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A second particularity of experimental systems in the life sciences is the differentiation between in vitro and in vivo systems. This differentiation became established around the beginning of the twentieth century, after it had been demonstrated that enzymes are able to exert their action outside the cells or tissues or organs or the intact organism, in the test tube, if supplemented with appropriate ingredients and under specified buffer conditions. To be sure, working on dead bodies and preparing specimens had been a much older practice in the life sciences. But the in vitro systems of the first half of the twentieth century claimed to be able to generate artificial environments in which actions that normally went on in the living body took place outside the body and the cell. As such, they marked the transition from an organismic and cellular to a subcellular, and finally to a molecular biological knowledge regime. In vitro systems are usually reduced systems. They enhance certain features of a complex network by eliminating and purifying away others. Their proneness to the production of artifacts, which is inherent in the approach, has to be constantly qualified by relating in vitro systems back to the in vivo situation. Much of the history of twentieth century biology has inscribed itself into this very specific game of rectification.

What is the basic service that the concept of experimental system does to the history and epistemology of science? The comparative investigation of the complex structures that are captured by this concept will help us to understand how new, unprecedented knowledge arises in the process of research. Viewed structurally, novelty appears always to be the result of spatio-temporal singularities. There are good reasons to assume that the emergence of novelty in modern, late nineteenth and twentieth century empirical research is tied to structures such as experimental systems. Experimental systems are precisely those setups that allow for the generation of singularities in the realm of our knowledge spaces. They allow, to put it paradoxically, to create new knowledge effects in a regulated manner and yet one that transcends our capacities of anticipation. In this sense one can say with Bachelard that the “scientific real” (Bachelard 1968, p. 8) is not the ultimate reference point of the scientific spirit; the particular reality of the scientific real is rather its capacity to drive beyond itself, to give space to unprecedented events. It is exactly in this sense that experimental arrangements are, in a way, ‚more real’ than our good everyday reality. The reality of an epistemic thing explored within an experimental system resides in its resistance, its resilience, its capacity, as a joker and obstacle of practice, to turn around our previsions as well as our imprevisions, in a word, to give birth to unprecedented events. As Michael Polanyi once remarked: „This capacity of a thing to reveal itself in unexpected ways in the future, I attribute to the fact that the thing observed is an aspect of reality, possessing a significance that is not exhausted by our conception of any single aspect of it. To trust that a thing we know is real is, in this sense, to feel that it has the independence and power for manifesting itself in yet unthought of ways in the future“ (Polanyi in Grene 1984, p. 219).

Reference: Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2004. Experimental Systems. The Virtual Laboratory (ISSN 1866-4784), https://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/references?id=enc19&page=p0008