Science In Vitro. A Historical Ecology of Modern Laboratory Research (Dissertation 2010)

Glass containers play an ambiguous role in the historiography of modern laboratory research. There is no doubt that they are indispensable as experimental vessels, and not for nothing are they omnipresent in scientific iconography. But this dominant cultural imagery has also obstructed the view on the historicity and the functionality of this material boundary in experimental research. Like glass in general, laboratory glass is normally perceived as an ahistorical quasi-immaterial material, whose properties are limited to form, transparency, neutrality and fragility. But how do glass vessels perform the complex causal containment of spatially enclosed epistemic phenomena without interfering with research? In my thesis, I will be absorbed by this question and examine the historically contingent development of these glass boundaries in experimental research from the early modern Scientific Revolution until the 20th century –with particular regard to the broader cultural usage of glass vessels. Moreover, this boundary work will be discussed in the context of recent epistemological debates. It has become very common to understand laboratories as environments for experimental research without further conceptual clarification of this common sense notion. In order to concretize this ecological approach theoretically, and to operationalize it methodically, I will draw on the Umweltlehre of Jakob von Uexküll. In the early 20th century Uexküll transferred the objectivist terminology of early scientific ecology, into a subjectivist Bedeutungslehre, and thereby opened it up to the humanities and its modes of understanding. The so-called Funktionskreis, i.e. a specific pattern of interconnected perception and operations, served as an elementary model for subject-environment-relations, but at the same time it could be used as a methodological tool for the analysis of those relations. The fact that Uexküll himself applied his concept self-reflectively to his own scientific environment will be the starting-point to examine the negotiation of glass boundaries in the history of experimental research with regard to the emergence of functional cycles. There is a historical bracket that holds together the empirical data and this conceptual approach. Uexküll imagined his Umwelten in the form of glass vessels, in which subjects are enclosed – a fact which has not yet been attended to in the reception history of his thought. My thesis concludes with a historization of Uexküll’s glass vessel metaphor in the context of modern glass cultures in the early 20th century, showing that the historical ecology of glass boundaries also provides new insights into the history of ecological thinking.