Social Studies of Science

Long before nanotechnology, the semiconductor industry was miniaturizing microelectronic components. Since the late 1950s, that industry's dominant material has been silicon. Yet there have always been competitors to silicon that supporters hope will upend the semiconductor industry. It is impossible to understand this industry without a more complete picture of these alternatives — how they come about, how they capture organizational support, why they fail. It is equally impossible to understand nanotechnology without a focus on these alternatives, since research communities devoted to perfecting them today form the backbone of the nanotechnology field. We trace the history of the longest lived silicon alternative — molecular electronics. Molecular electronics arose in the late 1950s as a visionary program conducted by Westinghouse on behalf of the Air Force. We attribute its failure to the difficulties inherent in matching a futuristic vision to a bureaucratically accountable, incremental program that could compete with silicon. Molecular electronics reappeared again at IBM in the 1970s and at the Naval Research Laboratory in the 1980s. In each of these incarnations, molecular electronics' charismatic champions failed to gain the organizational support to make it a mainstream technology. Only at the turn of the century, with new nanotechnology institutions and new models of industry—university collaboration, has some form of molecular electronics neared acceptance by the semiconductor industry.

This paper explores `other' ways of knowing DNA in the field of criminal investigation. Drawing upon 26 in-depth interviews with prisoners in Austria, it illustrates how this group knows and conceptualizes DNA traces and forensic DNA technologies. These understandings and conceptualizations are both nuanced and ambiguous. While on the one hand, DNA traces and forensic DNA technologies were not treated as categorically different from other types of traces and technologies in the prisoners' accounts, they were seen as `unique' in one respect: respondents experienced DNA traces as beyond their control because they were virtually impossible to avoid (in contrast to, for example, fingerprints). Furthermore, the scientific rigour that our interviewees assumed to underpin forensic DNA technologies rendered these technologies as impenetrable and intimidating, and as effectively challenging many offenders' expert knowledge on how to manage crime scenes and avoid convictions. Finally, due to coming `from the inside' of the body, forensic DNA technologies were seen as `deepening' the stigma of delinquency in many of our interviewees' bodies and selves. For our interviewees, forensic DNA technologies assumed the role of institutionalized memories of their delinquency.

This paper examines how Spanish techno-scientific discourses and practices shaped metropolitan Spanish and colonial Guinean bodies and identities. It focuses on the range of technologies of biopower — from fingerprinting and blood testing to racial and geographic discourses — that constituted Guinean bodies in ambivalent ways during two periods: the first decades of the 20th century, and the post-Civil War period of the Francoist regime. In the first decades of the 20th century, blood tests were imposed on the local population as a legal requirement for obtaining identity cards in colonial Guinea; the identity cards offered them a severely restricted citizen status, especially if they were female. Indeed, the new blood testing technologies played a key role in efforts to control, reform and identify `natives', less as subjects than as labouring bodies. During Franco's dictatorship, following the end of the Spanish Civil War (1939), the colonies became a space for the reconstruction of a unified Spanish national identity through two key strategies: `detribalization' and `hispanicization', which were carried out through a web of techno-scientific practices — in medicine and psychology as well as geography and anthropology — that included fingerprinting, blood testing, measurements of intelligence and racial discourses. Under the Franco regime, these practices not only justified violent, racist forms of exploitation, but were also used to stake a claim on Guinean colonial territories and bodies by emptying them of their existing identities and then reconstituting them under a single Spanish national identity.

This paper presents results from a qualitative study of perceptions of science careers in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the main research institution in France. Its aim is to understand the `glass ceiling' effect, which reduces the proportion of women at the higher levels of the career hierarchy. Long interviews were carried out with men, as well as women, support staff and researchers. Factors such as tension between individual and collective dimensions of research activity, and long-term time-management problems, were identified: these affect both men and women but in different ways. Organizations bear an important responsibility through the way they reinforce or alleviate difficulties that women and men face in contributing to scientific research at all levels.

We analyze the activities and actors involved in articulating and diffusing guidelines for ethical scientific conduct from 1975 to the present. We use a theoretical framework of institutional change at the organizational-field level to examine the co-evolution of the structure of the organizational field of `scientific research' and its institutional logic. Public agencies have long provided funding to US universities to support faculty research, expecting that implicit norms of scientific conduct would guide behavior. Growing publicity about research fraud in the late 1960s and early 1970s triggered a shift from implicit norms to explicit behavioral proscriptions, with strong administrative oversight. As private sources of research funding exert new pressures on research behavior, public—private partnerships are emerging to articulate explicit, yet voluntary prescriptive norms of research integrity. The analysis demonstrates the co-evolution and co-dependence of changes in the identity and strength of influential actors in the field of scientific research and changes in the norms of scientific conduct. We examine how the normative guidelines have been constructed over time, illustrating the persistence of earlier norms as the foundation for current guidelines. We conclude with implications for future research conduct.