Laboratory Life - The Construction of A Fact: The Case of TRF(H)

The Construction of A Fact: The Case of TRF(H)

The next chapter aims at giving a precise account of the way in which this process operates with respect to a single scientific fact: the peptide TRF(H). This historical account, which Latour and Woolgar admit is, like all histories, a "necessarily literary fiction" (107), has the ostensible purpose of qualifying the initial account given by the observer. To this end, the chapter focuses on the specific way in which TRF(H) was constructed as a fact, describing how one scientist, Guillemin, "redefine the TRF subspecialty solely in terms of determining the structure of the substance" (119). As sequencing TRF(H) required far more sophisticated equipment and techniques than merely determining its physiological effects, Guillemin raised the cost of entry to this field and cut his potential competitors by three-fourths.

The authors next claim that the fact regarding TRF(H)'s structure progressed by decreases in the number of "'logically' possible alternatives" (146) However, Latour and Woolgar critique the explanation that "logic" or "deduction" is a satisfactory and complete explanation for the specific way in which a scientific fact is constructed. Instead, as their historical account of TRF(H) shows, the "list of possible alternatives by which we can evaluate the logic of a deduction is sociologically (rather than logically) determined" (136). Specifically, the material, technical, and human resources of a laboratory affected what kinds of challenges and counter-facts could be constructed and formulated, leading Latour and Woolgar to later conclude that "the set of statements considered too costly to modify constitute what is referred to as reality" (243).

In the previous section, Latour and Woolgar used a semi-fictional observer to describe the laboratory as a literary system in which mere statements are turned into facts and vice-versa. The most sound and established facts were those statements which could be divorced from their contingent circumstances. The authors next aim to interrogate how this process operates on a very small and specific scale by looking at how this process operated with respect to the molecule TRF(H), whose molecular structure went through various stages of facticity both in and out of the laboratory Latour studied. In this section, Latour and Woolgar aim to "specify the precise time and place in the process of fact construction when a statement became transformed into a fact and hence freed from the circumstances of its production" (105).

Instead of trying to construct a "precise chronology" of what "really happened," in the field, they aim to demonstrate how "a hard fact can be sociologically deconstructed" (107) by showing how it emerged in what they call a network. A network is "a set of positions within which an object such as TRF has meaning" (107), and they recognize that TRF only has meaning within certain networks. For example, outside of the network of post-1960s endocrinology, TRF is "an unremarkable white powder" (108), which leads to the claim that a "well-established fact loses its meaning when divorced from its context" (110). Latour and Woolgar stress that "to say that TRF is constructed is not to deny its solidity as a fact. Rather, it is to emphasize how, where, and why it was created." (127).