The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of the New Biology. Lily E. Kay. Oxford University, New York, Oxford.
APStracts 5:0002S, 1998.
ABSTRACT
In recent years historians and sociologists of science have begun to explore the dimensions of scientific practice. Where earlier philosophers were content to inquire into what should be done, the more recent explorations delve into what is actually done. The laboratory and the experimental life have come in for much discussion (1,4). Both the physical and the life sciences have been explored in recent compilations of essays. Sociologists have realised what experimental scientists have often known intuitively, that the do-ability of research problems is a complex enterprise involving the concatenation of many elements. From a sociological perspective, these appear to involve the interaction of several elements. Craftsmanship, tacit knowledge, marshalling of resources lead to the generation of scientific facts that are constructed rather than given. Katchalsky (3) noted that "the ultimate goal of every science is to become trivial, to become a well-controlled apparatus for the solution of schoolbook exercises or for practical application in the construction of engines". The more successful a scientific enterprise is, the greater the surprise that at one time the facts were unknown. 
Received 17 February 1998; accepted in final form 17 February 1998.
APS Manuscript Number S004-8.
Article publication pending Advances in Physiology Education.
ISSN 1080-4757 Copyright 1998 The American Physiological Society.
Published in APStracts on 9 March 1998