Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology by Cyrus C. M. Mody (review)

The scanning-probe microscope, and one particularly successful variant, the scanning-tunneling microscope (STM), provide the context for this timely study. The real focus, however, is not the instrument itself but the community of "probe microscopists" who developed and applied this technology from the 1980s to create the new science of nanotechnology during the 1990s. As the author notes (p. 5), popular historical accounts that focus on the hardware fail to register the role of microscopists in making the new tools economically and scientifically important.

Cyrus Mody coins the terminstrumental community to describe this influential group, a phrase hinting at both the instrumentation they developed and their intentions to create a new instrumentality that would "propagate beyond their laboratories and change the world" (p. 6). His study explores these technologists as both microscope developers and community builders. He identifies their environment as one that included multiple universities, firms, and disciplines, with frequent movement of people and ideas among them.

This notion owes much to Terry Shinn and Bernward Joerges's concept of "research technologists" and to Carsten Reinhardt and Thomas Steinhauser's more inclusive definition of a scientific-technical community. A key question for scholars is, of course, when a "community" becomes a community: How does such a group become self-aware and collective in aims and actions, under what circumstances, and to what end?

It appears to be a difference of emphasis that distinguishes the author's account from these previous frame works. Mody suggests the probe microscopy community's determined intent to found a scientific field, and stresses its contributors' roles as academic entrepreneurs motivated by the non-economic influences of scientific curiosity and technical problem-solving. This perspective orients the study more usefully toward historians of business and management than prior studies, and especially links it to prior scholarship on postwar American high-technology industries.

A second nuance of this technological case study is its relatively brief lifetime. Unlike previous accounts of research technologies, which identified fields of expertise that often entrained their proponents in careers perpetually on the margins of recognition in institutions and disciplines, STM developers evinced special circumstances during the decade or so in which they and their instruments became successful and influential.

The format of the book underlines this investigative perspective. The individual chapters focus on distinct sub-networks—some associated with a discipline, others with key inventors, and yet others serving as bridges linking disciplines. The author identifies these sub-networks as serially influential, briefly defining "a version of the technology [that] set the wider community's agenda" (p. 23).

Between the lines is an account hinting at collective confidence and perhaps even hubris of a cohesive but intellectually dispersed social group. It raises the general question of whether such seeming intentionality is more obvious in retrospect, part of the collective myth-making that surrounds successful new fields, or a hitherto underestimated factor largely undetected by retrospective analyses.

Given the recent emergence of scanning-tunneling microscopes and nanotechnology, the study took advantage of the availability of active practitioners to capture near-contemporary accounts. It was based on ethnographic research and interviews with materials scientists, mainly at Cornell University, and relevant conferences, and supplemented by documentary evidence, both published and unpublished. This approach provides both strengths and weaknesses. The actor-centered approach paints a living picture of research in the field from the American perspective of the period, convincingly capturing the evolving social networks, team decisions, and—perhaps less compellingly—personal motivations. As a sociologically oriented analysis of a recent historical episode, it provides a perspective well suited to scholarship in science and technology studies.

Aspects of wider interest to historians of technology, business, or economics will also find valuable perspectives, though less explicitly explored. These dimensions include the decline of large American corporate laboratories and the rise of academic entrepreneurialism and spin-offs. Global developments of probe microscopy and nanotechnology beyond the United...