Social Studies of Science

Israel endorses one of the world's most liberal regulations of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research and human cloning. After an introduction to the technologies and their regulation in many Western countries and on an international level, I discuss ethical and moral concerns formulated in Western countries, many of which have no room in the bioethical discourse in Israel. The traditional argument is to explain this with religion: particularly, by arguing that Jewish religious teachings lead to a conception of ESC research and cloning as morally unproblematic. Nevertheless, in order to fully understand the Israeli situation, I argue that we have to take into consideration prevalent political narratives. The ‘demographic threat’ that the Jewish majority population in Israel will be outnumbered by non-Jews in the not too distant future provides a context of risk to the discourse on ‘Israeli cells’. Contexts of risk extend the scope of self-governing of individuals by predetermining ways of preventing particular risks. Instead of there being a consistent governmental policy on how to regulate medical technologies, the Israeli bioethics discourse shaped the regulations on ESC research and human cloning by providing decision-makers with particular understandings of what is ‘thinkable and sayable’. A discussion of the deliberation of the Prohibition of Genetic Intervention Law of 1999, which was extended in March 2004 for another 5-year period, will illustrate this claim.

This paper investigates an historical episode that involved an object that was both scientific and popular. In 1908, the first almost complete Neanderthal skeleton was discovered at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. From its very rebirth, the specimen became an object of interest to scientists holding different views of human evolution. It also was of interest for a public whose Catholic and anti-clerical stances were voiced through the press, and for the modernist clerical prehistorians who had discovered it. Conceiving of reconstruction as referring to either verbal or visual representation of the caveman from La Chapelle-aux-Saints, this paper discusses the multiplication of Neanderthal images in newspaper articles and illustrations that expressed particular scientific and political interests. This treatment of the newspaper as a site of encounters and knowledge production among these various constituencies is afforded by a set of newspaper excerpts on the specimen collected by the first person to physically reconstruct the bones, Marcellin Boule, at the Mus éum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. While the newspapers were welcome allies in the dissemination of the discovery and of the scientist's renown at home and abroad, Boule might have been less content with the way in which the various papers represented his work – or was he? As an object associated with such large issues as religion, evolutionism and nationalism, the ‘Old Man from La Chapelle-aux-Saints’ had to fulfil contradictory desires and his images multiplied accordingly.

‘Logo’ is the name for a philosophy of education and for a continually evolving family of computer languages that aid its realization. Developed in the USA in the late 1960s, it became the material embodiment of a radical educational philosophy and a potential vehicle for the transformation of education. In the early 1980s, Logo was introduced into mainstream education in both the USA and the UK. Within an increasingly conservative social and political context with different education policy priorities, Logo was gradually stripped of its radical potential, marginalized and, where it survived, remoulded as harmless to the mainstream educational system. This paper draws on empirical research that explored the evolution of Logo between the late 1960s and the late 1990s. The paper focuses on the social processes involved in the initial development and evolution of Logo. It shows that these processes were heavily contested. Logo was the product of complex social, technical, political and economic decisions, and the product of negotiation shaped by the concerns of the social players involved. The evolution of Logo was not linear or even primarily technical. Rather, it was a seamless web in which the technical was interwoven with the social, economic and political in ways that illustrate the dialectical interaction between historical contingency and the intentions and aspirations of individuals and communities.

Speculation on the implications of increased use of information and communication technologies in scientific research suggests that use of databases may change the processes and the outcomes of knowledge production. Most attention focuses on databases as a large-scale means of communicating research, but they can also be used on a much smaller scale as research tools. This paper presents an ethnographic study of the development of a mouse genome mapping resource organized around a database. Through an examination of the natural, social and digital orderings that arise in the construction of the resource, it argues that the use of databases in science, at least in this kind of project, is unlikely to produce wholesale change. Such changes as do occur in work practices, communication regimes and knowledge outcomes are dependent on the orderings that each database embodies and is embedded within. Instead of imposing its own computer logic, the database provides a focus for specifying and tying together particular natural and social orderings. The database does not act as an independent agent of change, but is an emergent structure that needs to be embedded in an appropriate set of work practices.

Talk of public dialogue and engagement has become fashionable internationally, and particularly within Europe. Building especially upon recent British experience, this paper argues that ‘public talk’ (that is, talk both by and about the public) represents an important site for science and technology studies analysis. The relationship between ‘new’ and ‘old’ approaches to scientific governance is considered. Drawing upon a series of official reports, and also the GM Nation? public debate over genetically modified food, the paper suggests that, rather than witnessing the emergence of a new governance paradigm, the current approach can more accurately be portrayed as an uneasy blend of ‘old’ and ‘new’ assumptions. Eschewing a straightforward normative account, the paper explores the social construction of public talk, the relationship between talk and trust, the search for the ‘innocent’ citizen, and the pursuit of social consensus. Current initiatives should not simply be criticized for their inadequacies, but should also be viewed as symptomatic of the state of science–society relations. In that way, stresses and strains within the politics of public talk assume wider analytical significance than the ‘mere talk’ epithet would suggest.