1973/1974
Yehuda Elkana, Joshua Lederberg, Robert K. Merton, Arnold Thack-
ray and Harriet Zuckerman—“Historical Sociology of Scientific
Knowledge.”

As members of a POSTS “core” project, Elkana, Lederberg,
Merton, Thackray and Zuckerman spent the greater part of the year
focused on aspects of the historical sociology of scientific knowledge
and on methods for assessing the condition of science.

It is, of course, difficult to assess the current state of the scientific
enterprise. Efforts to do so are still in their early stages. In the early
1970's, the National Science Board instituted a project designed to
attempt to answer such questions as these: What has been accom-
plished in science as gauged in terms of what could have been accom-
plished? To what extent is scientific activity being directed? What
are the strengths and comparative weaknesses in contemporary
American science? Are scientific personnel being trained in the fields
where they will be most needed? A first step in answering questions
such as these is the development of sets of indices which will indicate
the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. science and technology in terms
of the capacity and performance of the enterprise for contributing to
national objectives (including international peace). The first results of
a study in the use of such indices of the condition of science was pub-
lished by the National Science Board as its Fifth Annual Report,
Science Indicators 1972.

Under the joint auspices of POSTS and the Social Science Re-

9
i ihe De adhe e Bi.

 

search Council, the members of the POSTS “core” group arranged
for a three-day conference held at the Center in mid-June. The con-
ference of scholars at work in the history, politics, economics, phil-
osophy, and sociology of science was attended by several members
of the National Science Board and by staff members of the National
Science Foundation as well as by several additional Fellows at the
Center. The members of the POSTS group in the Historical Sociology
of Scientific Knowledge are editing a book which grew out of that
conference. The book, based on papers presented at the meeting and
supplemented by others generated by the discussion, sets out the
problems and prospects for developing measures of cognitive and
institutional developments in science. The title of the book is Toward
a Metric of Science and its publication is expected next year.

In addition to their work on “Science Indicators,” Elkana, Merton,
Thackray and Zuckerman compiled an annotated collection of 60
volumes, to be reprinted from works in and about science over a
span of the past four centuries (12). The collection includes writings
by and about scientists, such as Galileo, John Ray, Euler, W. R.
Hamilton, Henry Cavendish and A. R. Wallace. The group undertook
this project in the thought that the natural sciences have become of
increasing public concern and, in some quarters, are no longer taken
for granted as possessing self-evident worth. A renewed awareness
of the diverse heritage of the modern natural sciences should help
provide adequate perspectives on the newly-problematical status of
science.

In choosing the material for this collection, the selectors embraced
the historian’s belief that to glimpse where we are headed we must
know where we have been. This does not involve simple extrapola-
tion from the past. Rather, guided by perspectives drawn from the
related disciplines of the history, philosophy, and sociology of science,
and heading toward an historical sociology of scientific knowledge,
the selectors have searched out forgotten gems and occasionally,
since they were significant in the development of science, influential
mediocrities of past times. The collection is composed of biographies
and autobiographies of scientists, historical and sociological accounts
of scientific societies and other institutional science, interpretations
of the interaction between science and society, Festschriften devoted
to pioneers in the analytical study of the scientific enterprise, philo-
sophical orientations to science, and accounts of the comparative
development of science in differing social and political contexts, in
times of war and of peace. The collection, titled History, Philosophy
and Sociology of Science: Classics, Staples and Precursors will be
published in June, 1975.

Members of this POSTS group focused another part of their work
on the cognitive and social processes in the development of scientific
knowledge. Having decided to work toward the goal of developing
an analytical and interpretative framework through the study of
cases in point, they elected to focus on the case of Joshua Lederberg’s
discovery in 1947 of sexual recombination in bacteria and his sub-

10

sequent research on transduction, which laid the foundation for the
new specialty of bacterial genetics. The investigation is based upon
focused interviews with participants in the scientific development,
publications and unpublished documents, including a detailed per-
sonal account developed by Lederberg.

In a presentation to the American Association for the Advance-
ment of Science, Lederberg outlined the case history to be investi-
gated. From 1875 to 1945 most biologists believed that bacteria
were asexual. This myth originated in 1675 when van Leuwenhoek
observed protozoa copulating, but failed to find comparable evidence
for sex in his microscopic observations of bacteria. In 1875 Ferdi-
nand Cohn systematized the known data on the biology of bacteria,
postulating the strict genetic stability of these organisms. Thus the
myth of bacterial asexuality was established. Subsequently, the rapid
separation of the disciplines of microbiology, as an applied medical
subject of overwhelming human significance, from the main stream
of basic academic biology, impeded a fundamental reexamination of
these premises of microbiological science.

It took the renewal of evolutionary analysis in the 1940s, the
generally greater social investment in scientific, and especially in
biological research during and immediately after World War II and
a variety of other social, historical, intellectual and personal factors
to set the stage for the important discovery that bacteria recombine
sexually.

Joshua Lederberg

One of Lederberg’s many interests last year was the analysis of
safety procedures for testing newly-invented drugs and food additives.
In an article for How Safe is Safe? (19), he notes that many
people balk vehemently at the idea of dealing with health in economic
terms. Lederberg agrees that calculations of the proper dollar equiva-
lent of a human life are nonsense. However, he emphasizes that
economic calculations to achieve the most efficient relative allocation
of resources for protecting our most precious goods are valid and
necessary. We do not yet have much information about the costs or
benefits of drugs and additives, and we have even less information
about the impact of possible diseconomies of investment and inno-
vation in the field of drugs and additives. It is not reasonable to
demand across-the-board evidence that substances have no carcino-
genic effects for example (all food has some such effect), but it is
reasonable to ask whether the benefits of a substance are commen-
surate with its possible insidious risk to health. Lederberg states that
we need to consciously calculate costs and benefits and put our
estimates on the table.

Using such estimates, improvements in efficiency could be made
in the testing of new drugs. For example, routine testing may result
in very costly and unnecessary expenditures for the validation of an
additive or a drug (including the cost of the delay in not receiving
the drug’s benefits). Current regulations do not require thoughtful

11
analysis of the metabolism of a new agent, although this would in
many cases be more efficacious and efficient than only using large
numbers of routine tests.