Social Studies of Science

In this paper, I discuss the many contributions of a versatile black technician, Vivien Thomas, to surgical animal research between 1930 and 1979 at Vanderbilt University and Johns Hopkins University. Thomas' experimental work led to a surgical solution for a life-threatening heart defect, called tetralogy of Fallot. Children with this condition lack sufficient oxygenation and were referred to as `blue babies'. Following Thomas' research trajectory and his relationship with surgeon Dr Alfred Blalock, I review the conditions under which differing expectations towards race and occupation clashed, creating a status dilemma for Thomas. While the torsion originated in the laboratory where technical skills are valued, the research locale also facilitated a temporary, fragile solution for the status dilemma, because it separated Thomas from public view. Yet, Thomas' dexterity as a laboratory researcher enhanced his dilemma, because credit kept eluding him. In order to track the dynamics of race and occupational subordination as lived experience in the laboratory, I argue for an analysis of the process of crediting people for their scientific accomplishments.

When scientists act as consultants during the production of a fictional film, it becomes an act of communication that plays a role in the process of science. Fictional film provides a space for scientists to visually model their conceptions of nature. Film impacts scientific practice as science consultants utilize film as a virtual witnessing technology to gather allies among specialists and non-specialists. Film not only has the ability to act as a virtual witnessing technology, but also forces consensus on the public version of scientific debates by presenting a single vision of nature in a perceptually realistic structure. This paper shows films to be successful communicative devices within the scientific community by showing that, and how, other scientists respond to the depictions in the films. It also demonstrates that science consultants use fictional films as promotional devices for their research fields.

Existing studies of gender and lifecourse in science have not focused on publication decisions, and even less so for publication of studies liable to attract media and public attention. This paper is based on semi-structured interviews with 61 US toxic-exposure epidemiologists about their publication decisions. It examines gender differences in how scientists, as they move through the lifecourse, approach publication decisions for research bearing potential societal implications. Though preliminary, the data suggest that males are overall more comfortable than females with pursuing visible publication and handling media coverage. However, males and females may begin to crisscross over time. Specifically, males started out in publishing potentially controversial papers in visible journals likely to attract media and public attention, but grew more cautious with age, rank, and experience. Amongst females, the situation was less homogenous: while some (often, the most élite) reported patterns similar to males', more reported following the reverse pattern as they moved through the lifecourse. These differences may stem in part from gender differences in self-confidence, risk-taking, and competitiveness. The wider significance and limitations of the data are discussed, and lines of further research (including nine testable hypotheses) are suggested.

Among the many contested boundaries in science studies is that between the cognitive and the social. Here, we are concerned to question this boundary from a perspective within the cognitive sciences based on the notion of distributed cognition. We first present two of many contemporary sources of the notion of distributed cognition, one from the study of artificial neural networks and one from cognitive anthropology. We then proceed to reinterpret two well-known essays by Bruno Latour, `Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands' and `Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest'. In both cases we find the cognitive and the social merged in a system of distributed cognition without any appeal to agonistic encounters. For us, results do not come to be regarded as veridical because they are widely accepted; they come to be widely accepted because, in the context of an appropriate distributed cognitive system, their apparent veracity can be made evident to anyone with the capacity to understand the workings of the system.