Abstract
The paper questions both the disciplinary narrative and the interdisciplinary narrative through a re-examination of the status of disciplines in the actual practices of three different research fields: materials science and engineering which emerged in the USA in the 1960s, nanotechnology and synthetic biology, both of which became highly visible in the 2000s. Each of the cases under examination discloses a complex configuration of enabling conditions, more complex at any rate than any ‘master narrative’ of scientific change. While the master narratives suggest the existence of “a gravitational pull of disciplinary approaches and standards” followed by a kind of invisible hand that would gradually dissolve the boundaries between academic disciplines, I will argue that none of the opposite narratives – disciplinary and transdisciplinary – is adequate in light of the local configurations of these three new research fields. Despite the strong urge of science policy to create unstable research communities around specific research targets, a sense of disciplinary affiliation is still vivid and extremely resilient among, for instance, chemists.
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Notes
- 1.
This distinction has been promoted in the context of the development of science in higher education along with the creation of chairs of science in universities and specialized learned societies (see Bud and Roberts 1984 for the case of chemistry). Auguste Comte’s famous hierarchy of science provides an elaborate exemplar of a plea for setting rigid boundaries in science in the early nineteenth century.
- 2.
In the following, I will distinguish between ‘multidisciplinarity’ as the cooperation of several disciplines, ‘interdisciplinarity’ as an attempt to integrate or synthesize, and ‘transdisciplinarity’ as a transgression of disciplinary norms.
- 3.
Arthur von Hippel from MIT advocated a flexible and voluntary association of academics in order to promote what he called “molecular engineering” (MIT School of Engineering office of the Dean, Records received in 1988, AC 12, Box 71). William Baker, of Bell Labs, favoured academic research with long-term research contracts targeted on products with no division between academic disciplines, but investment in projects conducted at the national laboratories, the outgrowth of the Manhattan Project.
- 4.
Twelve interdisciplinary labs were funded by ARPA, three by NASA, two by AEC (Atomic Energy Commission). ARPA spent $ 157.9 million on the IDLs between 1961 and 1970, see Psaras and Langford (1987: 36).
- 5.
In the group of 12 universities with ARPA/IDL support, the number of Ph.D.’s granted in an MSE subject increased from 100 in 1960 to 360 in 1967.
- 6.
Rustum Roy who founded the MRS was also the founder of one of the first interdisciplinary programmes of Science, Technology and Society at Pennsylvania State University in 1969. This programme was explicitly meant to bridge the gap between “the two cultures”.
- 7.
For instance, Stanley Whittingham who completed his Ph.D. in England and then moved to Stanford told us in an interview: “In England, France, and Germany, solid-state chemistry was a respectable subject. Chemistry departments did solid-state chemistry. In the US you could count the number of solid-state chemists on the fingers of one hand. So I went to a materials science department, not to a chemistry department” (interview by Arne Hessenbruch & B. Bensaude Vincent, October 30, 2000).
- 8.
Similar cases instantiating the coexistence of interdisciplinarity and the (alleged) autonomy of science are presented in Barry Born and Weszkalnys (2008).
- 9.
In ten years the US National NanoInitiative has been funded with up to $ 14 billion. The budget was raised from $ 450 million in 2000 to 2,1 billion in 2012 (see http://www.nano.gov/initiatives/government ). In Asia investments, in 2012, were approximately $ 1,650 billion and in the European Union € 1,650 billion.
- 10.
In particular, the social sciences and humanities are often embedded in nano-initiatives to anticipate the ethical, legal, and societal impact of the latter’s applications (i.e., the so-called “ELSI” programmes).
- 11.
The European ObservatoryNano, in particular, adopted a scheme based on the linear model of innovation in 2011as it distinguished between (1) basic science, (2) applied research, (3) prototype, (4) market entry, and (5) mature markets for delivering the factsheets of its annual reports.
- 12.
However, one could have expected academic chemists to eagerly reposition themselves as nanoscientists or synthetic biologists, given the poor public image of chemistry. Following the triumph of chemical synthesis and the commercial expansion of synthetic products, chemistry is often associated with unnatural, pollution, hazards. In public polls chemistry has a very low profile and no longer attracts young talented students (Schummer et al. 2007).
- 13.
For instance, a researcher from the Atomic Energy Commission in Grenoble (CEA/LETI) said that “in the domain of chemistry and biochemistry those who are concerned with molecules and their reactions are de facto in the nanoworld (…).Nano has been around since a long time” (Arnaud Castex interviewed by Sacha Loeve, August 8, 2006). Frazer Stoddardt from North Western University insisted that it was “natural” for chemists to move into nanoscience: “I think it would have been a natural progression, but it happened that chemistry at some stage would move into the nanometer – if you define it by a span of length-scale, you go from one to one hundred nanometers. Inevitably people are going to make things that are bigger.” (Frazer Stoddardt interviewed by Terry Shinn, January 29, 2008). By contrast Chad A. Mirkin, chemist by training, professor of chemistry and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University, insisted that “chemists are really angstrom technologists, not nano technologists” (Chad A. Mirkin interviewed by Terry Shinn, 2008).
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Bensaude-Vincent, B. (2016). Building Multidisciplinary Research Fields: The Cases of Materials Science, Nanotechnology and Synthetic Biology. In: Merz, M., Sormani, P. (eds) The Local Configuration of New Research Fields. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22683-5_3
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