Die Experimentalisierung des Lebens: Experimentalsysteme in den biologischen Wissenschaften 1850/1950 (review)

One opens this book with high expectations. The “practical turn” to experiment in the history of science since the 1980s has produced a flood of theoretical and case studies focused primarily on the physical sciences. Might the biomedical sciences pose significantly different problems and thereby prompt novel conceptualizations of experimental praxis? Furthermore, one of the editors of this volume, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, recently has proposed just such a new conceptual scheme, arguing that the “experimental system” (ES), as the smallest functional unit of science, should become the fundamental entity of analysis for historians of science. Derived from Fleck’s claim that not single experiments but entire systems of experiments are required to produce new knowledge; from epistemological reflections by Foucault, Serres, Derrida, Lacan, Bachelard, and Latour; and from his own experience as a molecular biologist, an ES for Rheinberger comprises two intercalated “places.” “Technological objects”—the apparatus, techniques, and theories present at the beginning and known to function regularly—are arranged so as to generate Derridean “différances” (i.e., novelties), which sometimes become stabilized as “scientific objects” or “epistemic things.” The ES is a “space of representation” where “writing” occurs—that is, i.e., where “graphemes” become articulated, disconnected, and rearranged. And the ES is a “labyrinth” in which researchers grope blindly and research trajectories can be neither predicted nor prescribed. ¹ Rheinberger’s metaphors are tantalizing, but do they offer new insights into the modern scientific enterprise or raise new questions for the historiographic enterprise? To date, Rheinberger himself has employed his scheme only in several case studies of research on protein synthesis in the 1940s and 1950s. Hence the high expectation that this volume, with additional case studies, might further elaborate the notion of the ES as a new tool for understanding the dynamic of scientific research, especially within the biomedical fields.

Although many of the ten contributors to this volume do not make Rheinberger’s concept of the ES central to their essays, several essays illustrate both the promises and the shortcomings of Rheinberger’s approach. Stressing the material character of an ES, Timothy Lenoir argues that nineteenth-century media technologies—the photometer, telegraph, and sound-producing devices like the resonator and tuning fork—provided Helmholtz with representations for the eye and ear and “influenced in a fundamental way” his theories for sensory physiology (p. 69). Yet by ignoring the contemporary sensory researches of Maxwell and Fechner, and by blurring the crucial differences between optical and auditory “sensors” in Helmholtz’s theories, Lenoir clouds his explanatory intentions. That is, does Lenoir’s thesis apply to Helmholtz’s “actual” research processes, to their public presentation, or merely to some seamless web of cultural practices that embed any particular move by Helmholtz? Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt and Friedhelm Hilderbrandt ask why Nikolaus Friedreich’s 1867 discovery of malformed red blood corpuscles in the urine of kidney-diseased patients remained unexploited as a diagnostic tool for 120 years. Although they discuss how Friedreich tried to create “resonances” between his epistemic thing and themes in contemporary cellular pathology and cytology, they finally explain his failure in terms of competition—a classical trope unrelated to ES-talk. Michael Hagner attributes the refusal of German experimental physiologists before 1870 to explore the localization of brain function to a mismatch between the technical objects of those researchers and localization as a scientific object. Only after an accidential observation did the galvanic therapist Eduard Hitzig assemble an ES that, by oscillating between the clinic and the laboratory, suddenly made localization research feasible in Germany. Yet Hagner also admits a role for social factors such as soldiers with head wounds from the Franco-Prussian War and the disciplinary differentiation of neurosurgery, and thereby leaves unanswered the question of exactly how inclusive an ES may be.

Finally, Rheinberger examines a chain of ESs that began with the search for a causative agent for cancer tumors and ended with the...