1
“Studying Scientific Controversy from the STS Perspective”
Trevor Pinch and Christine Leuenberger, Department of Science & Technology
Studies, Cornell University,
There is a long history now of studying different sorts of controversies within
S&TS. In this concluding comment we plan to talk about some of the main
approaches and try and relate them a little to the papers presented at this conference
– both the papers on the session on “Citizen Participation and Science and
Technology” and the papers on the Hwang controversy.
First off we note that in general the quality of the papers at this meeting has been
very high and they auger very well for the new venture in S&TS publishing which
you are embarking upon. As one of us said already the Hwang controversy is the
“Perfect Case Study” and being located here in Asia you are in the perfect place to
bring the S&TS analysis of this controversy to the attention of the wider S&TS
community.
In handling our comments today I (Trevor) will start by making some general
comments about the S&TS approach towards controversy and then Christine will
say a bit more about the specific papers and how they fit into this approach.
2
The importance of scientific controversy has been recognized by scholarship within
Science and Technology Studies (S&TS) since the 1970s. Indeed the study of
controversies has become an important methodological tool to gain insight into key
processes which are not normally visible within the sciences.
Longstanding disputes, hotspots and scientific revolutions
What makes something a scientific controversy? It is important to distinguish
longstanding disputes, such as that between science and religion, or the merits of
socio-biological explanation as applied to humans, or whether the fundamental
constituents of matter are particles or waves, from more localized disputes such as
over the existence of a new particle or a new disease transmitting entity. The latter
sorts of controversy are more like a "hot spot" which erupts for a while on the
surface of science than a deeply entrenched long-running battle. Also controversies
are not be confused with the bigger sea changes which science sometimes undergoes
during scientific revolutions. Although defining a scientific revolution is itself
contested, the all-pervasive nature of the changes in physics brought about by
quantum mechanics and relativity seems different from, for example, the
controversy over the detection of large fluxes of gravitational radiation or over the
warped zipper model of DNA. Similarly long-running debates on the relative
3
impacts of nature and nurture on human behavior have a different character from
more episodic controversies, such as the possibility of interspecies transfer of prion
disease. Of course, intractable disputes and revolutions share some of the features
associated with controversies, but it is the bounded nature of controversies which
has led to their becoming an object of study in their own right, especially within the
tradition of S&TS associated with the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK).
The Methodological Importance of Controversies
One metaphor for understanding why controversies have taken on such
methodological importance is that of "punching" a system. Scientists on occasion
gain insight into natural systems by punching, or destabilizing, them. For example,
one may learn more about the laws of momentum by bouncing one billiard ball off
another than by watching a stationary billiard ball. Similarly Rutherford famously
used scattering experiments in which gold foil was bombarded with alpha particles
to uncover the structure of the atom and in particular the presence of the nucleus.
The methodological assumption underpinning the study of controversies is similar.
By studying a scientific controversy one learns something about the underlying
dynamics of science and technology and their relations with wider society. For
instance, during a controversy the normally hidden social dimensions of science
may become more explicit. Sites of contestation are places to facilitate the
4
investigation of, for instance, the metaphors, assumptions and political struggles
embedded within science and technology.
Four Different Approaches to Controversy
We can note four different influential approaches towards the study of scientific
controversies.
(1) The school of sociological research associated with Robert Merton (1957) first
recognized the importance of controversies within science. Of particular interest to
Merton was the existence of priority disputes. Many well-known controversies
center on who is the first scientist to make a particular scientific discovery.
(2) A second approach toward the study of scientific controversy developed in the
1960s as concerned citizens increasingly protested what they took to be the negative
effects of science and technology. Here the source of controversy is the perceived
negative impact of science and technology on particular groups and it is the study of
these political responses which forms the core of the analysis.
(3)The new sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) which emerged in the 1970s
and which largely displaced the Mertonian school provides a third approach towards
the study of controversies. Here the focus is on controversies at the research
frontiers of science where typically some experimental or theoretical claim is
disputed within an expert community.
5
(4) Modern science and technology studies owes a heavy debt to SSK but is less
likely to make distinctions between the content of science and its impact. Within
this fourth approach, controversies are seen as integral to many features of scientific
and technological practice and dissemination. Their study forms a key area of the
discipline today.
Merton and Priority Disputes
Merton's interest in priority disputes stemmed from his claim that science has a
particular normative structure or "institutional ethos" with an accompanying set of
rewards and sanctions. Because so much of the reward structure of science is built
upon the recognition of new discoveries, scientists are particularly concerned to
establish the priority of their findings. Such priority disputes are legion, such as the
famous fight between Newton and Leibnitz over who first discovered the calculus,
or the more recent unseemly dispute between Ian Wilmut and his colleagues as to
who is the real “father” of Dolly the cloned sheep.
It was Thomas Kuhn (1962) who first raised a fundamental problem for the analysis
of priority disputes. A priority dispute is predicated upon a model of science, later
known as the "point model" of scientific discovery, which can establish
unambiguously who discovered what and when. Asking the question who
6
discovered oxygen, Kuhn showed that the crucial issue is what counts as oxygen. If
it is the dephlogisticated air first analyzed by Priestly then the discovery goes to
him, but if it is oxygen as understood within the modern meaning of atomic weights
then the discovery must be granted to Lavoisier's later identification. The "point
model" requires discovery to be instantaneous, and for discoveries to be recognized
and dated. A rival "attributional model" of discovery, first developed by Augustin
Brannigan (1981), draws attention to the social processes by which scientific
discoveries are recognized and "attributed". This approach seems to make better
sense of the fact that what counts as a discovery can vary over time. In short, it
questions the Eureka moment of the point model. For example, Woolgar (1976), in
his analysis of the pulsar’s discovery, shows that the date of the discovery varies
depending on what stage in the process is taken to be the defining point of the
discovery. If the discovery is the first appearance of "scruff" on Jocelyn Bell's chart
recording of signals from the radio telescope, then it will be dated earlier than when
it was realized that the unambiguous source of this "scruff" was a star. This case was
particularly controversial because it was alleged by the dissonant Cambridge radio
astronomer Fred Hoyle that the Nobel prize winners for this discovery should have
included Jocelyn Bell, who was then a graduate student. Priority disputes can touch
in this way on the social fabric of science, such as its gender relationships and
hierarchical structure.
7
Despite the challenge posed by the attributional model, it is the point model of
discovery which is embedded in the reward system of science. As a result priority
disputes still abound. In modern technoscience, discovery can mean, not only
recognition, but also considerable financial reward, as for example with patents,
licensing arrangements or stock in a biotech company. In such circumstances,
priority disputes have added salience. One has only to think of the battle between
Robert Gallo and the Pasteur Institute over priority in the discovery that HIV is the
cause of AIDS. In this case there was not only scientific priority at stake, but also
the licensing of the lucrative blood test for identifying AIDS. The controversy could
only be settled by intervention at the highest political level. The Presidents of
America and France, Ronald Reagan and Jacques Chirac, agreed to share the
proceeds from the discovery. Again what was at stake scientifically was not simply
who was first past the post; the protagonists initially claimed to have isolated
different retroviruses and disagreed over the effectiveness of the various blood tests.
This case was marked by additional controversy because of allegations of scientific
misconduct raised against Gallo which led to Congressional and NIH investigations.
Controversy over the impact of science and technology
That a priority dispute could require the intervention of national political leaders is
8
an indication of just how important science and technology can become for the
wider polity. In response to the AIDS crisis, activist groups have campaigned and
pressured scientists and government officials to do more scientifically and have
intervened in matters of research design, such as the best way to run clinically
controlled trials. Such activist engagement dates back to the political protests which
science and technology generated in the 1960s in the context of Vietnam-era issues
such as war and environmentalism. There has been increasing recognition that
science and technology are neither neutral nor necessarily beneficial and that many
developments stemming from modern science and technology, such as nuclear
power, petrochemical industries, and genetic engineering, raise profound and
controversial issues for a concerned citizenry.
Dorothy Nelkin, a pioneer in analyzing these types of disputes identified four types
of political, economic and ethical controversies which engage the public in the US
(Nelkin 1995). One set revolves around the social, moral and religious impact of
science. Issues such as the teaching of evolution in US schools, animal rights, and
the use of fetal tissue such as stem cells fall into this first category. A second type of
controversy concerns a clash between the commercial and economic values
surrounding science and technology and that of the environmental movement.
Ozone depletion, toxic waste dumps, and green house gases are pertinent examples.
9
A third set has been provoked by health hazards arising from the transformation of
food and agricultural practices by the use of modern science and technology.
Genetically modified foods, the carcinogenic risks posed by food additives and the
use of bovine growth hormones in the dairy industry all belong in this category. A
fourth group centers on conflicts between individual rights and group rights - a
conflict that has been heightened by new developments in science and technology.
For example, the mass fluoridation of water to improve dental health denies
individuals the right to choose for themselves whether they want fluoride in their
water supply. This latter sort of controversy is further fanned when controversies
enter the legal arena. As Sheila Jasanoff has argued in her study of the silicon gel
breast implant controversy, the mass tort cases that follow are settled by individual
litigants being replaced by statistical objects and the power of juries losing out to
court appointed experts in the relevant science and technology.
Research on these sorts of controversies by Nelkin and her colleagues focused
mainly on the interest politics of the groups involved. How and why do they get
involved in political action over science and technology; what underlying political
values do such groups exhibit; and how do they effectively intervene to protest some
perceived deleterious development stemming from science, technology or medicine?
The positions taken by the participants are consistent with their interests, although
10
these interests may not enable the final outcome or closure of a debate to be
predicted. For instance, the demise of nuclear power had as much to do with
economics as with political protest. Since scientists themselves often play an active
part in these disputes, a full analysis will touch upon how scientists deploy their
science for political aims. But, by and large this research tradition has avoided
using the entry of scientists into these disputes to examine the core processes by
which scientific knowledge is developed and certified. In short, the attention was
focused upon seeing how scientists became political rather than upon how politics
might itself shape scientific knowledge. Political controversies were treated as
analytically separable from epistemic controversies and as resolved by distinct
processes of closure (Engelhardt and Caplan 1987). Typically epistemic
controversies were thought to be closed by application of epistemic and
methodological standards, while political controversies were closed through the
intervention of "non-scientific factors", such as economic and political interests.
Even when the micro details of how people make technical decisions in participant
decision-making processes are examined it is important to analyze how the technical
aspects of knowledge are dealt with. The different contours of expertise of different
lay groups would seem to be important. Thus the paper by Juraku, Suzuki and
Sakura on decision making around Japanese nuclear power needed integrating more
11
with S&TS approaches towards expertise and how technical arguments are resolved.
It is not only the social processes and social networks which citizens form which are
important but the socio-technical networks and how technical knowledge is also
operationalized amongst such networks. Their focus on the interchange and tensions
between formal policies and informal networks ties in with recent work in S&TS on
Goffman’s notion of “front stage’ and “back stage” as applied in science policy by
Stephen Hilgartner. One of us, Christine, in a forthcoming paper about
psychological disease categories, points to the importance of how national policies
are transformed in the process of being adopted into local institutional cultures.
Scientific Controversy and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
With the emergence of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) in the late
1970s, it was no longer possible to avoid examining how scientific knowledge was
shaped and how this shaping contributed to the dynamics of controversies. A key
tenet of this new sociology of science, as formulated by David Bloor (1991) in his
"Strong Programme", was that of symmetry. This principle called upon sociologists
to use the same explanatory resources to explain both successful and unsuccessful
knowledge claims. It raised to methodological status the necessity of examining the
processes by which science distinguishes the wheat of truth from the chaff of error.
SSK soon turned its attention towards examining scientific controversies because it
12
is during such controversies that this symmetry principle can be applied to good
effect. With each side alleging that it has "truth" on its side, and disparaging the
theoretical and experimental efforts of the other, a symmetrical analysis can explain
both sides of the controversy using the same sorts of sociological resources. This
differs from the earlier interest approach to controversies in that it applies this
symmetrical sociological analysis to the very scientific claims made by the
participants.
Bloor and his colleagues of the Edinburgh school pursued their program mainly
through theoretical analysis supported by historical case studies. H.M. Collins and
the "Bath School" by contrast, developed an empirical method for studying the
sociology of scientific knowledge in contemporaneous cases -- a method based
primarily upon the study of scientific controversies. One early application of the
method was to the study of parapsychology (Collins and Pinch 1979). Collins and
Pinch suggested that controversies such as that provoked by parapsychology were
resolved by boundary crossing between two different forums of scientific debate the constitutive and the contingent. Generalizing from several case studies of
controversies, Collins (1981) argued that during controversies scientific findings
exhibited "interpretative flexibility", with the facts at stake being debated and
interpreted in radically different ways by the parties in the controversy. This
13
interpretative flexibility did not last forever: by following a controversy over time
researchers could delineate the process of "closure" by which controversy vanished
and consensus emerged. Collins defined the group of scientists involved in a
controversy as the "core set". Only a very limited set of scientists actively partook in
controversies, the rest of the scientific community depended upon the core set for
their expert judgment as to what to believe. This was particularly well illustrated by
Martin Rudwick (1985) in his study of the great Devonian Controversy in the
history of geology.
As researchers followed controversies from their inception to the point of closure, it
became necessary to address matters of scientific method as they were faced in
practice by the participants. Factors that had usually been seen as issues of method
or epistemology thus became open to sociological investigation: for example, the
replication of experiments, the role of crucial experiments, proofs, calibration,
statistics, and theory. In addition other factors such as reputation, rhetoric and
funding were shown to play a role in the dynamics of controversies.
An important finding of this research was what Collins (1992) called the
"experimenter's regress" which he developed from examining the issue of
replication of scientific experiments. Controversies clearly were messy things and
14
were very rarely resolved by experiments alone. Collins argued that in more routine
science experiments were definitive because there was an agreed upon outcome
which scientists could use as a way of judging which scientists replicating
experiments were the competent practitioners. If one could get one’s experiment to
work one had the requisite skills and competence; if one failed onelacked the skills
and competence. The trouble was that when there was a dispute at the research
frontiers there was no agreed upon outcome by which to judge the competent
practitioners. Experiments had to be built to investigate a claimed new phenomenon,
but failure to find the new phenomenon might mean either there was no new
phenomenon to be found or that the experimenter failing to find it was incompetent.
This regress was only broken as a practical matter by the operation of a combination
of factors such as rhetoric, funding, and prior theoretical dispositions.
Often the losing side in a scientific controversy continues to fight for its position
long after the majority consensus has turned against it. Those who continue will
meet increasing disapprobation from their colleagues and may be forced to leave
science altogether. "Life after death" goes on at the margins and often finally passes
away only when the protagonists themselves die or retire (Simon 1999). The
uncertain side of science is clearest during moments of controversy. Most scientists
never experience controversies directly, and often it is only after exposure to a
15
controversy that scientists become aware of the social side of science and start
reading in science studies and even employ ideas drawn from science studies to
understand what has happened to them. I wonder if this will happen in the case of
Dr Hwang?
This work on scientific controversy has been exemplified by a number of case
studies of modern science such as memory transfer, solar neutrinos, gravity waves,
high energy physics and famously cold fusion. The approach used by sociologists
has also been taken up by historians and the sociological methods have been
extended to a number of historical case studies. Such studies pose particular
methodological challenges because often the losing viewpoint has vanished from
history. Shapin and Schaffer's (1985) study of the dispute between Robert Boyle and
Thomas Hobbes over Boyle's airpump experiments was a landmark in research on
scientific controversy, because it showed in a compelling way how the wider
political climate, in this case that of Restoration Britain, could shape the outcome of
a controversy and at the same time help institutionalize a new way of fact making -experiments-- in the Royal Society. It also drew attention to the literary and
technological dimensions of building factual assent in science. By documenting the
witnesses to particular experimental performances a culture of “virtual witnessing”
was born.
16
The SSK approach to scientific controversy has also been influential in the study of
technology. The social construction of technology (SCOT) framework uses
concepts imported from the study of scientific controversy such as "interpretative"
flexibility" and "closure". A variety of competing meanings are found in
technological artefacts and scholars study how "closure mechanisms" such as
advertising produce a stable meaning of a technology (Pinch and Bijker 1984,
Bijker 1995).
Another influential approach to the study of controversies in sciences and
technology has been that developed by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon. Again the
initial impetus came from studies of scientists. Callon's 1986 article on a
controversy over a new method of harvesting scallops is one of the first articulations
of what later became known as Actor Network Theory (ANT). Callon argues that
the outcome of a controversy cannot be explained by reference to the social realm
alone, but the analyst must also take account of the actions of non-human actors,
such as scallops, which play a part in shaping the outcome. Subsequently Latour's
work on how "trials of strength" are settled in science and technology has become
especially influential within the new sociology of scientific knowledge. Such
struggles, according to Latour (1987), involve aligning material and cognitive
17
resources with social ones into so-called “immutable mobiles” or black boxes,
objects which remained fixed when transported along scientific networks and which
contain embedded within them sets of social, cognitive and material relationships.
Latour and Woolgar (1979) in their now classic study of a molecular biology
laboratory showed that literary inscriptions play a special role in science. They
indicated how controversies could be analyzed in terms of whether certain
modalities are added to or subtracted from scientific statements making them more
or less fact-like. The role of discourse in scientific controversies has been examined
in great depth in a study of the oxidative phosphorylation controversy by Gilbert and
Mulkay (1984). They showed how particular repertoires of discourse, such as the
"empiricist repertoire" and the "contingent repertoire", are used selectively by
scientists in order to bolster their own claims or undermine those of their opponents.
Subsequently there has been much work on how a variety of rhetorical and textual
resources operate during controversies (e.g. Myers 1990). Sometimes the resolution
of controversy is only possible by drawing boundaries around the relevant experts
who can play a role in the controversy. Sometimes particular scientific objects cross
such boundaries and form a nexus around which a controversy can be resolved.
Such "boundary work" (Gieryn 1983) and "boundary objects" (Star and Griesemer
1989) form an important analytical resource for understanding how controversies
18
end.
In addition to analyzing scientific controversies, SSK has itself become a site of
controversy. Most notably, lively controversies have occurred over the viability of
interest explanations, over the extent to which the sociology of science should itself
be reflexive about its methods and practices and over the role of non-human actors.
The "science war" involving debates between natural scientists and people in
science studies over the methods and assumptions of science studies and cultural
studies of science is another area of controversy that is ripe for sociological
investigation.
Scientific Controversy in Science and Technology Studies Today
In contemporary Science and Technology Studies the sites of contestation chosen
for analysis have become more heterogeneous. One strength of the new discipline of
S&TS is the wide terrain of activities involving science and technology which it
examines. For example, similar methods can be used to examine controversies
involving science and technology in the courtroom, the media, quasi-governmental
policy organizations, and citizens’ action groups. Indeed, many of the most
contentious political issues facing governments and citizens today involve science
and technology: issues such as genetically modified foods, gene therapy and in vitro
19
fertilization. We have good examples of these sorts of approaches at this conference.
For example, Jinhee Park, in her paper “Woman’s Body as Wasteful Materials”
argues that gendered social practices in Korean society meant that there was a lack
of regulation of IVF treatments which enable the Kwang team to use frozen embryos
in his science without the consent of patients. The line of argument can be related to
Nelly Oudshoorn’s study of contraceptive devices where she points out that
dominant gender relationships effect the sort of research problems posed. In her case
she shows that the lack of research on the male pill is because contraception and
reproduction have been defined as women’s issues. Park further points out that the
dominant gender relationships affect the likelihood of the commercialization of
women’s bodies. Dorothy Nelkin and Lori Andrews has a paper in the Hastings
Center Report (1998) on the commercialization of body tissue where they point
out that the capitalist logic has permeated research on human tissue and people are
in fact no longer in charge of their bodily tissue once it is in the hands of the
medical authorities. It is then available for scientific research and can become a
commercially traded product. To what extent the commercialization of body tissue
is an issue that disproportionately effects women would therefore be a research
question yet to be answered.
Park also implies that women’s bodies are more likely to become what she calls
20
“experimental material”. Anne Eckmann has shown that when it comes to
scientific research men have traditionally been the experimental subjects, often to
the detriment of women’s health. In the US there was an uproar in the media when
recent studies on women showed that the health effects of aspirin, long assumed to
be the same for men and women, actually differed between the sexes. This only
transpired after for the first time women were included in clinical trails. Up to that
point men had been the standard subject for medical trails. Indeed women and
their bodies being taken into account in the design of medical trails is according to
Eckman the women’s issue of the 1990s. So it would be worth theorizing in which
medical contexts women versus men become the object of scientific investigation
and experiment.
Lastly would like to have heard a bit more in Jinhee’s Park analysis about the
women who supported and continue to support Hwang. We do these women a
disservice if we exclude their voices from the analysis of the controversy. An
important part of the methodology of studying controversies from an S&TS
perspective is to recover the voices of people who get written out of the history,
often people who are on the losing side of controversies. Clearly the women who
supported Hwang derived something from his work and his skillful recruitment of
them to his cause is a part of the story we need to know more about. As Charis
21
Thompson’s work on IVF technology in the US shows – there are many women
who argue that these sorts of technologies are actually empowering to women.
Some of the papers at this conference speak to the rise of citizen action groups and
their effect on various social policies as well as the definition of certain disease
categories. For instance, Masanori Kaji, in his paper on the case of Itai-Itai
Disease in Japan, points out how citizen action groups can be crucial in
recognizing certain issues as relevant to medical authorities and can impose new
citizen initiated forms of pollution controls. With the intervention of the courts in
Japan we wondered how far Jasanoff’s consideration of the “statistical victim” and
the loss of power in legal contexts of individual citizens apply to this case. This
work could also be strengthened if it was put in the context of recent discussions
in S&TS by Collins and Evans and others of different forms of expertise, who can
get obtain expertise and under what sorts of conditions. While S&TS recognizes
that exerptise may not always match credentialed expertise, as Brian Wynne and
Steve Epstein have shown, the downside of granting too much expertise to
laypeople is that it can produce what Barry Glasner calls “a culture of fear” where
citizen groups and other interest groups become advocates and mobilize around,
for example, new disease categories, which medical science does not recognize.
Sorting out the legitimate contours of expertise and how far ordinary citizens can
22
acquire expertise is one of the big issues facing current S&TS. How as Kobayashi
puts it, are governments and citizens going to learn to trust each other in matters of
technoscience again?
This issue of expertise is one which is also needed to understand further the social
dynamics of consensus conferences as examined by Dung-Seng Chen and ChungYeh Deng. The contours of expertise in regard to specific matters of scientific
controversy are not easily mapped onto generalizations about citizens’ capabilities
and education – again as Brian Wynne showed it is the uncredentialed ecological
expertise of sheep farmers which the scientists overlooked with such adverse
consequences in the Chernobyl nuclear fallout case.
The study of controversies in modern technoscience -- with its porous boundaries
between science, technology, politics, the media and the citizenry -- also calls for
the analyst to broaden the array of analytical tools employed. Although the
fundamental insights produced by SSK remain influential, such insights are
supplemented by an increased understanding of how macro-political structures
such as the state, and the legal system, enable and constrain the outcome of
scientific controversies. Examples of this sort of work include Jasanoff’s (1990)
investigations of how technical controversies are dealt with by US agencies such
23
as the EPA and FDA; Lynch and Jasanoff (1998) work on science in legal settings
such as the use of DNA evidence in courtrooms and Epstein’s (1996) work on the
AIDS controversy. In the latter case Epstein deals not not only with the dispute
about the science of AIDS causation, but also turns to social movements research
to understand how AIDS activists outside of science got sufficient influence to
actually affect the design of clinical trials by which new AIDS drugs are tested.
Callon, as Tadashi Kobayashi has pointed out in his paper, has recently
distinguished how in the modern age different sorts of “concerned groups” are
impacted by technoscience. Concerned groups of consumers he refers to as the
“voicy group”, groups who align around a technology which loses out in a battle
with a more dominant technology are the “orphan group”, and he uses the term the
“hurt group” to refer to people threatened by risky foods, chemical additives,
environmental pollution and so on.
The broader approach needed to examine modern technoscience is evident in the
paper on Japanese clocks by Takehiko Hashimoto. This exemplary study reveals
what Sheila Jasanoff calls the co-production of science and the nation state. By
focusing on technology, institutions, policies, agents of popularization and
educational campaigns the author shows how the modern technology of clocks and
time keeping was established along with modern Japanese habits of punctuality.
24
Also Kim Tae-Ho in his paper on “Science-Technology as an Ingredient of
Nationalism” expands traditional S&TS analyses to look at the link between science
politics and the state in the Hwang controversy. He traces the origins of the Hwang
scandal in terms of a historical review of Korean nationalism and how Dr Hwang
skillfully appealed to anxieties in Korea and its delayed and sometimes rough path
to modernity. In this view Dr Hwang is seen as a skillful interpreter of and
responder to a kind of Korean national psyche. We found that idea intriguing but
wanted more specific examples of both Dr Hwang’s rhetoric and how ordinary
Koreans’ responded to it.
Particularly interesting methodological issues have been raised by the study of
controversies which overtly impinge upon politics. When studying controversies
within science SSK researchers were largely able to adopt the neutral stance
embodied in the symmetry principle of the Strong Program. However, some
scholars have argued that, when dealing with cases where analysis could have a
direct impact upon society, it is much harder to maintain neutrality. Researchers
studying these sorts of disputes, such as whether Vitamin C is an effective cancer
cure, find they can become "captured" by the people they are studying. This
complicates the possibility of producing the sort of neutral analysis sought after in
SSK. A number of solutions have been proposed to this dilemma (see Ashmore and
25
Richards 1996). It may be a dilemma we face with the Hwang case. Jan Sapp is
arguing for a constructivist approach towards fraud ended up deconstructing the
scientific means by which the well-known German molecular biologist Frans
Moewus was shown to be a fraud. Do we want to do this for the Hwang case –
where the overwhelming consensus seems to be that he has committed fraud? Is
there a way of approaching fraud within S&TS whereby we can still derive
normative conclusions about Hwang’s misconduct, or do we want to relativize
misconduct? These are important issues facing the field in dealing with this case.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ashmore M and Richards E 1996 The Politics of SSK: neutrality, Commitment and
Beyond, Special Issue of Social Studies of Science, 26:219-445
Bijker W 1995 Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Towards a theory of
Sociotechnical change, MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma
Bloor D 1991 Knowledge and Social Imagery, 2nd edition, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago
Brannigan A 1981 The Social Basis of Scientific Discoveries, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge
Callon M 1986 Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the
scallops and the fishermen of St Brieux Bay. In J Law (ed.) Power, Action and
Belief: A new sociology of Knowledge?, Sociological Review Monograph, 196229, Routledge, London
Collins H M 1981 Knowledge and Controversy: studies in modern natural science,
Special Issue of Social Studies of Science, 11:1
26
Collins H M 1992 Changing Order, 2nd edition, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago
Collins H M and Pinch T J 1982 The construction of the paranormal, nothing
unscientific is happening. In R Wallis (ed): On the margins of Science: the social
construction of rejected knowledge, Sociological Review Monograph, University of
Keele, Keele UK
Dascal M 1998 The Study of Controversies and the Theory and History of Science,
Science in Context, 11:147-155.
Engelhardt T H and Caplan A L Scientific Controversies: Case studies in the
resolution and closure of disputes in science and technology, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge
Epstein S 1996 Impure Science: AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge,
University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London
Gieryn T 1983 Boundary work and the demarcation of science from non-science:
Strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists, American Sociological
Review, 48: 781-795.
Gilbert N G and Mulkay M K 1984 Opening Pandora's Box, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge
Jasanoff S 1990 The Fifth Branch: Science advisors as policy makers, Harvard
university Press, Cambridge Ma
Kuhn T S 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The University of Chicago
Press, Chicago
Latour B 1987 Science in Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Ma
Latour B and Woolgar SW 1979 Laboratory Life, Sage, London and Beverly Hills
Lynch M and Jasanoff S (eds) 1998 Contested Identities: Science, law and forensic
practice, special issue of Social Studies of Science, 28: 5/6
27
Martin B and Richards E Scientific Knowledge, Controversy, and Public Decision
Making, In: S Jasanoff, G E Markle, J C Petersen and T Pinch (eds) Handbook of
Science and Technology Studies, Sage, Thousand Oaks, Ca
Merton R K 1957 Priorities in scientific discoveries: a chapter in the sociology of
science, American Sociological Review 22:635-659
Myers G 1990 Writing Biology: Texts and the social construction of scientific
knowledge, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison
Nelkin D (ed) 1992 Controversies: Politics of Technical Decisions, 3rd edition,
Sage, Newbury Park, Ca
Nelkin D 1995 Science Controversies: The Dynamics of Public Disputes in the
United States. In S Jasanoff, G E Markle, J C Petersen and T Pinch (eds) Handbook
of Science and Technology Studies, Sage, Thousand Oaks, Ca
Pinch T J and Bijker W E 1987 The social construction of facts and artifacts. Or
how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each
other. In: Bijker W E, Hughes TS, and Pinch T J (eds) The Social Construction of
Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of
Technology, Cambridge: MIT Press
Rudwick, M 1985 The Great Devonian Controversy: The shaping of scientific
knowledge among gentlemanly specialists, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Shapin S and Schaffer S 1985 Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the
Experimental Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Simon B 1999 Undead science: Making sense of cold fusion after the (arti)fact,
Social Studies of Science, 29:61-87
Star S L and Griesemer J 1989 Institutional Ecology, “translations” and boundary
objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology,
1907-1939, Social Studies of Science, 19:387-420
Woolgar S 1976 Writing an Intellectual History of Scientific Development: the use
of discovery accounts, Social Studies of Science, 6: 395-422
28
Jinhee Park raises issues to do with gender and science and sees the Hwang
scandal as emblematic of gender discrimination in Korea. Certainly the ease with
which Hwang used human eggs and the lack of accounting for them and the
general discrimination against women and women scientists in Korea are
noteworthy features of the case