The prominent physicist in the first row had heard enough. When the literature professor, a visitor at Cornell University had finished his talk on Isaac Newton's alchemy, the scientist barked, "Why are you attacking Newton? No one cares about dead ends. Newton's science was impeccable; it speaks for itself." As the audience of scientists savored what they assumed was a victory, the unruffled speaker replied, "Whatever you may think, alchemy was not a dead end for Newton. It was crucial for his research in astronomy and optics. You have to understand," he said, pausing dramatically, "science is always a part of the culture of its time--your science as well as Newton's."

Since this exchange took place in 1987, variations of this scene have been played out many times. Scientists, comfortable in the sanctity of their labs, priding themselves on their dedication to cool, dispassionate observation, now find that they have become the objects of study. Anthropologists and sociologists spend months, even years, in laboratories observing the behavior of scientists as members of a distinct culture with its own ethics, politics, languages, and rituals. Literary critics read scientific texts, like Darwin's The Origin of the Species, to uncover their authors' values and assumptions as well as to examine the very different ways in which nature has been described. Historians look beyond published works to explore the labyrinthine paths which scientific discoveries often take. And there are even prominent scientists, like Richard Lewinton, coauthor ofNot in Our Genes and Stephen J. Gould, author of The Mismeasure of Man (both of Harvard) who have stirred controversy by questioning whether their fields are devoted only to objectivity and truth seeking.

Whatever their differences, these approaches - sometimes called science studies, sometimes called the cultural study of science - are part of an emerging field that may be reshaping both the study of science and the practice of science itself. Although they often overlap, two fields of science study--historical and contemporary--have emerged in recent years. For Kenneth Knoespel, Director of the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech, the history of science is important "because science often seems to suffer from a grand case of amnesia. It suppresses voices that were important in its formation." For Knoespel, the traditional history of science, which usually highlights the work of individual geniuses like Newton, Darwin and Einstein, tells only part of a complicated story.

Take the example of Newton. For most scientists, Newton is the father-figure of scientific method; for some ecofeminists, like Carolyn Merchant, author of The Death of Nature, he is the symbol of all that is wrong with seeing the universe as hunks of dead matter governed by clockwork laws. But the Newton who has emerged in recent years in the cultural study of science is very much a man of the late 1600s, more interested in alchemy and biblical prophecy than mathematics. The point, though, is not that Newton is a less than perfect scientist but that science itself--in the twentieth century as well as the seventeenth--is never "pure." It is always shot through with the values of theology, politics, and gender relations.

For Knoespel and for James Bono, who holds a joint appointment in the History Department and the School of Medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo, demonstrating how science has been constructed in the past raises fundamental questions about how it operates in our own day and age. The new journal they edit with Wilda Anderson of Johns Hopkins,Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, includes wide-ranging articles on everything from science in Soviet Russia to proprioception in Virtual Reality. Contributors and subscribers to this journal, we might call them critics of science, share the view that science is a complex, sometimes sloppy affair that does not proceed in the logical, step-by-step, manner conveyed in textbooks.

Many scientists dismiss the cultural study of science as uninformed "bashing" of their work by nonexperts. Paul Gross, University Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Virginia, and coauthor of the book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, believes most cultural criticism of science is either "fatuous or incompetent." He acknowledges that scientists are subject to external pressures but argues that a reliable "body of knowledge emerges from scientific practice which transcends the foibles of individual scientists." If its critics are right, he contends, there would be "no way of distinguishing science from superstition."

But the members of organizations like the Society for Literature and Science and the Society for Social Studies of Science insist that their work does not "bash" science but attempts doggedly to understand how it operates in our culture. Don Ihde, a philosopher at SUNY-Stony Brook, defends his fellow critics of science by comparing them to "art and literary critics. No one," he reminds us, "accuses them of simply bashing art or literature." If the critic's role in art is to give us new ways of seeing both an artwork and the world it represents, then the critic's role in science may be to open science to new forms of sympathetic as well as skeptical investigation. Ron Schleifer, who teaches English at the University of Oklahoma, points out, "people read book reviews and movie reviews to learn about both strengths and weaknesses. If I review a book of literary criticism, I need to be both engaged and dispassionate; I need distance as well as specialized knowledge. This is what the criticism of science offers-- techniques gleaned from other fields that can illuminate how Heisenberg, for example, came to view the language of quantum physics as a significant philosophical as well as scientific problem." Critics like Schleifer, then, see themselves countering two forms of distortion: the nightmare image of technoscience run amuck conjured up by "bashers" and the soothing image of prosperity and progress offered by those who feel that science can do no wrong. Critical distance, Schleifer suggests, needs to be maintained in both directions.

The criticism of science still leads a kind of shadowy existence for many people because no Carl Sagan--no eminent popularizer--has emerged as a regular on public television to explain the intricacies of the history or sociology of science. On the university lecture circuit, though, two scientists, Evelyn Keller, author of Reflections on Gender and Science, and Donna Haraway, author of Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, have become academic luminaries by offering trenchant--and controversial--feminist critiques of science. The packed lecture halls when these critics speak suggest that their brand of criticism may be ready to move off-campus and into public consciousness.

Go to an annual meeting of, say, the Society for Literature and Science, and you will find yourself surrounded by graduate students, young professors, and a handful of well-known scientists, any one of whom might soon leap from the pages of specialized journals to the cover of Time. Listen to a lecture on quantum physics and modern poetry, though, and you might find yourself baffled.

One of the problems in the social studies of science is that any analysis you hear may be as tough to understand as a complicated mathematical proof. Ask a physicist to explain new developments in quantum physics and the talk turns to playful images of charmed and flavored quarks. Although the scientist may see these fanciful terms merely as clever labels, for the cultural critic of science they may be the very stuff that needs to be analyzed. "Metaphors," says Bono, "allow scientists to forge connections, to demarcate terrains, and to configure objects, like human genome as the holy grail of genetic research." For Bono, metaphors are never just descriptive; they reveal all sorts of buried and half-acknowledged assumptions about how the world works. The more we take phrases like "the laws of nature" for granted, the more they need to be investigated. "Law" may not be just a convenient label for dependable workings of the universe but the carrier of deep-seated hopes and fears that the universe indeed is ordered in a coherent way.

To study science in this way is not to attack it, says George Levine, Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers, but "to make it even more valuable to the culture in which it participates and which it serves." Critics of science themselves guard against blanket hostility to science or tendencies to reduce it to caricature. Levine maintains, "we need to be careful to distinguish 'bashing' from cultural analysis." David Porush of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, agrees: "Science is not just an expression of logic, not just a fiction, not just a quasi-religion, not just a political weapon, though it is all of these things." Because it breaks down into thousands of specialized techniques, science cannot be pigeonholed--or deconstructed--by sweeping generalizations. "What's at stake in the cultural study of science," says Bono, "is not how humanists read scientists but how scientists learn to understand their own practices."

In this respect, critics of science insist that the importance of what they do is tied to larger questions about the role of science in society. They justify their often specialized research by emphasizing their responsibility to examine science's consequences beyond the laboratory. Joseph Rouse, a philosopher at Wesleyan University, maintains, "the question is not whether humanists or social theorists have a right to talk about science, but whether they can do their jobs responsibly without talking a great deal about the sciences." For thinkers like Rouse, any attempts to keep science as a private preserve threaten to close it off from external scrutiny. Scientists must pass rigorous internal reviews before they publish their findings, so (the argument goes) why should they balk at reviews of the larger implications of their work? As Levine cautions, "if you allow only scientists to discuss science, you leave their activities free, in a way no one else's activities are free, from responsibility to the culture at large." Sandra Harding, a philosopher and former Director of Women's Studies at the University of Delaware, and author ofThe Science Question in Feminism, has an even stronger warning: "scientists" she says, "are experts on nature, not on the institutions of science. If we say that only natives in the field can legitimately critique it, we are ripe for totalitarianism."

Harding is quick to add that her criticism is "not an attack on individual scientists but on the insularity of scientific culture." Although most scientists know all too well the internal politics of departmental squabbles, priority disputes, and the endless quests for funding, they are often reluctant to acknowledge that all sorts of external factors can shape the objects and the procedures of their research. As Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and author ofScience as Power, claims, "science is political. It doesn't have a choice." Some critics of science insist that the political contexts of science can be more important than its internal workings. Although Gross and his coauthor, Norman Leavitt of Rutgers, might disagree, many scientists would acknowledge, if only grudgingly, that Aronowitz has a point when he says, "scientists don't wake up and decide 'Ah, this is the most rational thing to study.' They follow the money." The danger he perceives is that if Big Science follows Big Money a lot of people are left out in the cold, forced to deal with the consequences of what Harding calls scientific and technological "arrogance" that rarely takes their concerns into account.

Although scientists often are painfully aware that nonspecialists--public interest groups, government officials, corporate executives, and university administrators--may be looking over their shoulders, many resist having anthropologists studying them as though they were a tribe of well-funded headhunters. Gross maintains that "scientists don't take cultural criticism seriously. They either ignore it or think it's charming but ignorant." Other scientists, such as Haraway, disagree, however, and welcome the cultural study of science, pointing to the beneficial effects it has had already in everything from environmental sciences to primate studies. After all, as Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch point out in their new book, The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science, what is called in Britain the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge has been around for two decades, long enough for many scientists to become as familiar with the work of pioneers in the field, such as the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, as they are with the latest developments in their own areas. Some are even teaching interdisciplinary courses in science studies--or developing new programs in science education.

Michael Flower, a developmental biologist, and William Becker, a chemist, are codirectors of a new program, Science in the Liberal Arts Curriculum, at Portland State University--funded, in part, by a large grant from the National Science Foundation. Along with introductory courses on methods of scientific inquiry, the program includes more advanced seminars such as "Biopolitics" and "Science: Power/Knowledge." Directed at nonmajors, the program seeks to develop a new kind of scientific literacy, an awareness of the complex ways in which science gets done. "Science in the making is where the action is," Flower declares. "We want to emphasize the sites where science, literature, politics, and economics come together, where they haven't been sorted out yet into separate domains." Like many critics of science, Flower maintains that science is always in the process of reshaping society, and that this reshaping confers both the liberty to develop new ways of thinking and the responsibility to use them democratically. In his advanced courses, he uses books by Haraway and the sociologists Bruno Latour, author of Science in Action, and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, coauthors of Leviathan and the Air Pump, to challenge traditional notions of science as a finished product. The fact that the NSF funded this program suggests that the critics of science are winning converts in the laboratory. If Flower can teach the controversy over the "abortion pill" RU-486 as the site of conflicting views on science, ethics, and responsibility, then the old models of education--biology on one end of campus and philosophy on the other--may be in for a radical overhaul.

In a piecemeal fashion, the revolution is already underway. "What people often fail to realize," muses Schleifer, "is that science is already here. What lies in the past is the history of science; what is going to come is science fiction. People who talk about the ethical, social, or political implications of technologies and research programs often do so when the scientific work is done. But science is no different from other human activities where these concerns are always present." What the criticism of science offers is a way to think about these implications as part of the processes of discovery and development. Science may look very different in the future if mathematicians have to explore the religious and political principles at stake in the dispute between Newton and Leibniz over the discovery of calculus. If the most abstract mathematical models of quantum physics are tied in complex ways to the social realities of our time, then these links need to be investigated by a new breed of researcher who is as competent in social theory as she is in theoretical physics. This hybrid, the cross-disciplinary critic, is the logical outgrowth of programs like Portland State's. Her ancestors--the cloistered researcher and the old fashioned- humanist--may be the endangered species of the future.

Across campus from where I write this article, sits a small decommissioned nuclear reactor. It is the product of decades-old assumptions about nature, the remnant of a different kind of science. If it is no longer a useful tool to study the secrets of the atom, it may still have a half-life as the object of new forms of analysis. From tool to cultural artifact: the trajectory of the new cultural study of science.

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