Abir Am Pnina 1992 - A Historical Ethnography of a Scientific Anniversary

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A historical ethnography of ascientific anniversary in molecularbiology: The first protein Xray

photograph (1984, 1934)Pnina AbirAm

a

aDepartment of History of Science, Medicine and

Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD,

212182690, USA

Available online: 19 Jun 2008

To cite this article:Pnina AbirAm (1992): A historical ethnography of a scientific anniversary

in molecular biology: The first protein Xray photograph (1984, 1934), Social Epistemology,

6:4, 323-354

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SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY, 1 9 9 2 , VOL. 6 , NO. 4 , 3 2 3 - 3 5 4

A historical ethnography of a scientific

anniversary in molecular biology: the first

protein X-ray photograph (1984, 1934)

1

PNINA ABIR-AM

1. Introduction. Wh ere history and ethnography meet: The scientific anniversary as

the epistemological o bject of historical ethnograph y

Scientific anniversaries of great scientists, scientific discoveries, or other scientific

institutions, have always been venerable ritualistic occasions for reaffirming,

inculcating, and modulating both the present epistemological aspirations and past

accomplishments of th e ce lebrating scientific comm unity. The eulogies delivered by the

perpetual secretaries of the Acadmie des Sciences are among the better known

instances of formal, routinized attem pts at the c onstruc tion of a collective mem ory and

moral genealogy of science, by spokesmen whose real or apparent authority was

grounded in their capacity to simultaneously and smoothly re-enact personal

incarnations of scientific progress and historical authenticity.

2

However, despite their key epistemological and social roles, scientific anniversaries

have not been studied as performative occasions, or as the object of a historical

ethnography that explores not only the contents of the scientists' construction of a

collective memory for their discipline but also how it is performatively accomplished.

This gap in our knowledge of how scientific anniversaries work, that is, how they

manage to reconcile the contradiction between the relativism implied by discarded

convictions with the prete nse of pres ent scientific progre ss to an absolutist tr uth , can be

traced to an unfortunate separation between historians and ethnographers of science.

On the one hand, historians of science are accustomed to examine texts, including

comm emorative texts, rath er than address their critical gaze at scientific celebrations as

integratively bounded social performances. Thus, they noticed that though celebratory

Author:Pnina G eraldine Abir-Am, Dep artm ent of History of Science, Medicine and Technology, Jo hn s Ho pkins

University, Baltimore MD 21218-2690, USA. I am grateful for comments by many of the scientist

ethnographees, as well as by ethnographers of science Francoise Bastide, Bruno Latour, Michael Lynch, and

Sharon Traweek; anthro polog ists Monni Adams, Mike Fischer, Barbara Frankel, and N ur Yalman; and h istorians

of science M ario Biagioli, Jo hn T . Edsall, and Joy Harvey. Ot he r colleagues, especially the anonym ous referees,

offered various helpful suggestions. All remaining error s are entirely my own. The participant ob servation was

mad e possible by a fellowship from the Wellcome Trust a nd a Visitor status at Robinson College, Cam bridge, UK,

during the year Jun e 198 3-Ju ne 1984. The ethno graphy was written during my stay as a post-doctoral fellow at

Harvard (1985-89) and as an international fellow at Northeastern University, Boston (1990-91). My gratitude

goes to my sponsors in these institutions and to NSF (grant DIR-8922152).

0269-1728/92 $3.00 1992 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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PNINAABIR-AM

scientific texts provide crucial insights, even revelations, into the scientific and personal

past of the object of celebration, those texts also reflect systematic discrepancies

between the collective memory ratified by the celebrating community and the actual

past. However, historians of science did not explore how the celebratory occasion in

itself smoothes over such discrepancies, beyond implying that the scientist spokesmen's

appeals to the past were usually constrained by the assumption that 'the truth about the

collective actual past has a necessary or intrinsic relevance to ethical and political action

in the present'.

3

On the other hand, ethnographers of science focused primarily on participant

observations of 'laboratory life', most notably on observing the process of production

of scientific facts (and artifacts) in the immediate present. Despite their membership in

an advanced industrial society that regards science as its mode of cognition, while

assuming a minimal level of scientific literacy for everyone, the ethnographers of

science sought to turn their relative lack of formal scientific education into an

ethnographic virtue. New insights into science could suddenly be generated not by

logical disquisition of its conceptual foundations, as philosophers of science have been

attempting ever since the logical positivist revolution; but by contending that the

laboratory, the site of presentist science in action, was a culturally alien environment

for the (non-scientifically trained) social scientist. Ironically, a pioneering ethnographer

of science dismissed the ethographic study of scientific anniversaries as '19th Century

anthropology'.

4

In contrast to the above separatist stances of historians and ethnographers of science,

this paper explores how the performative action at a scientific anniversary can be

fruitfully studied from a joint, complementary historico-ethnographic perspective. The

paper further suggests a preliminary agenda for a historical ethnography of scientific

anniversaries across disciplines, historical periods, and countries. At the same time this

experiment with the genre of historical ethnography, as applied to a scientific

anniversary, further reflects on how the engagement with the research object had

partially transformed the author, while a visiting scholar in another country, from a

historian of science into an ethnographer of ceremonial scientific events, through a

process that constitutes a critique of disciplinary dogmas in history of science,

ethnography, and science.

Thus, the key problem addressed by this paper is how a scientific anniversary held

in 1984 had achieved performative efficacity in transforming a fifty years old non-

event or the preliminary inscription embodied in the first protein X-ray photograph

and its brief announcement in

Nature,

in 1934, into the birthmark or the origin of the

highly fashionable, prestigious, even revolutionary 'ultradiscipline' of molecular

biology.

First, the paper identifies some literature on scholarly ceremonials in general and

scientific ones in particular, as an

adhoc

relevant context for the scientific anniversary

explored below. Second, the paper provides a self-ethnography for its author, so to

clarify the background enabling and constraining the process of transformation

entailed by the author's preoccupation with this historical ethnography.

5

Third, the

paper describes a summary of the author's participant observation at the scientific

anniversary held in April 1984 in Cambridge, UK. Fourth, the paper offers an

interpretation of the scientific anniversary as a social drama, attempting the fusing of

authoritative concepts of historical authenticity with those of scientific progress, in an

effort to reconcile the relativism implied by discarded past science with the absolutism

of scientific progress in the present.

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY 325

Finally, the paper inquires how extrapolating beyond the specificity of this historical

ethnography of the fiftieth anniversary of the first protein X-ray photograph may

produce an agenda for the study of the generic phenomenon of scientific anniversaries

across disciplines, historical p eriods, a nd cou ntries, by the jo in t, com plem entary efforts

of historians of science, ethnographers, and scientists.

Ceremonial discourse in science has been analyzed by Mulkay who focused on the

Nobel Lectures in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He sought to demonstrate the

similarity between the constructivist features of the scientists' discourses and those of

ordinary persons, including sociologists. At the same time, Mulkay's discourse analysis

reveals how scientists construct scientific progress as both a personal accomplishment

of Nobelists and as a collective accomplishment of their background discipline(s) and

overshadowed collaborators. Furthermore, by examining the discursive rhetoric of the

various categories of speakers in the Nobel Prize ceremony (for example Lau reates an d

non-L aureates), Mulkay reveals many tacit conven tions prevailing amo ng scientists with

regard to impersonalizing and appropriating scientific credit.

6

Such conventions are

also manifest during the scientific anniversary described below.

In contrast to Mulkay's focus on the generic features of ceremonial discourse in

science, Charlesworth and colleagues Farrall, Stokes, and Turnbull, examined the

actual inaugural speech of the Director of an internationally renowned immunological

research institute in Melbourne, Australia, delivered in November 1985, as an attempt

to create an institutional myth. While their attention had focused on the discrepancies

between the inaugural speech's lofty contents and the daily social reality in the institute,

Charlesworth and colleagues also recognized that history is one avenue for

understanding the institute's position in the present. Hence, they insightfully

cont rasted the interest in history of the institute's wo rshipped an cestor, Sir M acFarlane

Bu rnet, a 1960 No bel Prize winner for research in immunology, who served as Director

of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne for two decades ending in 1965,

with the lack of interest in history on the part of member scientists in the present.

However, Charlesworth and colleagues focused only briefly on the inauguration as a

performative occasion for constructing a specific historical record for the institute.

7

A broader perspective on scholarly or cerebral ceremonies was offered by La

Fontaine in her normative analysis of public scholarly lectures, for example, inaugural

lectures, presidential addresses, and memorial lectures, as ceremonials. While

bem oanin g the lack of ethnog raphic studies of British society, despite its saturation with

custom and tradition, La Fontaine has dwelled on the many various conventions

sustaining these ceremonial public lectures.

Included in the social conventions that La Fontaine decodes as being implicit in

scholarly ceremo nials were their co ntinuin g a particular trad ition , being a show case for

the ideas of an individual (rather than for the mission of an institution), occurring at

regular intervals, being sponsored by a professional o rganization, carrying no mo netary

reward, inducing attendance as a matter of moral obligation or display of social

solidarity rather than for reasons of mere intellectual interest, balancing specialism with

generalism, reflecting the community's commitment to merit, among many other

conventions. She interprets the ceremonial lecture as a formal representation of the

principle that academic 'authority should reside with the more rather than the less

learned'.

8

While La Fontaine did not specifically focus on how the holding of public scholarly,

whether inaugural, presidential, or memorial, lectures fulfills the custom of establishing

some historically valid link with the object of commemoration, Bogen and Lynch


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PNINAABIR-AM

explored the processes involved in the production of conventional history during the

performative interaction of witnesses and interrogators at the Iran-Contra

Congressional hearings in 1987. Their account describes 'some of the discursive

methods the interrogator uses to assimilate the witness's [the hostile native Oliver

North] stories to a conventional historical account and then goes on to discuss how the

witness is able to resist the movement from biography to history by embedding his

stories within a set of local entitlements that resist translation into a generalized

narrative'.

9

Bogen and Lynch's study provides an instructive contrast to the production

of history in a scientific anniversary, where, as we shall see below, the movement from

biography to history is not resisted but rather encouraged through impressive

constructions of historical authenticity.

The analyses of La Fontaine and of Bogen and Lynch do not make specific mention

of scientific lectures or meetings; however, Lomnitz has elaborated on the analogy

between scientific meetings, of which scientific anniversaries are a specified subset, and

tribal fairs in small scale, traditional or primitive societies. She suggested that both are

public occasions for formal and informal ritualized exchanges or transactions of

valuables. In the case of scientific meetings, the transactions focus on scientific and

other relevant information, especially professional gossip. Furthermore, rank,

affiliation, topicality, or regions, though suspended throughout the breaks between

sessions, are reaffirmed through the formal structure of the program, which classifies

participants into a hierarchy of formal statuses, for example, speakers, chairmen,

commentators, organizers. Those statuses are further marked by timing, sequence, or

space allocations.

10

Scientific anniversaries, however, possess unique additional features as they revolve

around a fixed, 'necessary', asymmetry in time between the performers and most of

their audience. The performers do not only represent successes in making scientific

progress but must also be able to evoke the past while recalling ancestor figures and

landmark events. This duality, of being able to 'embody' both the 'ancestral realm' (as a

source of professional life for the tribal assembly) and the 'ongoing present' (of

continuous concerns over the frontier of scientific progress), distinguishes the

performers at scientific anniversaries from those at ordinary meetings. The public

sharing of their recollections constitute the performers at scientific anniversaries as

participants in a subtle transaction of past memories for present loyalties.

Thus,

a scientific anniversary cannot be easily analyzed in terms of contrasting

theories of social dramas advanced by anthropologists. On the one hand, the ritual

theory associated with the work of Victor Turner offers a relevant conception of social

drama as a regenerative process, while dwelling upon the theatrical and religious

dimensions of public performances. Along these lines, the scientific anniversary

described below can be understood as a 'regenerative' or even 'generative' process as it

aimed to construct, legitimize, and invest with authority a past event or a fifty years old

inscription

qua

'discovery'the first protein X-ray photographas the totemic

birthmark of a sub-disciplinary clan undergoing reaffirmation of its collective identity.

The ritual theory thus draws attention to the scientific anniversary as an opportunity for

collectively experiencing disciplinary solidarity and reasserting scientific identity by the

celebrating group.

11

On the other hand, the symbolic action theory associated with the work of Clifford

Geertz is also relevant for an understanding of scientific anniversaries, since during

such anniversaries, a variety of symbols, especially the first or primordial protein X-ray

photograph and the most recent, or 'fresh as yesterday' computer graphics aided

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328 PNINAABIR-AM

statesmen of science), themselves often had some interest in the history of science.

Their interest was usually derivative of their parahistorical duties, most notably the

writing of formal obituaries of prematurely or otherwise recently deceased colleagues

for scientific societies such as the Royal Society or the National Academy of Science.

As a result of their exposure to such officially sanctioned forays into the history of

science, we had a mutual basis for a productive dialogue: while most of the scientists

responded to my questions on various scientific, social, or personality puzzles from the

1930s, I would tell them spicy stories from the archival record that I had been

examining for the last five years on both sides of the ocean. Essentially, we traded in

memories: they offered authentic ones, their own, while I reciprocated by sharing with

them my second-order memories of archival gems, for example, revealing

correspondence exchanges between great figures from the past, which stirred our

human curiosity or name-dropping propensity, beyond their specific value as historical

markers.

At the same time, our oral history sessions increasingly acquired ethnographic

overtones as the need for cultural and temporal translation would surface every so

often. Although we shared key intellectual presuppositions, such as an interest in the

universalistic role of science and its history in Western civilization, formative training as

scientists, and a penchant for Collgial life in Cambridge, we also had our own unique

cultural and historical backgrounds. While the elder British scientist-interviewees had

various disciplinary, Collgial, regional, ethnic, class, gender sensibilities which I slowly

learned to appreciate, I was also carrying diverse explicit and implicit cultural baggage,

such as educational and research experience in several countries, languages, academic

institutions, and disciplines.

Yet another source of the ongoing need for 'translation' derived from the fact that

my scientist ethnographees were embedded in the Cambridge Collgial sub-culture, a

bastion of academic ritual, which still retained in the early 1980s many of its customs

from the 1930s or much earlier. They delighted in translating many terms required to

convey to me the intricacies of Fellowship in various Colleges, or in displaying their

knowledge of Collgial histories, academic or scientific dynasties, Town and Gown

customs. We lived in a mutual dialectics of academic particularism, scientific

universalism, and historical relativism, modulated by various Collgial rites that

increasingly impressed upon me the mutual fit between my fortunate location on the

fringes of the Cambridge Collgial setting and my dreams for exploring inter-war

British science in an historico-ethnographic manner.

20

Furthermore, my incipient plans for exploring inter-war Cambridge science in a

historico-ethnographic manner gained further feasibility from the local lore according

to which no one less than Claude Levi-Strauss, the hero of structural anthropology, had

suggested that Sir James Frazer, a founding father of anthropology, could have done

better (than writing

The

Golden Bough)if he had written an ethnography of a Cambridge

College, most notably of his own College, Trinity, perhaps the richest in both legend

and assets. Yet, if Frazer proved too much of a Cambridge 'native' for the task

envisaged for him by Levi-Strauss, my own background appeared to provide the right

blend of empathy and cultural distance required for a good start in mutual

ethnography.

In my case the traditional relationship of superiority in both knowledge and power

between the white male ethnographer and colored natives in colonized countries was

both inverted and balanced. Though my scientist ethnographees belonged, at least

during their lives in the 1930s, to the mindset of the scientifico-cultural elite of the

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHYOF ASCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY 329

British Empire, which dominated the pre-World War II world order; during our

enc oun ters in the early 1980s, the B ritish Em pire was a thing of the past. Indee d, thre e

of the four countries in which I had studied prior to my arrival in Britain, namely

Canada, USA, and Israel, had once been ruled by Britain but subsequently became

instrumental in the dismantling of British political superiority. I further hoped that my

Eu rope an birthplace would rescue me from being occasionally viewed as an ex-colonial

entity. In any event, our ethnographer-ethnographee relationship was embedded in

our sharing an increasingly post-modernist predicament.

Gradually I concluded, in line with La Fontaine's above observation on the lack of

ethnography of British customs, especially academic ones, that by treating as its

research object two of the pillars of cultural superiority of Western civilization, namely

science and British culture, in addition to historicizing both for the 1930s, a historical

ethnography of inter-war Cambridge science could be innovative on two major counts.

This exuberant conclusion led me first to attempt an ethnographic reorientation of

my previous paraethnographic oral and archival research in history of science.

21

If

previously I had been content to examine the texts of myths of origins in molecular

biology,

22

under the impact of pervasive academic ritual in Cambridge and its majestic

scholarly confrontations, I increasingly became preoccupied with the difference

between a live and a textual confrontation between protagonists of opposite

historiographical accounts. That difference seemed to parallel the difference between

watching and reading about a bull fight. So, I began to dream about watching an actual

corrida of tribal scientific historiography, or the actual process during which scientists

construct a historical account for their discipline as a live performance. Suddenly, my

formerly beloved task of critiquing the presentist agendas forever evident in the

scientists' writings, in light of ever deep er archival excavations, appe ared to have faded

in view of the spontaneity of action prom ised by a live historiographical perfo rm ance .

23

Having thu s pre par ed my mind for the p reced ing year, one spring day in April 198 4,

my dream of observing how scientists create history came t ru e. While reflecting with a

mixture of anger and despair on my belated notification of a projected meeting of

scientists devoted to the anniversary of a discovery, which meant that it was too late to

arrang e for o ral history interviews with the distinguished particip ants, it dawned on m e,

as I was crossing Clare College Bridge on my daily promenade, that I could bypass the

temporal impossibility of scheduling individual oral histories, if I were to shift the focus

of analysis from individual participants to the collective performance constituting the

scientific anniversary. Due to such fortuitous circumstances, I was finally able to

materialize my previous ethnographic dreams.

My new goal became to understand how the scientific anniversary, as a structured

and bo un ded event, was to create and impart to the participants a particular conce ption

of their collective disciplinary past. Of course, I knew that it would be hard for me not

to interfere whenever 'amateurish' historical pronouncements would contradict my

own, profuse and largely archive-derived sensibility, but I decided that I should strive to

confine my presence to that of an ethnographer in the classical realist tradition. I took

that to mean a highly disciplined and accurate recording of the scientists' conduct

throughout the duration of the anniversary. I also knew that I would have to oscillate

between two modes of knowing, the 'conceptual' or the accurate recording of the

contents of specific recollections by the scientist speakers (including those which might

be 'dismissable' on the basis of previous historiographie judgement); and the 'social' or

the patterns of social interaction among the various clan members, during the formal

and informal parts of the event.


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330 PNINA ABIR-AM

Having previously enjoyed reading some ethnographies but without ever acquiring a

professional interest in studying exotic societies, I felt acutely the lack of a 'know how'

manual that could tell me how was I supposed to comport myself in the familiar

auditorium turned challenging ethnographic 'field'. Thus, I was not quite sure how to

observe all the social interaction during the informal parts of the program when the

participants would disperse simultaneously in different directions and I would have to

quickly decide which group to follow. If only I could be lucky enough to quickly spot

the best informants during those moments of 'chaos', that is, question periods, coffee,

tea or lunch breaks, when my formerly 'fixed' audience would suddenly become mobile

and amorphous, then I would have 'captured' and 'preserved' the integrative totality of

a scientific commemoration.

This was what I thought in my excitement at having finally found an observational

object that would enable me to express my dual, complementary interest in history and

ethnography of science. Sadly, any dreams I might have had of getting a last moment

crash course in either ethnography or applied historical epistemology of science, let

alone moral support for venturing into their uncharted borderline, evaporated when I

recalled my global and local groups of reference in history/philosophy of science,

anthropology, and science.

My projected endeavor fell in between the preoccupations of several, largely isolated,

scholarly communities, on the fringes of which I had enjoyed a marginal existence for

the preceding decade or so, while conducting an 'unending quest' for a subversive

dissertation. My primary or formal group of reference, the historians of science, were

not exactly in the business of integrative gazing, reflexively or otherwise, at scientists

fashioning their tribal histories in the immediate present.

First, the history of twentieth century science was then still at the bottom of the

history of science pecking order, where the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth

century defined a chronologically reversed pecking order. Second, the

paraethnographic technique of oral history, though accepted among the then few

historians of twentieth century science, was viewed as a secondary, somewhat

unreliable, source of data. The archival record was considered to be the 'master

context' of historical interpretation, even though this led some practitioners to confuse

the writing of history with a mere reiteration of the archival contents, often prefaced by

a ritualistic appeal to the ever elusive social context.

However, in the 1970s, historians of science had begun to oscillate between

intellectual and social history of science, while liberating themselves slowly but surely

from a previous hegemonic philosophy of science and its ahistorical ideals of rational

reconstruction. In that context of liberating science from its golden bondage as the

embodiment of reason in Western civilization, some historians and historically-minded

philosophers of science had seized upon anthropology as a leading source of cultural

relativism. Their first contribution, as I recall, was to import some shocking metaphors,

most notably the revelation that science, stripped of its rationalistic pretensions, was

just another 'belief system', on the same par with magic, religion, art, and related

coherent systems.

24

The chief anthropological gurus of historians and philosophers of science were

Mary Douglas, whose work, especially the grid-group model, provided a model

for integrating the conceptual and social aspects of science;

25

and Clifford Geertz,

whose symbolic action analysis of various 'cultural systems' (for example, ideology,

religion, art) pointed toward a similar, interpretive analysis of science.

26

Never-

theless, the many liberating insights and exotic terminology provided by


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Story of the

British

Cambridge)

field of

history of

science


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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY

OF A

SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

331

anthropologists for historians and philosophers of science, did not seem to lead to

concrete research programs in ethnographic history, let alone historical or

philosophical ethnography of science, despite some such developments in general

history, until the mid-1980s.

27

However, the news of this general rapprochement between history of science and

anthropology did not seem to have reached the relevant departments at Cambridge

University, despite their physical proximity as next door neighbours, on Free School

Lane, in a building occupied in the 1930s by the famous Cavendish Laboratory of

Physics (since relocated to the outskirts of Cambridge). Though both departments

graciously gave me permission to attend their respective weekly colloquia, as venerable

Cambridge entities they often saw their raison d'tre in following their own illustrious

but insulary disciplinary traditions. I was inevitably disappointed by the complete lack

of any intellectual or organizational contact between them.

This immutable situation shook my precarious confidence in the feasibility of my

quest for an historical ethnography of science, as it implied its prematurity or even its

implausibility. For example, a member of the Department of Anthropology who was

otherwise friendly, but apparently wary about other disciplines' supposed abuse of the

ethnographic method told me flatly that I would never be an anthropologist unless I did

an ethnography of a funeral in Ghana, a statement that froze me, even though never

p re t e n d e d

or in tended t o become a classical anthropologist.

A

similar lack of professional con text for my project of historical ethn ography of

Cambridge

science in th e 1930s obtained in the

D e p ar tm e n t

of H istory and Philosophy

of Science at C ambridge University, possibly due to a split of complex origins between

th e

historians and the philosophers of science, or due to th e fact that Simon Schaffer

h ad not yet arrived from L o n d o n .

2 8

O n e Cambridge scholar who displayed some in terest toward my endeavor was C.

H u m p h r e y a Fellow of King s College, whose by then deceased illustrious scientist

father was on e of the group of radical scientists in the 1930s t ha t I had studied for my

P h . D . thesis. When H u m p h r e y p r o n o u n c e d

t ha t

one chap te r in my Ph .D . thesis in

history

of science qualified as social anth ropology, I was so moved that

u p o n

walking

away from our

lunch

at King s majestic

Hall

I almost stepped on lawns forbidden to

non Fel lows.

29

Eventually my alternatin g, enth usiastic and skeptical moods concern ing

th e

feasibility of a historical ethnography of science, were put to test in mid April 1984

when

my one day in the life of a self styled historical ethnographer of science had

finally arrived.

3.

Process

andstructure in ascientificanniversary: The

fiftieth

anniversary of the

first protein X ray

photograph

1984, 1934)

Shortly

before 11 a.m. on Friday, 13 April 1984, I blended

in to

the movement of

individuals

and groups progressing toward th e anniversary site, th rou gh the po rter s

gate of the New Museum Site, and climbing on the ant ique metal stairway leading to the

first

floor

of the

C o m p u t er

Science Building where the Cockroft Th eat re is located to

th e

left of the stairway. About eighty people appeared to have segregated themselves in

th e

sitting space by age groups. The first two rows were occupied by veterans of the

1930s, detectable by the ir white hair and an audible conce rn with hearing well.

Dispersed

on the side seats of the Th ea t re as if still enjoying lastm o m e n tsof imaginary

anonymitysat th e projected speakers. The cen tra l section was populated by rank and

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file post-doctoral fellows, the target audience of the anniversary as they embody the

future of the scientific clan or its medium of social reproduction.

The audience members spent the moments prior to opening vividly identifying each

other. It was evident from this commotion, which my native English speaking

companion and I did our best to overhear, that the participants came for two different

reasons: the veterans came to relive and possibly refine or redefine the past, while the

younger generation saw an opportunity to update themselves on professional gossip

and listen to their elders, the Nobelist keynote speakers. With some exceptions, each

age group tended to stay together. A program distributed at the door described the

one-day meeting as a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the first protein X-ray

photograph, taken, indexed and interpreted in 1934 by John Desmond Bemal, FRS

(1901-1971) and Dorothy Crowfoot (later Hodgkin, 1910-, FRS, OM).

30

The meeting was eventually opened by Alan McKay, a veteran member of the

Department of Crystallography at Birkbeck College, London.

31

This department was

established in 1963 for Bemal, who had come from Cambridge University in 1938 to

head the Physics Department. McKay, who had been collaborating, since the early

1980s, on a project on the history of X-ray crystallography, did not waste time before he

stated that we, the audience, were privileged to meet with those on whose shoulders the

revolution in molecular biology stood. He further referred to the explicit object of the

half-centennial anniversarythe first X-ray photograph of an active protein, taken in

1934as the beginning of molecular biology.

McKay did not elaborate on the significance or rationale for this relatively belated

assertion, or rather admission, by a spokesman for the clan of protein X-ray

crystallographers, that their historical rights as founders of molecular biology, were no

longer so self-evident, as they long believed them to be. Rather, those rights, however

accurate, needed special collective reaffirmation both for the benefit of the clan's new

generation, but especially in view of the fact that other clans, such as the phage

geneticists in the US or the microbial physiologists in France, had already successfully

appropriated the founder rights, simply by developing, or rather displaying, their

collective historical consciousness ten or fifteen years earlier.

32

The British protein X-ray crystallographers' belated development or display of their

historical consciousness was not linked by McKay to their ancestor's loose style of

leadership, to his institutional precariousness or base outside the ancient universities,

or to his extensive and possibly excessive preoccupations with radical politics and avant-

garde sex, a combination that may have lessened his impact as head of a research

school.

Instead, McKay further described Bernai as a conceptual and professional seer, or a

visionary, having both anticipated topics and problems (that is, solving the structure of

complex biological compounds such as proteins, hormones, and viruses by X-ray

diffraction as the key requirement for understanding their biological functions), which

were still being solved a generation later, and recruited or inspired many would-be

distinguished X-ray crystallographers. McKay's enumeration of Bernal's recruits was

significant in that he included both those associated with technical improvements,

especially early computer building, and those who used that equipment to solve

biologically significant structures. McKay reminded the audience of a less glamorous

aspect of protein X-ray crystallography, instrumentation, at a time when professional

glory remained associated with fully solved biological structures.

Finally, McKay turned to the task, 'difficult' as he put it, of introducing the first

speaker, Aaron Klug, Director of the Virus Structure Unit at the MRC Laboratory of

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF ASCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY 333

Molecular Biology in Cambridge. The difficulty McKay referred to may have stemmed

from the public juxtaposition of a total reversal of these two colleagues' former

positions, with Klug, once a foreign arrival and worker on a hopeless task emerg ing as

the object of international glory, while McKay, the once more veteran colleague

receding into the background of the scientific frontier, as a champion of its past.

Klug, then a recent (1982) recipient of the Nobel Prize, walked to the podium with

humility and modesty, as if he had not yet become accustomed to being the center of

scientific celebrations. A medium-sized man with slightly greyish hair and a look

radiating both kindness and a most pleasant lack of pretentiousness, in his late fifties,

Klug first defused the tension derivative of the curiosity and expectations focused on a

fresh Nobelist by apologizing that he was cast undeservingly as the first speaker, even

thou gh he was the last am ong the speakers to have en cou nte red Bernai, because he 'had

to catch a train'. The resulting laughter showered sympathy on him while reassuring

everyone that contingency still has a place among high-ranking scientists.

Klug's fairly organized repertoire revolved around thirty or so slides that he

accompanied by vivid anecdotes and recollections. The slides presented both historical

objects such as old laboratory buildings, instruments or people; and scientific ones,

especially graphical displays of scientific results, properly arranged in a progressive

order. Klug's presentation alternated between personal recollections of Bernai, and

stages of scientific progress in Klug's own work on TMV structure. Klug's frank and

insightful remark that Bemal was temperamentally unsuited to pursue and complete

work req uirin g a lot of details immediately established Klug as an au thentic and reliable

witness of the past, since almost all other speakers refrained from evaluating Bernai,

who as the founder of protein X-ray crystallography was their 'ancestor', in ways that

could be interpreted as being critical.

33

Some interesting attempts to deflate Klug's neat historical recollections and scientific

stages of progress were made during the 'Questions & Answers' period, especially by

scientist veterans of the 1930s who were not included on the Program, most notably

Henry Lipson, F.R.S. and Norman Pirie, F.R.S. While Lipson, an X-ray

crystallographer chiefly known for his technical innovations, relished to remind the

audience of scientific errors grounded in imperfect command of techniques, Pirie, a

former Cambridge biochemist and comrade of Bernai in leftist politics in the 1930s,

insisted that Bernal's image as profoundly involved with politics and sex be properly

acknowledged.

Those reminders were humorously handled by Klug and eventually submerged in

computer-graphics multi-colored images of progress as 'fresh as yesterday', delivered

by one of Klug's most accomplished former post-doctoral fellows, the American

Stephen Harrisson of Harvard, who was apparently charged with presenting the most

recent incarnation of scientific progress in virus structure because of Klug's imminent

departure for the train.

34

During the lunch break I joined McKay and a few other participants for the short

stroll from Downing Street to Emmanuel College. McKay explained to us that the

College elected Bernai to Fellowship post-humously, eager to bask in the glory of a

former outcast. While queueing for the buffet lunch in Emmanuel's Library, the

younger scientists reverted to shop talk about their research projects, recent results,

and career plans. I joined a group of them, which included an Indian woman and an

Israeli man, for a discussion on the relationship between science and its history.

Eventually, we found ourselves nea r th e duck po nd , a Collgial institution that inspires

great pride in its members and a sense of misplaced domesticity in visitors.

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However, the main historical benefit from the lunch took place when McKay's

collaborator on the project in history of X-ray crystallography, Harmke Kamminga,

introduced me to Margot Heinemann, an English don from New Hall at Cambridge,

whom I primarily knew, from the secondary literature on the 1930s, as an author on the

relationships between art and leftist politics and as a friend of John Cornford, the poet

and leader of communist students who died as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War.

35

Heinemann, whom I would meet later on a number of occasions in both Cambridge

and London during which she displayed original and perceptive views of Bemal (with

whom she had a daughter in the early 1950s but whom she did not know well in the

1930s), introduced me to her lunch companion, Anita Rimel, known to me from the

archive as one who managed Bernal's professional life with utmost devotion and

efficiency. Rimel produced an excellent string of historical 'nuggets', the most

important being that shortly before his death Bernai contemplated writing the story of

the avant-garde Theoretical Biology Club in the 1930s, the topic of my own Ph.D.

thesis.This revelation both surprised and delighted me, as my long-debated choice of

topic for my thesis turned out to reflect the perception of one of my key historical

actors turned scientist ancestor.

36

Similar strategies of alternating slides of historical and scientific objects were

deployed by the afternoon speakers, Bernal's Nobelist students Dorothy Crowfoot

Hodgkin and Max Perutz. D. C. Hodgkin, who as the surviving co-author of the

celebrated paper and first student to complete a Ph.D. with Bernai, had a special

position in the anniversary, put on a spectacular performance, as befitting her unique

position in science as perhaps the only woman head of an internationally renowned

research school. Among her various, historically relevant, revelations was her absence

from the laboratory, due to illness, on the day Bernai actually took the celebrated first

protein X-ray photograph. She further displayed an impressive concern with historical

authenticity while providing detailed descriptions of Bernal's laboratory, collaborators,

illustrious visitors, and prevailing jovial spirit in the 1930s.

37

In addition, D. C. Hodgkin called to the podium a living witness, the Oxford

biochemist John Philpot (1911), whose unique pepsin crystals enabled Bernai to take

the first protein X-ray photograph having been brought to him in their mother liquor.

38

Dry crystals showed no patterns since the water was part of the crystal structure.

Another living witness, Tom Blundell, who as Head of the Department of

Crystallography at Birkbeck College was the current occupant of Bernal's office, was

shortly after called to give a scientific update on the then still ongoing efforts,

worldwide, to solve the structure of pepsin.

39

Though the pepsin story had been previously told in writing by D. C. Hodgkin,

40

the

live performance of unexpected witnesses was even more conducive to conveying

historical authenticity. So were the slides of two, previously unknown, of Bernal's

handwritten notes on pepsin, which she had recently found while sorting her own

papers, and in which Bernai tried to interpret those preliminary X-ray patterns in

specific structural terms. The rest of the talk charted D. C. Hodgkin's progress on 'her

own protein', insulin, on which she had started to work in 1935, abandoned in 1939,

and returned to in the early 1960s.

41

Many questions following D. C. Hodgkin's talk focused on Philpot's experience in

Uppsala. Much to the audience's surprise, the then 73-years-old Philpot confessed that

he went to Uppsala, on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, not in the pursuit of the

ultracentrifuge, as Perutz sought to confirm in his question, but rather in a romantic

pursuit of Swedish protein physical chemist Inga-Brita Eriksson. Although the Swedish



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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHYOF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY 335

interlude produced beautiful crystals for Bernai (which formed during Philpot's

absence due to a ski vacation), Philpot returned to England by

himself,

once Inga-Brita

married a Swedish colleague and remained in Uppsala as Mrs Eriksson-Quensel.

42

I spent the tea break between the afternoon talks mostly talking to the newly

uncovered living witness John Philpot, who recalled a lot of relevant material from

Oxford in the 1930s. I was glad to b e able to arra ng e to meet with him and his scientist

wife,Flora, later in Oxford for a more extended oral history, a meeting that eventually

materialized in Ju ne 1984.

The last speaker, Max Perutz, a veteran of historically loaded inquiries and

controversies with regard to both proteins and DNA, apparently did not need to

perform the customary rite of persuasion via slides. He prepared instead a rich

repertory of anecdotes, revelations, and confessions as befits his long experience as a

spokesman for science in its cultural context, as well as a spokesman for the history of

molecular biology. Perutz's bold, revealing anecdotes signalled the desire of scientist

spokesmen for greater historical authenticity. Thus, he made references to dilapidated

laboratories in the 1930s, which were to be remedied by a vague philan throp ic scheme

involving the Director of the Cavendish Physics Laboratory at Cambridge, Lord

Rutherford, the then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the car maker millionaire

Austin.

43

Perutz's extensive delving into historically relevant professional gossip, which greatly

delighted the audience, included not only Bernai whose legacy Perutz described as

more theoretical than empirical, but also many other key figures in the history of

molecular biology, especially those who like W. T. Astbury, L. Pauling, and I.

Fankuchen affected Perutz's own research. He also responded to a special request to

clarify the near expulsion of Francis Crick, of the double helix fame, from the

Cavendish Laboratory, by its then Director Sir W. Lawrence Bragg. Like Klug

beforehand, Perutz supported his emphasis on Bernal's 'visionary insights' with

quotations from Bernal's writings in the late 1930s and the 1940s and from BBC

discussions between Bernai and Sir William H. Bragg, the founder of X-ray

crystallography.

44

However, upon presenting his scientific work on haemoglobin structure, Perutz

adopted an essentially progressive path. Yet, in line with his and other speakers' explicit

quest for greater historical authenticity, Perutz confessed to errors in the early 1950s,

and of the horror of being left behind in 'flatland' (that is, without the capacity to

produce a three-dimensional model) in the late 1950s, prior to surveying the triumphs

of the 1960 and 1970s when he solved the structure of haemoglobin and proposed a

widely accepted mechanism for explaining its function as a 'molecular lung'.

45

The questions following Perutz's talk were mostly provocative, while reminding

Perutz of the more famous incidents around him such as the rows between Crick and

Bragg, of his own confrontation with anothe r early Bernai associate, the American 'Fan '

who voiced objections to Perutz's work, or of his 'luck' in having Linus Pauling, a fierce

American competitor of Bemal and his associates on the problem of protein structure,

abandon the haemoglobin problem in the 1930s.

46

Following the formal ending of the meeting at 5.30 p.m., I joined a group of

participants for drinks in the nearby pub, The Eagle, which achieved notoriety as the

place in which the d oub le helix was first ann oun ced . In th e pub I had to decide wh ether

to sit with a group around D. C. Hodgkin, whose facile sociability with younger

colleagues in the p ub struck me as an unex pected clue to he r unusu al position as leader

of a large research school of biomolecular crystallography; or whether to continue my



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discussion with the chairman of the last session, Herman Watson, which started on the

way from the Auditorium to the pub.

47

I opted for continuing my discussion with Dr H. Watson (who would repeatedly insist

that his first initial be used so to distinguish himself from the more notorious 'other

Watson' of the double helix scandals), eventually compensating for the sense of loss

involved in my dilemma of having to choose between two crucial ethnographees, when

two months later I was able to meet D. C. Hodgkin in Oxford. H. Watson provided

numerous insights into many puzzles from the history of protein X-ray crystallography,

including the absence of Sir John Kendrew, the versatile scientist who solved the

structure of the first protein (myoglobin) in the late 1950s, before becoming a science

statesman, the first director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, and the

earliest author on the role of protein X-ray crystallography in the rise of molecular

biology.

48

My long and transformative day, at the end of which I felt vindicated in my adventure

in historical ethnography, ended befittingly on the same Clare College bridge, where I

stood undecided for a few minutes, while contemplating the pros and cons for

attending the concluding dinner for the Meeting's participants at Emmanuel College.

On the one hand, I had to estimate the probability of further historically relevant

'nuggets' surfacing during the dinner. On the other hand, I felt that the performers

deserved to relax among themselves without the inevitably intrusive presence of a

historian turned ethnographer who might forget, especially under the influence of

unlimited Collgial port, not to offer misplaced correctives to their memory.

Eventually, my desire to type my 'field' notes right away, with my memory still fresh,

especially with the lore I had just heard in the pub, and which I could not write down,

further convinced me to transcribe my nearly illegible notes on the typewriter right

away. Thus, I ended my experimental day in the reassuring setting of my College office.

As a result of various constraints, especially my departure from the Cambridge

historico-ethnographic paradise two months later, and my subsequent professional

adventures in Ischia, Cambridge, Mass., Montreal, and Tel Aviv, for the remainder of

1984,1 did not return to the writing of my experiment in historical ethnography until a

year later.

My initial writing, which deliberately reflected the objectivist, realist genre of classical

ethnographies, was completed shortly before the 17th International Congress for

History of Science, held in Berkeley early in August 1985, and submitted for

publication later in 1985. The hybrid character of my paper, which strove to capture

empirically the entire wealth of historical detail 'unearthed' by the scientific

anniversary, but also to provide an ethnographic framework for its interpretation as a

social drama, baffled the referees. While some objected to my implicit treatment of the

archival record as a 'master context', others compared me adversely to Geertz and

Turner, who were said to possess more empathy toward their 'natives' than I, the

historian of science, presumably displayed toward my scientist ethnographees.

49

Many other similarly misguided comments, some interim professional experiences

that eroded my earlier passion for interdisciplinary Utopias, and my eventual discovery

of the new movement of experimentation with an expanded, flexible, and

interdisciplinary ethnographic genre, of whose 'poetics and politics' I finally became

aware, enabled me to split the initially comprehensive, or dual message of an

ethnographic history coupled to a historical ethnography of a scientific anniversary into

two distinct papers.

50

Hence, this paper began with a self-ethnography, which suggested how my increasing

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF ASCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY 337

reflexivity as a novice historical ethnographer had enabled and constrained both the

above described, participant observation, of the scientific anniversary and the following

interpretation of the anniversary as a social drama revolving around a fusion of

authoritative conceptions of historical authenticity and scientific progress, a fusion

designed to smooth the contradiction between science's relativist past of discarded

convictions and its absolutist present of ultimate scientific progress.

51

3 . 1 . Cons tructing historical authenticity in a scientific anniversary

A few days after the meeting, I thought to assess the impact of the anniversary on the

audience by administering a brief questionnaire. My tentative forays into quantitative

sociology were brief since the co-organizer whom I approached for the list of

participants was not eager to co-operate. The question thus persists as to whether the

fiftieth anniversary of the first protein X-ray photograph was efficacious, as a social

ritual, in persuading the participants that a short, preliminary though visionary paper,

barely noticed in its time, or at any time between 1934 and 1984, should be rega rded as

the birthmark of the prestigious, even revolutionary, discipline of molecular biology. If

so, the question further persists as to how the anniversary was able precisely to convey

such an original message, regardin g the validity of the pro tein X-ray cry stallographers'

related ancestral claim to be recognized as founders of molecular biology.

The scientific anniversary's immediate efficacy may be contrasted with my own, much

slower, efficacity in conveying the notio n, base d on five hu nd re d pages of dissertation

research, that the origins of molecular biology in Britain were to be found in the life

story of the Biotheoretical Gathering, an avant-garde group of scientists active in the

1930s, but especially in an unpublished proposal for an interdisciplinary research

institute that its five founders submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1935. That

proposal anticipated many of the problems that later came to constitute molecular

biology, including X-ray crystallography of protein stru ctu re, gene str uct ure , m olecular

evolution. J. D. Bernai, who took the first protein X-ray photograph in 1934, was

among the five founding members of this group, which came into being in 1932.

52

The scientific anniversary's efficacity in retrospectively transforming a fifty years old

'non-ev ent' into a credible claim for fo under status in molecular biology, stemm ed from

an ongoing interplay, in each Nobelist keynote speaker's performance, between two

complementary registers of meaning. On the one hand, a key feature of the scientific

anniversary was the explicit effort by each keynote speaker to convey historical

authenticity

by prov iding revealing accoun ts of the spea ker's early days of association

with Bernai, while further backing each account with numerous visual displays of

authentic relics from the past, such as pictures of people, 'antique' buildings and

instruments, recently found handwritten letters from Bernai, quotations from his

scientific papers, historical writings, and public broadcastings, even anecdotes involving

famous name-dropping, while stretching from the 1930s to the 1950s, and including

leading scientists Rutherford, W. H. and W. L. Bragg, Crick, Prime Minister Stanley

Baldwin and millionaire Austin, among others. On the other hand, each keynote

speaker did not limit his or her discourse to constructing themselves and their past

situations as historically a uthen tic; ra the r, each keynote speaker also conveyed a parallel

story of perso nal

scientificprogress.

That progress was illustrated with slides displayed in

a sequence of increasing degrees of atomic resolution (that is, low, intermediary, and

high)the type of progress characteristic of the protein X-ray crystallographers' work

and scientific goals.

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Having demonstrated the historical authenticity of Bernai and his early associates'

priority in initiating X-ray crystallographic studies on the structure of key biological

compounds such as sex hormones, proteins, and viruses in the mid-1930s, the keynote

speakers superimposed their discourse on Bernai and on their own relationship to him,

onto a discourse of concrete stages of progress in solving fully, that is, at atomic scale,

the structure of those complex biological macromolecules.

Prior to exploring how these two intermingling discourses, one on historical

authenticity and another on scientific progress, created a special effect of smooth

continuity between the disciplinary clan's past and present, an effect which, I suggest,

constitutes the very essence of this scientific anniversary as a social ritual, it is necessary

to elaborate on the multi-dimensional symbolism embedded in the discourse on

historical authenticity.

Though the historical authenticity of the keynote speakers was visibly grounded in

their scientific biography and personae, by then a matter of public record for the group

since the keynote speakers, as Nobelists, have already provided an accessible, even

official, account of their work and life in their respective and widely accessible Nobel

Lectures, still they strove to display expertise in various, occasionally subtle, historical

matters. For example, I detected seven converging dimensions of historical authenticity

built into their performative action and discursive practices.

The first type of historical authenticity built into the scientific anniversary was

inscriptional,

revolving around the public rite of resurrecting an old paper formerly

confined to oblivion by a surrounding scientific community of apparently indifferent

clans,

and reinterpreting it as the birthmark of a new, prestigious discipline. Once the

clan of protein X-ray crystallographers had finally decided to make appeal to history, a

short, fifty-year-old paper from

Nature,

announcing the successful taking of the first

protein X-ray photograph was no longer viewed as one of many other preliminary

scientific papers, let alone a paper whose priority in taking protein X-ray photographs

was contested on the very same page ofNature.

Following a process of fifty years of social and conceptual development, the paper's

visionary, that is, scientifically incomplete aspects, were retrospectively declared to have

been a historical turning point rather than remaining a modest success, constrained by

technical and conceptual contingencies at its time of birth in 1934. The selection of an

inscriptional source of historical authenticity was a brilliant move, since other

contenders to the status of founders of molecular biology have not been able, so far, to

produce for themselves such an early authentic inscription.

53

Similarly, an entire supportive cast of other inscriptions, both published and

unpublished, were introduced by the three keynote speakers, reflecting their awareness

that recollections alone are no longer sufficient to guarantee acceptance of scientists'

claims as historical facts. Included in that supportive cast of diversified inscriptions

were newly discovered letters and manuscripts, and quotations from published

scientific and historical documents by Bernai, especially his direct pronouncements on

the origins of molecular biology; such a reference further legitimized the keynote

speakers' historical understanding and position as deserving heirs by locating the

source of their historical preoccupation with the origins of molecular biology and with

protein X-ray crystallographers as its founders in the ancestor's own writings.

A second type of authenticity built into the anniversary's structure wastemporal, as

the celebration was held on the authentic date of the inscription's submission to

Nature

(something existing only in the memory of the surviving co-author and not in the public

record, which refers to the publication date only, some six weeks later, see Appendix 2).

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This subtle point had not only conferred an additional measure of historical

authenticity upon the anniversary, but further signalled the increasing preoccupation

of the keynote speakers qua successor heroes with historical detail. Moreover, by

mirroring personal birthdays, this 'accuracy' in dating the origins of the birthmark of a

scientific group, draws on the participants' 'cultural bias' in treating anniversaries as

authentic marks of birth.

A third aspect of authenticity was physical, as the celebration site was selected to

coincide as closely as possible with the discovery site. Gesturing across the Cockcroft

Auditorium to the adjacent location of the once active laboratory of structural

crystallography, in which Bemal took the first X-ray protein photographs, conveyed a

mo re imm ediate sense of historical authenticity tha n if the celebration h ad been held in

an auditorium in London (where, after all, Bemal spent the greater part of his career).

A fourth aspect of authenticity was conceptual or derivative of the protein X-ray

crystallographers coming to pursue their means (structural studies) to an end

(biological function) as an end in its own right. As such, they became primarily

molecular structurists, while betting on Bernal's assumption that structure, once

solved, will automatically explain biological function. Though they may have never lost

sight of providing a molecular functional explanation of life phenomena, in practice

they inherited and perpetuated a conceptual primacy on molecular structure or

'conformation'.

Molecular s tructu re is a key aspect of the synthesis und erlying molecular biology, bu t

it is not exhaustive of it. By situating themselves at the 'mo lecular' pole of the me tap ho r

'molecular biology', while projecting the con formational aspect of molecular biology as

more basic, the protein X-ray crystallographers' inherited choice led to both

spectacular hits and misses. It is of course the nature of anniversaries that they focus on

successes rather than on failures. Thus, the anniversary emphasized how Bernal's vision

that th e direct m etho d of X-ray crystallography was the only way to resolve the struc tur e

of a protein was vindicated by protein X-ray crystallographers, but was silent on their

missing oth er major b reakth roug hs such as alpha-helix, DNA structu re, or the theo ry of

allostery.

A fifth aspect of authenticity was

technical

or derivative of the clan's commitment to

X-ray crystallography as a sup rem e, almost self-sufficient tech niq ue for attackin g the

problem of protein, hormone, or virus structure. Unlike ' traitor' kin who abandoned

the primacy or singularity of this technique in the aftermath of a 1950 fiasco, briefly

alluded to by Perutz and otherwise well known from a secondary literature, the clan

never wavered in its primordial commitment to this technique qua tribal faith, even

though in later days they all came to complement it with many other, complementary

techniques.

A sixth aspect of authenticity was

institutional,

deriving from the fact that all the

keynote speakers had been institutionally associated with the principal investigator-

turned-ancestor. The institutional precariousness of the ancestor, and the fact that all

three successor associates had relatively short institutional association with him, was not

emphasized, despite its profound implications for the clan's subsequent decentralized

structure and for the lack of overshadowing of the successors by the ancestor.

Last but not least, the seventh aspect of authenticity was

political,

or rather micro-

political, as the keynote speakers subscribed to a loyal rhetoric of descent or to a

pragmatic strategy of smooth succession. This contrasts with the quick subversion

strategy deployed by Crick, their one-time foster kin turned theoretical molecular

geneticist and DNA supr-hero. In this sense, they represent for the third generation



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scientists in the audience the historically authentic message that a slow strategy of

succession has paid off and consequently, that continuity with the past, rather than

rupture with it, is the career strategy to which they should aspire.

In fact, these quiet successor heroes departed from the subversive but also erratic

research strategy of their ancestor. They actually redefined their projects in concrete

structural and empirical terms, as opposed to the broader philosophical and theoretical

preoccupations of Bernai, which remained a lasting source of irreversible diversion.

Yet, the speakers chose to portray themselves as loyal followers even though their

departure is implied in the disparity between their own scientific accomplishments and

those of their mentorquaancestor.

Klug, the latecomer would-be-successor hero, alone implied what may have been the

case for them all, namely that the successor associates greatly benefitted from the

ancestor's temperamental inability to pursue his own insights, that is, to complete, as

opposed to initiate, a research program. In contrast to the ancestor's disciplinary and

institutional marginality and avant garde conduct, the successor associate' conduct was

characterized by disciplinary and institutional accommodation. The micro-political

message to the future generation of scientists could not have been any clearer for being

historically so authentic.

All these seven layers of authenticity, experienced simultaneously by the participants

during the performative sessions, converged to transform the celebration into a special

vehicle of conferring social reality upon authentic, yet select, conceptions of historical

truth. Those conceptions were not only a matter of setting straight the record of the

past, but also provided a subtle guide for present conduct. Such an extrapolation

seemed inevitable, given the convergence of many impressive dimensions of historical

authenticity, carefully constructed and re-enacted throughout the duration of the

anniversary.

The temptation to regard such extrapolations as 'natural' was further increased

through the creation of a common discursive context by the keynote speakers, which

constantly blended various dimensions of historical authenticity with present

respresentations of scientific progress, culminating in the crescendo of a spectacular

computer graphics designed structure that was described as 'recent as yesterday'. This

striking colorful design evoked the inevitable question: 'What would have Bemal

thought about the possibilities of computer aided graphic design?' followed by the

participants vividly offering imaginary answers, while contesting each other's right to

speak in the name of the tentative thoughts of their ancestor.

3 . 2 . Constructing thedan s imageryofscientific progress: Deleting the technical processand

highlighting asequenceofprogressive atomic resolutions

Protein X-ray crystallographers spend a great deal of time on a slow process of

preparing crystals, photographing them from many angles and at different rates of

exposure with various types of increasingly sophisticated X-ray cameras, indexing

reflections with the aid of computer, and drawing density maps from which the

molecular pattern can be inferred. Indeed, the event being celebrated was strongly

related to the serendipity of obtaining proper crystals for the first protein X-ray

photograph as evidenced by a keynote speaker's insistence on producing an authentic

witness, who played inadvertedly a major role in creating this serendipidity.

54

Yet, the performative action of the keynote speakers focused almost entirely on those


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relatively rare moments when these numerous contingent actions become a 'necessary'

or 'objective' structure of signification, that is, a high level resolution of the molecular

pattern. Furthermore, those temporal-rarities-turned-eternal incarnations of progress

were captured in slides, captioned by accompanying texts and/or narrative and flashed

in succession, punctuated by brief intervals of comment on the 'self-evident' or no

longer contested, nature of the displayed representation.

Indeed, all the speakers produced slides representing various stages of progressive

outcomes in their otherwise prolonged processes of crystallizing, photographing,

indexing, interpreting, and captioning virus, hormone, or protein structures. They

further arrranged their 'products' or outcomes in a progressive sequence, while

following th e first protein X-ray photo gra ph of pepsin in 1934 with the more extensive

pictures of insulin, a hormone for which the first Pattersons or vector diagrams were

constructed in 1935; eventually to be superseded by Fourier maps until the triumph of

a partial resolution in 1969.

Similarly, virus pictures were shown of low (i.e. 20 Angstrom, hereafter ),

intermediate (5.5 ) and high (2.8 ) degrees of resolution until the most recent

com put er aided graph ic design of a virus structu re was dramatically displayed. Each talk

proc eede d to move from a 'primitive' and primordial stage of scientific progress or low

resolution to the most recent or advanced one, or high resolution, while implying a

rational process of ever increasing progress. Despite brief allusions to 'bad ideas' or

blind alleys, the displays of quasi-totemic outcomes culminated with the colorful

computer-graphics designed pa tterns, thus celebrating the most advanced products of

the clan's scientific progress in an almost artistic form.

To some extent, the fiftieth anniversary of the first protein X-ray photograph's

com mitm ent to historical au thenticity was inevitable because of the existence of a wide

secondary literature by various species of metascientists (for example, historians,

philosophers, sociologists, investigative journalists). Yet, despite the occasional

allusions to 'slow progress', 'bad ideas' or blind alleys, the celebration provided no

forum for drawing lessons from the clan's equally important experience of historically

authentic failures.

Included in those briefly alluded to failures were an array of supposed empirical

'impediments' such as the dogmatic adherence to crystallographic biases of perfect

order or integral number of primary structure units per fold of the secondary

structure; the belated recognition of artifacts or reflections that were exceptional

rather than typical of proteins in general; the dismissal of stereochemical knowledge as

crucial in decoding spatial structures and of model building as a heuristic strategy for

deriving complex structures; the phase problem, eventually solved by the heavy atom

replacem ent meth od (which was adopt ed only slowly because of the clan's deprec iation

of other experimental strategies and theoretical orientations, originating outside the

clan's certified repertory of tools and beliefs).

This de-emphasis of many episodes of failure suggests that the celebra tion's m eaning

cannot be understood in the separate terms of historical authenticity or of scientific

progress. The celebration appears to have been first and foremost a social medium for

creating congruence between these two registers. The celebration revolved around a

dual attem pt to convey historical authenticity an d scientific prog ress, not for th eir own

sakes,

but for a higher purpose: instilling allegiance to a particular vision of the past

precipitates an identification with the past that has concrete ethical and political

implications for th e futu re of the clan. Re-enacting th e past in auth entic ways, however

partial, thus becomes a means for creatin g future obligations, while articulating a mo ral


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342 PNINA ABIR-AM

and intellectual debt of all the descendants to their ancestor and his associates, the

keynote speakers or successor heroes.

The first protein X-ray photograph and its descendant patterns or 'organized

reflections' are the currency determining exchange and flow of action among the clan's

members as well as a unique, collective property that the clan members may trade,

individually and collectively, for other scientific currencies which they may need, such

as chromatograms, sedimentograms, and electron microscopic pictures. The X-ray

patterns become symbolic nexes around which the entire 'form of life' in protein X-ray

crystallography revolves. The

raison d'etre

of that form of life is to produce complete

structural solutions.

Hence, the keynote speakers' private turned public ownership of precious 'patterns',

such as the first or only fully solved structures, of a virus, a hormone, or a protein, as

well as their ownership of authentic recollections, reflect the totemic status of certain

X-ray photographs for the protein X-ray crystallographers' clan. At the same time, their

performative action reflects the taboo of admitting the limitations of their venerated

method for molecular biology at large (limitations made famous by the accounts of the

double helix story in which adherence to crystallographic principles proved to be

counterproductive). In this manner, the third generation disciples will be sure to

emulate the exemplary conduct of the successor heroes, leading to the possession of

such 'riches' of patterns, and hence to a strategic location in the group's genealogy of

morals and authority.

The uniqueness of the protein X-ray crystallographers' products is embodied in these

patterned reflections that they alone create, interpret, own and trade on the scientific

marketplace of results on protein structure. The protein X-ray photograph becomes

the fountain nourishing the protein X-ray crystallographers' unique 'form of life'. This

form of life, intersecting the growth of crystals, their X-ray photographing, indexing

and interpreting in terms of molecular and atomic patterns, is not embodied in the

crystal, or in the X-ray camera, or in the mathematical Patterson or Fourier techniques,

but rather in the X-ray photograph that integrates, in

itself,

all these aspects into a

unitary coherent, interprtable, and convertible framework.

4. Conclusion. The epistemological complementarity ofhistorical authenticityand

scientific progress in ascientific anniversary

The performative action and setting at the fiftieth anniversary of the first X-ray

protein photograph was modest and humble when compared to the pomp and

circumstances surrounding more exotic ethnographic settings such as the Negara

Theatre in Bali or even a Honorary Degrees ceremony at Cambridge University.

Indeed, so big was the pomp at one such ceremony, which I was able to attend two

months later in the Senate House due to my College Senior Tutor's unexpected

ethnographic foresight, that I preferred to immerse myself in the more trivial pleasure

of 'mere' participating rather than observing. Hopefully, other, more pomp-oriented

colleagues, may one day write on the spectacular gown and sword of the Chancellor,

the Duke of Edinburgh, and the procession in which the Vice-Chancellor, who was at

that time the Master of Downing College, led the recipients, in their colorful silky

gowns, via King's Parade.

55

The question even persists as to whether the scientific anniversary can be usefully

described as a social ritual, not only because of its relative lack of pomp but also because

Downloa



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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHYOF ASCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY 343

of its complex epistemological status as an interdisciplinary research object. Some

anthropologists regard the concept of ritual as so sacred for their discipline that they

resist its application to the supposed anti-thesis of ritual in 'primitive' society, a

scientific anniversary of u nb ou nd ed reason and inevitable progress. Many historians of

science like to complain ab out the superfluous social science ja rg on supposedly

contaminating their discipline and its pure legacy as a history of disembodied ideas.

Some scientists rega rd it as dem eaning for their dignified e nterp rise to be addressed by

methods originally developed for primitive societies.

Despite the striking modesty conveyed by the keynote speaker Nobelists and their

self-deprecatory humor, the scientific anniversary had many features of a social drama.

A demanding role of playing the historically credible scientific leader has been re-

enacted thre e times, by each of the keynote speakers, in three com parable sessions. The

repetitive actions of presenting slides, yet supplying alternating discourses on past

memories and present accomplishments, created the desired impression of a smooth

continuity between the narrated historical authenticity and displayed scientific

progres s. Visibly marked by their grey-white hair and o the r signs of long term presen ce,

the keynote speakers enacted credibly their dual relevance as witnesses of the past and

actors in the present.

Through their performative action, revolving around a skilful, even virtuoso,

alternating of past memories and present representations of progress, they lived, for

the duration of their performance, in both the ancestral realm and the mundane,

everyday realm of relentless pursuit of the latest scientific advance. Their recollections

of the a ncestor and episodes of con tact w ith him cast them as emb odim ents of his spirit

by virtue of the multi-dimensional historical authen ticity tha t they were able to project.

At the same time, their verbal explanations of num erou s scientific results, ven erated in

the present as symbols of success by protein X-ray crystallographers, cast them as

members of the clan, who share its mundane preoccupations with results.

The keynote speakers alone can thus identify with and represent the ancestor,

whose spirit and vision they inherited. However, they can also identify with and

represent the ordinary members who are still concerned with ongoing progress by

recalling their own prolonged existence as ordinary members until their later

emergence as heroes. By sharing their sole accessibility to the ancestral realm with

other clan members in a public forum, while also being attentive to the members'

ongoing mundane preoccupations, the heroes create a common discourse capable of

fusing the past and the present. Their unique personal characteristics (biologically

spanning the past and the present) and their performative action (alternating

historical recollections with accounts of scientific progress in the present) further

reinforce this fusion.

Indeed, the enshrined inscription that became the celebration's raison d tre

symbolizes this unique position of the heroes as collaborators of both the ancestor and

the third generation clan members. The anniversary thus re-enacts the heroes' position

as venerated sources of both scientific success and social continuity, while legitimizing

Documents

Abir Am Pnina 1992 - A Historical Ethnography of a Scientific Anniversary