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

In Instrumental Community, Cyrus Mody has produced an engaging study of communities, innovation, and knowledge in the digital age. Mody guides readers along “the path to nanotechnology” through a careful analysis of a scientific instrument, the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The STM’s novelty, briefly stated, was its ability both to manipulate and to create images of matter on an atomic scale—typically measured in nanometers (or one-billionth of a meter). Mody’s path begins in the 1960s with precursors to the STM and the invention of the STM in 1981, continues through the adoption of the STM in industrial and academic labs in the 1980s, and ends in the 1990s with commercialization of the STM. Pundits and elites touted the STM as the driver of nanotechnology, a claim that Mody finds “somewhat exaggerated” (p. 4). Nevertheless, since the rise of nanotechnology elevated the economic importance of the STM, there is both strategic and scholarly value in understanding this recent episode of the successful commercialization of a bench-top scientific instrument.

Mody builds his account from the vantage points of the makers and users of the STM and other types of probe microscopes. The title phrase, “instrumental community,” describes a network of people in government, industry, and academia that coalesced around probe microscopes. Some members of the community used microscopes to conduct research and promote their own careers; others used the community itself to promote new uses of microscopy and, crucially, to sell microscopes. The narrative path through this complex subject is commendably clear and readable—a difficult task, since the story constantly forces readers to confront blurry boundaries: boundaries between bench-top science and high technology, between different scientific disciplines, and between industrial, government, and academic organizations. Microscopists fashioned an instrumental community as they moved across these permeable and ever-shifting boundaries. It was this instrumental community, rather than any single discipline or organization, that facilitated the development and adoption of the STM and, further, was indispensible to its successful commercialization.

Chapters in Instrumental Community feature “sub-networks” (p. 23) of probe microscopists who came together within the broader instrumental community. We learn (Chapter 2) how the inventors of the STM, IBM researchers Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, convinced established practitioners in the discipline of surface science that the STM could generate interesting results for atomic-scale imaging. In turn, early adopters of STMs at Bell Labs and IBM convinced their managers in the early 1980s to invest in research built around the expensive and fickle instruments. When managers slashed corporate research budgets in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many probe microscopists moved to universities such as Harvard, Wisconsin, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and the University of California at Santa Barbara (Chapter 3). There, they expanded the instrumental community as they brought their tacit knowledge to new projects, maintained connections with former colleagues, and trained a new generation of students. New research groups led by Stanford’s Calvin Quate and UC Santa Barbara’s Paul Hansma improved the design of STMs and reduced their costs. In the process, they abandoned earlier disciplinary allegiances to surface science and widened, varied, and strengthened their professional networks to include researchers in fields such as biochemistry, molecular biology, electrochemistry, and materials science (Chapter 4). This diversification fueled market demand for STMs; Digital Instruments, a company formed by a physics professor at UC Santa Barbara, led a wave of entrepreneurship and commercialization in the 1990s (Chapter 5). In the sixth and final chapter (there is no conclusion or epilogue), Mody explains how nanotechnology became a coherent social category, a field “composed of many organizations, disciplines, and instrumental communities that existed long before they adopted the ‘nano’ label” (p. 177).

Mody’s evidence consists of published and archival sources, ethnographic study, and an astonishing number of interviews (nearly 200). Some stretches of the book depend heavily on his interviews, which maintain a sense of contingency and even...