The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation Christopher Newfield (bio) The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. By Steven Shapin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. xvii + 468. $29. This volume traces the evolution of science from calling to job to semi-entrepreneurial activity in our own time. The story is of course not this simple, and readers will find here Steven Shapin's renowned virtues as a historian—rigorous evidential detail, sustained analytical complexity, and other gratifying signs of a historian thinking. The chapters on entrepreneurial science are less successful, however, and raise important questions about where science is now going and about how to study it. After chapter 2's retrospective, most of the book focuses on changes in the twentieth century. The main scientific types are familiar: the academic scientist, focused on fundamental research; the industrial scientist, oriented toward putting knowledge into use; and the entrepreneurial scientist, creating intellectual property for sale into a commercial development process, including faculty-based start-up companies. Many analysts have argued that these are misleading: the publication of Donald E. Stokes's Pasteur's Quadrant (1997) influentially displaced the binary contrast between basic (Bohr) and applied (Edison) research by showing that major discoveries occurred [End Page 1058] where fundamental research and practical problem-solving interacted continuously. How does Shapin help clarify this "post-binary" picture? First, Shapin's book confirms the Stokes tradition by showing that familiar contrasts between basic and applied, high and low, intellectual and commercial science emerged from limited historical and institutional perspectives. His careful review of mid-century claims for "inherent strains" between science and industry (chapters 4 and 5) shows that the model appeared in academic sociology but not in industry accounts of research practices. Second, Shapin is not simply blurring the distinctions between basic and applied, high and low science, but showing that we may have high and low upside-down. He shows that when we pay attention to the self-descriptions of industrial science, we may find the large-scale corporate scientific operation more rather than less able to produce breakthrough discoveries. If you are trying to help stop global warming by engineering quantum dots at the nanoscale to produce large increases in photovoltaic efficiencies, you probably need what I would call "mass science"—brilliance orchestrated on a gigantic scale, which humans are just learning how to do. Chapters 5 and 6 are the heart of the book, and the detail in accounts of research managers like Kodak's legendary Kenneth Mees suggests that real science is industrial science—if and only if it incorporates the traditional strengths of "pure" science into a collaborative architecture. This is Shapin's third contribution: he stitches together a picture of research in large corporations that rests on publication, open professional exchange, self-management, and significant freedom from cost accounting—in short, on the combination of autonomy and free collaboration that is normally associated with the research university. Those as aware as Mees of the uncertainty of ambitious research advocated research disorganization—which meant researcher self-organization—and regular, rigorous communication. Finding profitable commercial applications depended on applying Meesian aphorisms such as, "when I am asked how to plan, my answer is, 'Don't'" (pp. 198–99). The implication, not stated as such by Shapin, is that the productivity of U.S. science for most of the twentieth century depended on a much-misunderstood synthesis of "academic" freedom and porous, flexible, corporate organization, regardless of whether it appeared in industry, a government laboratory, or the university. This meant not entrepreneurial wildcatting but creativity within stable organizations. The rest of the book is devoted to entrepreneurial science, and here the discussion is less compelling. Chapter 7's interviews stage a debate between "discovery" and "use" that the previous analysis seemed to surpass. Chapter 8 and the epilogue fit oddly into the book: they change the subject from the "scientific life" to the life of venture-capital (VC) investors. The reason is ostensibly because the science-industry-university-inventor complex has come to be "late modern" science as such, but in fact research continues to [End Page 1059...