces or oceanographic theoretical

, o at ion and .

+-fo

compromlse temporary solutions among competing

r example, the ear ly heroic aeh ievement by surveyors of long

72


t riangula tion ares from Scandinavia to Cape Town, f rom Europe to Japan


73

dmitted women there, and even if they did, Iwas just not yet.



from Canada to Tierra del Fuego; the ca1culation of defiections of the vertical

(variat ions in gravity forces of the earth from place to place which can affecI

rocket or missile trajectories) by ~ither dense g.ravity.~urveys o~by calcUlaling

the difference between astronomic and geodetic posiuons; the mtroduction of

marine geodesy (stationing three transponders in an equilateral triangle on lhe

ocean 's bot tom with a ship above sending acoust ical s ignals as a basic

u ni r o f

triangulation; utilization of bathymetry to help estimate differences

of

deflec_

tion of the vertical from terrestrial measurernents); the introduction of satellite

geodesy (geometric satellite techniques, analogous to terrestrial triangulation,

photographing a moving satelli te against a star background from two stations,

one of known position and one to be determined; dynamic satelli te tech.

niques, analogous to terrestrial gravimetry, measuring distances, not angles,

by electronic, not optical, means), the disputes between oceanographers

and

geodesists about ca1culating equipotential surfaces of the earth and over the

slope of mean sea levei, the measuring of the irregularit ies of the earth against

locally best-fitt ing ellipsoids and finding a global datum, bureaucratic

solu-

t ions of taking discrepant scientific results by differing methods and dividing

the difference to produce a compromise datum for widespread use-provides

a fascinat ing conceptual educa tion as wel l as a his tory. Along the way are

wonderful side studies into historical issues illuminated by new scientific un-

derstandings: appl icat ion of the world datum to the Ice Age, reevaluating the

classic lunar parallax determinations, refiguring Eratosthenes' and Posido-

nius' ca1culat ions of the ci rcumference of the earth and showing how errors

have creeped into the literature about those ca1culations, and more gener~lly

application of Vienna Circle pragmatic language philosophy to a retranslatl.on

of a famous but often misunders tood dic tum of Rabbi Akiba about free will.

Also along the way are as tute analyses of a ttempts at management of scienc e

in the government-not jeremiads but observations on how a new comma~d-

ing officer was able to rekindle morale among researchers by .separat~ng

status- and control-seeking administrators from scientists, by dísrnantlinê

stovepipe organization, as well as observations on the triviality, inappropn-

ateness, and sel f-defeat ing phi losophies of management courses , and a~

. h

i holog

l

-

analysis of c ivil service reforms. And there are anecdotes nc m psyc

cal historical, and cultural resonance.

These historical soundings constitute the layerings of memory that are.POW

f

-

I . he

i

voice

°

rful anchors for the present. These are persona , as m t e mner

. f si ifi ance

o r

Fischer's father who gives her support at vanous moments o sigm c ,

in the banter of O'Keefe and Fischer over fear of fiying in her first ove:s

e

:

fiight in 1955: Catholics have it easier, joked O'Keefe, they know there ~ _

, .. f h b . g hymn slng

upstairs, causing Fischer to refiect on Shaw s VISlOno t e onn . t

.. . B t I did nO

ing upstai rs , and also the Jewish vers ion of sages debatmg- u

~ ~;.,a(27)_fOllOwed by a lyrical descripti?n of the worl.d.seen from

~ ating with psalm, Beethoven, and Isaiah, and a traditional bless-

tbe

atr, ::::ching down safely-culture and religion. They are also historical

iIlS upo nections and hesitancies of the last half-century, as when returned

in rhe

eon . .

sium in Vienna-the first and only return mover thirty-five

10

a

Sy~~ convener addressed her in an inimitable Viennese idiom and

~ líte and colloquiallanguage, Gnãdiger Frau, ich habe ein Hünchen

~ Jb POzurupten [Dear Lady, I have a bene to piek with you], admonishing

J D i t ti

enforcing

him

to speak in English for decades not real iz ing she spoke

: . . : n b u t

she poignantly remarked about. her childhood ci ty , ~here

..,emedto

be

two towns on the sa~e spot: the

lively

to~~ of the Syrnposium,

beautiful town strangely suggestmg we may have visited here before; and

:..omer personal town that was ~rying with silenc~,. a ghost town (226-27~.

Anel she found sometime later m the course of giving thanks for an honor it

was easy enough to speak the thanks in German, but as she tried to turn to

geodesy she found she had to ~sk permiss i?n to. speak in English: Th~ third

lev eI

of sueh mosaic memory

IS

the

s ou nd in gs m

much deeper histories, to

Eratosthenes, for instance, and the Ice Age, but also Pe tronius Arbi ter (66

.D_ ) on management.

We trained hard-but it seemed that every time we were beginning

to

form up into teams, we would be reorganized. Iwas to learn that

Ia te r in \ ife we tend to meet any new situat ion by reorganiz ing, and

the

wonderful method it ean be for erea ting the il lusion of progress

while produeing eonfusion, inefficieney, and demoralization. (319)

. she posted on her file cabinet to provide a

long

view [whieh] had a

IOOIbing

philosophieal effect, together with a pinup of Galileo Galilei:

He

a pensive look into the far distanee .... His presenee reinforeed aware-

of a c1ear distinction between real work and busy work in a researeher 's

YIlue

system, and helped allocate precious time and energies aeeordingly

~) . She had to fight repea tedly to proteet his freedom on the wal l agains t

rc ;vemment's inspee tora te, and hid away in her desk drawer Lord Aeton's

-: corrupts, and absolute power eorrupts absolutely, also as a reminder

~f as ~nadministrator (325).

. mo síac features are not just ornaments but are repositories of philo-

~ rr spective, of will, of motivation, of sense of proportion, things

.M

e p foster that determination and diseount ing of obstacles of whieh

~ O~talcini.also spoke .

.~ographleal triangulations . Two features of these seienti st s' autobio-

hi te~ts are most important in the present eontext: the uti lity of auto-

ca forms as exploratory aeeess into the systematic features of

76


world's greatest scientists (Ramanujan, Chandrasekar, Vikram Sarabai , HOrni

EYE(l)lNG THE SCIENCES

77



Bhabha, Abdus Salam) as wel l as an increasingly important segment of the

world' s scientific establishment, and not just as intel lectual traditions but also

as community structures that provide the sustenance, pressures, and motiva_

tions out of which various sorts of professionals and scientists emerge.

In the preceding pages, I have rai sed and evoked many more questions than

I can answer, f rom what i san autobiography to what and how do they signify?

As an anthropologi st, I have been t ry ing to ask the beyond the text questions:

how do real selves in the world assemble themselves, and can autobiographies

help analogize or inves tigate this? How do genres of self -port ra itu re change

under different social conditions? Do leading technologies of an age provide

d if ferent perspectives on the ways in which agency and moral respons ibility

are negotiated? The autobiographies that have, in however a preliminary way,

been analyzed here are tex ts f rom a par ticular generation-that which carne

of age before or during World War lI. Will the texts of their children look

dif ferent, be formulated in the languages of cyberneti cs and molecular biol-

ogy and cyberpunk l itera ture , and with a d if ferent moral or socia l sensibility,

with a di fferent range of aes thet ic and cul tural resonances (more cosmopoli-

tan, more multicultural, more individualistic, less utopian)? Francois Jacob's

autobiography, with i ts elegant play upon emotional memories acting as trig-

gers and repressors, as a f low of information beneath the surface oford inary

consciousness (the statue within) perhaps already hints in this direction.

But I have also been using the evidence of scient is ts' autobiographies im-

.plici tly to recast the science, technology, and society (STS) literatures of the

recent past: to refocus the STS l itera ture that focuses on ethnomethodology

and agonisti c game playing in to one that focuses on pos it ion ing and t ransla-

tion; and to recast the STS genre of the study of conflicts into one that deals

with public policy negotiations and complex sites of science construction. The

shif ts involved are those from a kind of internali st beating of scient ists at

their own game to a broader effort to locate science and engineering in larger

cultural and social contexts. Particularly important are moments of translation

across discipl inary boundaries that constitute breakthrough sites, or ongoing

needs for translation across discipl ines, where scientists are able to reflec~on

their own limitat ions and needs to negotiate meaning, technique, or imphca-

tion; and public poli cy debates that involve the need for scien tis ts todo trans-

lat ions vis-à-vis other kinds of expert knowledges and public interests.

Notes . ai

1. See Midgley (1992) for an eloquent charting of some of the metaphYs;cr

embeddednesses of contemporary science. As she says , Any sys tem of thought P a

h

e

P

art that science now play s inour Iives must also shape our guiding myths

- tbe ug .

c

di I' .

- I ur imaginatJOns proroun y. t IS not just a useful tool. It is also a pattern

_oo

oro

I

we follow at a deep leve m trym~ t? mee t our imagina tive needs (1992: I).

dIIl On the dialectic between male VISlOnas a source of tyranny and female voice as

• ~que of healing in the Ar~~ic

Thousand and One Nights

see MaIti-Douglas

1991); also on speech vers~s ~ntl~g. See a lso MI~ls ( 1991 ) on the or al reci ta tion of

fGIkIaIesas a talking cure m sl~uatlOns of oppression from

The Thousand and One

ri s to contemporary Afghamstan. The s tr uc tur al p ara llel s ar e a lso s triking in the

d : e t .

legend of th~

Rin g

of G~ges, and the Jew.ish story of Esther. Note the variants

I)inarZadeh (a dmar IS a unit of money) which would r esonate wi th the s tory of

0yseS

as

Shell (1978) unpacks i t, having to do with bureaucracy and the introduction

money; versus Dunya-zadeh [born of the world, worldly], which John Bar th 's ver-

Dunyazid prefers.

3. See Mary Midgley's interest ing account ( 1992: chaps . 7, 8) of the outbreak of

lizIrre

sexual metaphors in writing about science by the founders of the Roya l

So -

and mechanist philosophers such as Bacon. She suggests that these metaphors

in pari directed against Aristotelian thinking (which treated Nature in a contem-

p l a t i v e

manner without touching it/he r) but mainly aga ins t na tu ra l magic and occul t

farces figured as feminine dark forces (which the light of reason should dispel). Kep-

DOtionof attraction and, later, Newton's theory of gravitation were both rejected

:UDinteUigibleappeals to such occult forces. The spokesmen of the Royal Society

they were for a truly masculine philosophy.

4. Do~ Ihde quoted in Sobchack (1993: 578-79). See also Hayles (1993), Haraway

1992): Piercy (1991). The cIassic contemporary speculation about downloading in-

D

from brains into computers i s Moravec (1988), but i ts l ineage in contem-

8arrow scientific tho~ght goes b~ck at l east to 1. D. Bernal, Freeman Dyson, J. D.

and Frank Tipler (see Midgley 1992: chap. 2), and its philosophical lineage

back. at le~t to Descartes' notion that h is me is completely distinct f rom his

lIId lS

ea sier

toknow than his body.

~ of, the most interesting, and most influent ial, of these might be Erwin

tIlIlIroc:din.er ~

What Is Life?

which served as a key r efe rence for many physici st s

g

DtO.

blolo~y after World War n, a movement t hey spoke of as one from a

lmphcated m death to d . h

I'

c . '

d . one concerne

wit ire.

Considered m historical context

bi ~ng the war wi thout r efe rence to the war) and in terms of i ts margina l ia

~ 1 e (the ~reface, the epilogue, and the autabiographical sketches penned in

DO W

pubhshed with 't) it b

..0'1)(1 pi di, I ecomes a rather profound personal text as well as

Oa ece ocument.

Ihese notions of thi d .

) and Ir genre and semlpopular, see Kelley (1993) Eger

• , more generally Mid I (1992 '

technical '. I g ey ). Eger nominates a third genre be-

SClenlIficwriting di' .

seriousn' an popu anzation, that combines both scientific and

Jacqu

ess

IMnn attempt to break through professional barriers. The texts he

es onod'

Ch

i.

Esch er and B

s

ance and Necessity

(1971), Douglas Hofstadter's

(1976) t I

ach

(1979), Joseph Weizenbaum's

Computer Power and Human

,e a -he sug ti' I

• unified storv ges s u timate y contribute to a renewed and more de-

ory of evoluI d '

íon, a renewe mas ter nar ra tive tha t can integr ate the

78


prebiotic (chemical) to the cosmic (astrophysical), incIuding brain physiology and


79

. 's turn Al though computer science is still the lead major at MIT, the

ter sClence . . .



cuIture. He sees these texts as signaling an emergence from a positivist period of

multiple specializat ions and concerns wi th methods, into a new dri ve for theoretical

unification. However, at the same time, this third genre because it foregrounds the

cons tr uc tion of new high leveI metaphors, it allows a more p rofound recognition of

the hermeneutical nature of foundational metaphors in science, and thus an opening

for critique especially insofar as such metaphors provide socially orienting models for

action beyond research in the laboratory (he cites sociobiology and genetics as obvious

worrisome cases). Midgley (1992) and Gillian Beer (1993) show that t his genre is

considerably older than Eger thinks.

Robert Kelley suggests a useful typology o f scient is ts wr it ings f rom the scientifie

paper to textbooks and popularizations. The semipopular scien ti fic text-he would

incIude Mandelbrot (1977; 1983), Prigogine and Stenger (1984), Hofstadter (1979),

but not G le ick (1987), Steven Jay Gould, or Lewis Thomas-is t rue to the science it

portrays but like a textbook (an extremely interesting observation) skips some of the

mathematical development and experimental data. It makes assertions about a sei-

ence and abou t i ts implications without r igourous proof and is therefore cIose in form

to the scientific textbook (148). Certain subdisciplines, he also suggests, find this

genre par ticu larly appropriate. In this context , a third essay in the same volume, by

David Porush (1993) on Gleick' s Chaos and Pr igogine and Stenger's Order Out af

Chaos is quite instructive, and leads to my own quest ions abou t the variety in this

genre of texto I suspect that Eger is overly pessimistic about the hegemonic reassertion

of a singular mas ter narrative, and would only cite, as a very preliminary starting

point, the f ina l p ages o f Fr ancois Jacob' s autobiography, where he contrasts his own

philosophical stance with that of his coworker, Jacques Monod, despi te a work ing

relationship of exceptional intensity and even intimacy like a Iong due t and

culminating in jo int concIusions ( Jacob 1988: 307).

Steven Heims's provocative and problematic double biography of Norbert Wiener

and John von Neumann (1980) is profoundly overdetermined by Heims's own decision

to leave physics during the Vietnam War. Wiener and von Neumann thus become the

two warring parts of t he moral dilemmas of phys ic ist s dur ing the cold war: to f ind

ways to not work on defense depar tment-funded p rojec ts (Wiener, albe it the f athe r of

missile guidance systems during World War 11), o r to go along wi th weapons devel-

opment more or less enthusiastically (von Neumann, figured by Heims as an ~Imost

demonic Dr, Strangelove). The i n many ways better biography of Al an Turing by

Andrew Hodges (1983) might also be read usefu lly as a doubly figured text, as Hodges

is himself a mathematic ian who took t ime ou t towri te the biogr aphy and then r eturned

to mathematics. It is a better biography for its richness in weaving toge the r the

enigmas o f the var ious aspects of Turing's life, while Heims's text is fl atter, angrier;

but these aes the tic and human cri te ria do no t lessen the power of the questions Heims

poses about the social responsibility of scientists, and about the role the public sh?uld

play in decisions about science in the contemporary world for whi ch the two subjects

of his text a re bu t fo ils for himself and uS.

6. Physics was the leading science in terms of numbers of undergraduate majors at

schools l ike MIT unt il the 1960s; in the 1970s it was electrical engineering and com-

pu tl'onwide began to crest and turn down m the mid to late 1980s.

mbers na ..

nu Id be of inte rest to pu rsue a new study of the twentieth-century evolution of

It wo u ltures gap: the founders of the modern ist humanities-Descartes, Kant,

the tWO-

cu

' .. .

L

cke Hume, et al.-were heavily motivated by developments m eontem-

Qoethe, o , . .. I . b .

ienee in a way that perhaps IS only now, quite tentanve y, agam ecorrung

porary se t least insofar as key figures in the humanities sueh as Claude Lévi-Strauss,

ihe

case, a . . d

De

rrida Miche l Foucau lt, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Serres are concerne .

~~

,

. .

t

· g that these should alI be Frenchmen, which leads one to ask questions about

Interes 10 .

. I struc ture o f the Fr ench academy, or inversely about the failures of the

the SOCla .

. an and British academies which have acknowledged the need to bndge the two-

~~

.

I s gap but have not seriously addressed the issue except f or oddly conceived

cu ture , , .. . d scientists. S

courses of physics for poets and ' humanities ror engl?eers an scientists. ee

Snyder's 1980 study of MIT students and the degree to w?lch leaming sty~es f?stere.d

in the humanities are also important to the success of engmeers and sciennsts m their

creative careers and lives.

7. The 1992 sessions culmina ted in an author-meets-critics session with Donna

Haraway. In the 1993 session, I raised as problematic the freezing on one term,

cy-

borg,

as a label, when even in Haraway's own work,

cyborg

is just one o f a range of

terms that generate narratives of possible worlds and new agencies, as in the quo te

from the 1992 session used as an epigraph above; while this point was freely admitted,

organizers of the 1993 session also pointed out the need for a name that draws audi-

ence, and cyborg anthropology has precisely that possible world promise of

drawing together into conversation hard science, science-fiction imagination, ethno-

graphic realism, and utopian critique.

8. Note that there is an impor tant d is tinc tion to be made between actants as func-

tionai units that may incIude machines and humans or bio logical processes and humans

on the one hand, and on the ot her hand the moral ly trivializing idea that objects like

coffee pots may be thought of as having agency and subjectivity.

9. Part s of the following sections a re taken f rom a fo rthcoming ear lier essay on

autobiographies and social theory in probing ethnicity, religion, and science.

10. See Edward Said's

Beginnings

fo r a l it erary critical approach to beginnings.

11. From a fascinating series of c ro ss -cul tu ra l interviews of leading researchers in

electroluminescence conducted by Annadore SchuI tz, with her permission.

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M I N D , B O D Y N D

S C I E N C E

contributions develop conversations with scientists involved in medical

, one through the mind and the other through the body. Dramatic con-

shifts in the understanding of the idea of humanity are nowhere

apparent than in these conversations, as is the salience of morallethical

pations in the discourse of the subjects of these pieces. Joseph Dum-

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process as well as treatment.

Documents

Technoscientific Imaginaries Fischer Marcus George