Laboratory Life.
How Physiologists Discovered their Everyday

Philipp Felsch

"How could anyone ignore the details of our daily work" uttered molecular biologists from the Californian Salk Institute with astonishment, when, upon reading Bruno Latour's anthropological account of their daily work, Laboratory Life, in 1979, they were informed that Latour's approach was somewhat revolutionary within the social study of science. (Latour 1986, 274) Had scientists always known what historians and sociologists of science were only then beginning to realize: that scientific knowledge was not just a matter of theory and abstract thinking, but the product of everyday practices, shaping scientific results just as much as, and probably even more than, the theoretical, the abstract, and the erudite? Had scientists even actively dealt with their everyday, long before the scholars of the late 20th century?