Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research ed. by Peter Galison, Bruce Hevly

Abstract

966 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE book would be even more effective if it were to serve as a springboard for research on scientific practices that integrates benchwork with higher levels of organization, linking the cognitive and political realms of knowledge production. Lily E. Kay Dr. Kay is an associate professor of history of science in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her book, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and her other works focus on the cognitive and social dimensions of 20th-centurv life sciences. Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research. Edited by Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992. Pp- v + 392; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00. The study of big science and technology has commanded increasing interest in the last decade. This volume, which includes thirteen essays by leading experts, offers a generous smorgasbord of scholarly perspectives of the held. The contributors are trained (and in many cases cross-trained) in numerous disciplines in the physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The editors, with the help of an insightful introduction and afterword, have blended their distinctive contributions into a well-balanced collection that examines the devel­ opment of large-scale research from the 1920s to the present in a wide variety of institutional settings—NASA, large government-sponsored laboratories in the United States, Europe, and Japan, university laboratories, and “research-intensive” companies, such as Du Pont. The breadth of the volume provides its major strength—a wealth of new information is given about poorly understood or little-known subjects. Two articles that cover physics research in the 1930s, by Robert Seidel on the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and by Peter Galison, Bruce Hevly, and Rebecca Lowen on Stanford University, dispel the common notion that big physics began in World War II. Lillian Hoddeson contradicts the dogma that social factors dictate the course of large-scale research, demonstrating that a purely scientific finding prompted massive institutional changes which enabled the wartime Los Alamos laboratory to meet the daunting technical challenges posed by the development of the first implosion weapon. To complement ongoing studies of U.S. big science, Sharon Traweek presents her study on Japanese physics, and Dominique Pestre and John Krige present their work on European physics, showing how local conventions and circumstances shape research. For example, Traweek notes that in line with Japanese custom, decisions are made more consensually, and therefore arguably more democratically, in Japan than in the United States, and Pestre and Krige note that due TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 967 to inexperience CERN decision makers were less willing to take risks than their American counterparts in the 1950s and early 1960s. Departing from the more familiar territory of federally sponsored laboratories, David Hounshell focuses on Du Pont, explaining how the company developed nylon in the 1920s and 1930s, designed, constructed, and operated the plutonium separation plants for the Manhattan Project during World War II, and developed Delrin acetal resin in the 1950s. Noting Du Pont’s difficulties with Delrin, which earned far less money than anticipated, he questions whether the enormous increase in federal research funding after World War II actually hampered industrial research because companies operating strictly within the civilian sphere were then obliged to compete with facilities receiving large government subsidies. Despite the volume’s breadth, it fails to cover completely the full complexity of big science. A few authors get lost in the maze of organizational detail and fail to clearly articulate conclusions about large-scale research. Due to this failing, and the intrinsic difficulty of the task, the book never defines the topic it addresses. As Bruce Hevly admits in the afterword, although defining big science was a primary objective of the contributors, “after hundreds of pages of text, ‘big science’ itself remains an elusive term” (p. 355). The editors also acknowledge that despite the diversity of the collection, some types of big science and technology, most notably big biology, are ignored. These missing pieces simply whet the reader’s appetite. The volume shows that large-scale research is...