Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour

Author:Bruno Latour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Wilson:

But these guys from England only put their amino acid analysis in their paper, that’s bad manners….

Smith:

And its dangerous because there is definite variance between pig and ovine sequence and you cannot deduce the sequence from the amino acid analysis (IV, 37).

During this exchange Smith and Wilson were sitting at a table, surrounded by drafts, protocol books, and copies of articles. Even though they have already half drafted their paper, the data to support their arguments are not yet available. As Smith comments, the series of investigations necessary to obtain these data would take more time than he could spare. The paper by English researchers which Wilson mentioned (and to which their own paper should necessarily refer) claims that a newly discovered substance A is merely a component part of a known substance B. Since they found that the amino acid analysis of substance A was identical with a portion of the amino acid analysis of substance B (and since they had supplementary reasons to believe that the two substances were related), the English researchers were said to have concluded that the structure of the two substances was the same. Wilson commented that to report the amino acid analysis rather than the sequence was “bad manners.” His complaint was that the English researchers had made a claim for the identification of substance A prematurely, where, he (Wilson) was trying to establish the same identification by direct sequencing of substance A. Smith, however, saw the issue as more than just a matter of bad manners. His credibility was at risk because of the danger that a future paper might advance a different structure for substance A, which would make possible accusations that both Smith and the English researchers had prematurely deduced the structure of substance A from its amino acid analysis. This possibility was heightened by participants’ knowledge of past attempts to establish structures. By referring to the Dayhoff dictionary of peptides which he kept on his desk, Smith could show that the structure of many substances varied according to the particular species of animal from which peptides are taken. Even so, when he argued that one cannot deduce the structure from amino acid analysis, Smith was not invoking an absolute rule of procedure. In a less risky situation, in a less stringent group, in a case where the dictionary showed no variations, the structure could have been deduced in this way. Since the English researchers had already made this deduction, Wilson and Smith might have been tempted to make the same jump. The decision whether to carry out more experiments or simply to concur that substance A and B were identical thus depended on various evaluations made by Wilson and Smith. For example, whether or not sufficient time was available hinged on Smith’s evaluation of the relative importance of other tasks he had to fulfil. The importance of independently deducing the structure depended on Smith’s assessment of possible objections in future papers.4

These examples of conversations between scientists show that a complex web of evaluations simultaneously enter into any one deduction or decision.

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