Scientific Cultures, Technological Challenges: A Transatlantic Perspective (review)

Scientific Cultures, Technological Challenges is a collection that emerged from the 2007 annual conference of the Bavarian American Academy (BAA). Located in Munich, the BAA seeks to promote Bavarian scholarship on the United States, particularly as it relates to science, culture, and economics. This collection's chapters are generally well-written and intriguing, though, as with many conference collections, they do not form a coherent whole. Individual chapters will emerge over time as being more significant than others, and most readers will find only certain chapters useful, depending on their scholarly concerns.

That said, most of the authors reference C. P. Snow's seminal 1956 lecture "The Two Cultures," and one question the book as a whole takes up is whether scholars can "reconcile science and the humanities" (p. 122). A clearer introduction would provide a framework for how to think about this question; Klaus Benesch's introduction instead takes up two historical case studies which, though fascinating, do not provide a clear thesis for how we might think about the relationship between science/technology and the humanities. Instead, authors at times implore humanities scholars to take up the sciences as a topic of study (to make themselves relevant) and at other times adopt a defensive stance (the humanities are already relevant, if only scientists would listen). Others ignore the question of the two cultures altogether, and few critically interrogate in depth whether Snow's original thesis holds, or if it ever held.

The book's first section is "Science, Technology and the Literary Imagination." Most entries here clearly illustrate how the humanities might engage up the sciences in academic conversation, particularly through the lens of literary analysis. Highlights include Ursula Heise's "Cultures of Risk and the Aesthetic of Uncertainty," which examines the representation of "risk cultures" in three significant literary or cinematic texts (both German and American, making it one of the few truly comparative contributions in the book). Another high point is the chapter by Peter Freese on the fictionalization of the entropy law in Thomas Pynchon's short story "Entropy." In both cases, the authors maintain their own disciplinary commitments to literary analysis, but at the same time are conversant in how science or scientific metaphor functions within these texts. In addition, both cogently argue that an analysis of literary texts can reveal to science something about itself, such as its construction of risk or its own controversies over the meaning of a scientific term like entropy.

The second section, "Technoscience and Its Publics: Theories and Practices," makes much less sense when taken as a thematic whole, yet contains essays that will probably be of most interest to historians of technology. Alondra Nelson contributes a fascinating chapter on "Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry" in which she details her (auto)-ethnographic work on African Americans and British blacks who pay for genealogy testing as a way of connecting with their ancestry. Nelson provides a nuanced and sophisticated framework for thinking about how these men and women construct identity and history in interaction with a particular technology. Heike Mayer's history of R&D investment funds in four American states—Oregon, Idaho, Kansas, and Arizona—will be of interest to historians of innovation, as will David Nye's excellent essay on "black boxes" and "white boxes," which deals with the "Changing Life Worlds of Communication Technologies."

In short, as is the case with most collections, different scholars and students will use different chapters for their own reasons: it is hard to imagine that the collection as a whole has a single audience, or that the book could serve as a class text. The individual chapters, however, are lively, intriguing examples of how humanities scholars and social scientists—both from Germany and the United States—might address questions of science and technology from a range of disciplinary perspectives.