Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (review)

PCR (the polymerase chain reaction), invented in the mid-1980s, harnesses the biological process of polymerization to rapidly multiply tiny samples of DNA in the laboratory. It has revolutionized genetic testing. Calling PCR “arguably the exemplary biotechnological invention to date” (p. 1), Paul Rabinow sets out in this ethnographic account to tell the story of its invention and, at the same time, to document the vocational culture of the biologists at Cetus Corporation, the California biotech company that developed PCR.

Although Rabinow’s narrative is deliberately understated, the story has all the elements of high drama. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, is a larger-than-life figure who is partial to LSD and brawls with his colleagues. Robert Fildes, the CEO of Cetus, almost perpetually battles with his scientists, who eventually engineer his ouster. Finally, the climactic birth of PCR continually threatens to miscarry, thanks to Mullis’s erratic behavior, shortages of capital, infighting among the scientists, and the inability of many at Cetus to see the potential of PCR until quite late.

Rabinow’s absorbing account does not dumb down the biology, nor does it—unlike much contemporary anthropology of science—trowel on the theory. It will interest a broad audience in science and technology studies for a number of reasons. First, it is an exemplary analysis of the new biotech private sector as a milieu for the practice of science. Rabinow sketches the legal and financial developments that catalyzed the biotech industry. He examines ways in which research agendas are affected (though not entirely determined) by company patent lawyers and market analysts, and he captures the mix of defensiveness and pleasure that first-rate scientists feel in working for private industry rather than, as their mentors often expected, universities. Rabinow argues that Cetus provided these scientists a “fortuitous space of experimentation” (p. 159), where they had the improvisational flexibility they needed to do cutting-edge science.

Second, Rabinow’s account destabilizes its own object in interesting, complicated ways. Rather than weaving the voices of his interviewees into a seamless account unified at the level of an omniscient narrator, he juxtaposes contradictory accounts and intermittently inserts long passages from his transcribed interviews so that the reader can absorb the different voices and perceptions of his informants. In other words, Rabinow injects an element of collage into his writing.

Breaking with classic history textbook models for narrating invention, this gently deconstructive writing strategy also destabilizes PCR itself. Rabinow shows that our view of the dates of invention and the inventors depends on whether we think of PCR as a concept or a technique. Was the inventor the inspired scientist who first glimpsed the possibility or the technician who made PCR work when this scientist could not? Or was it the group that made PCR a refined, commercially viable technology two years later? Nor are these questions innocent, since Nobel Prizes, company bonuses, and self-regard hang in the balance.

Finally, in view of Rabinow’s observation that “a significant omission from the by now classic laboratory studies has been the representation of science as a . . . vocation” (p. 17), the entire book can be read as a sub rosa conversation with Max Weber and Robert Merton over what it means to take science as a vocation. Attacking the recent literature in science studies for its ungenerous impulse always to unmask or defrock scientists, Rabinow attempts a subtle rehabilitation of Weber and Merton—and of scientists themselves. Pointing out that norms are ideals that many may not live up to, in the last pages he casts Paul White, a senior scientist at Cetus, as the modest Weberian hero who quietly pursues a disciplined dedication to science while others feud over Nobel Prizes and stock options. Implicitly casting Mullis as the charismatic false prophet and criticizing the “increased tabloidization of science in its leading journals or the extravagant claims of the spokesmen for its megaprojects” (p. 165), Rabinow characterizes...