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This is not an article: Model organism newsletters and the question of ‘open science’

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Abstract

Scientific newsletters, especially in biology, flourished in the twentieth century. They are virtually unstudied, but can tell us a great deal about the simultaneous development of scientific communities or collectives and the concepts, techniques, collections, materials and maps they produce. This article introduces scientific newsletters as a ‘model organism’ on which to study the moral economy of science. As an exemplary case, the article explores issues of property and propriety in the Drosophila Information Service and explains how newsletters constitute a closed community at the same time that they demand the unrestricted sharing of organisms, techniques, results and other information within the community. The last third of the article compares aspects of newsletters with the contemporary claims about ‘open science’ in the case of synthetic biology, and speculates about the relationship of the current political economy of intellectual property to the moral economies present in newsletters.

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Notes

  1. The so-called August Krogh Principle (Krebs, 1975), originally formulated (Krogh, 1929, p. 247) as: ‘For such a large number of problems there will be some animal of choice or a few such animals on which it can be most conveniently studied’.

  2. The metaphor of the model organism may seem playful, but at least one recent work has taken the notion of model organisms as metaphors more or less seriously, comparing models, cases and exemplary narratives across the sciences and humanities (Creager et al, 2007). One clear point demonstrated by the increasingly voluminous literature on model organisms is that the choice of organism is a very momentous one. It determines not only the problem one can explore, but also the amount of funding available, who will become peers and collaborators, and much else besides. An argument might be made that the choice to focus on citations instead of propositions or archives is not just a methodological or disciplinary one, but also a choice of model – with the many implications that it carries for the formation of traditions, communities, paradigms or epistemic objects. There is also a large general literature on models and model organisms in science (Levins, 1966; Griesemer and Wade, 1988; Griesemer, 1990, 2006; Morgan and Morrison, 1999; de Chadarevian and Hopwood, 2004).

  3. Kohler (1994, pp. 11–13) employed the concept of ‘moral economy’ to great effect in his analysis of the Drosophila research community, both before and after the constitution of the DIS newsletter. The concept signifies not simply a community of norms or practices, but a community concerned with exchange, and in particular with the moral rules and expectations governing exchange. As he explains, he borrowed the notion from E.P. Thompson's (1971) article exploring the moral economy of eighteenth century British peasants, see also Scott (1976). Both Lorraine Daston (1995) and Steven Shapin (1996), and more recently Bruno Strasser (2011) have also made use of the concept for similar reasons. Thompson's analysis has resonance here because it concerned the displacement of a moral economy (that of the peasants) by a formalized political economy in which new forms of production, new legal arrangements and a massive leap in the scale of production confronted these peasants from all sides. Without wanting to figure twentieth century biologists as peasants, it is possible to see a similar conflict between a cherished moral economy of science and a new political economy occurring along similar lines.

  4. Newsletters are invariably mentioned in works that address particular model organisms as in Ankeny (1997, 2000, 2001, 2007); de Chadarevian (1998, 2006); Rader (1998, 2004); Kass and Bonneuil (2004); Leonelli (2007, 2008a, 2008b); Strange (2007); Murray et al (2008); Murray (2010); Ankeny and Leonelli (2011). Occasionally, sociologists interested in scientific communities have stumbled on them (Mullins, 1968, 1972; Star and Ruhleder, 1994). But with the exception of Kohler (1994) they are rarely addressed directly. Hogan (2009) is the only other work I’ve encountered that explores them in detail. Newsletters might also be seen as continuous with the growth of ‘Big Science’ in America (Galison and Hevly, 1992), except that very few of them represent large-scale, bureaucratic, institutionalized enterprises, even though they mimic some of the same functions and features of a scaled-up research enterprise.

  5. A brief note on method: model organism newsletters are both easy and hard to study. Easy because any given scientist (of a certain age) is likely to have copies of them lying around; and hard because few libraries catalog them systematically or keep complete runs of them. Some have been digitized and moved to the Web for instrumental purposes. However, these are often not direct scans of the original documents – sometimes lacking any contextual or meta-data. Some newsletters are well attested by a simple Google search, other well-known ones (like Mouse Newsletter) seem to be entirely unknown to Google. In short, the certainty with which it is possible to know of their existence or location is not high. I have looked at several in detail: the DIS, the Yeast Newsletter, the Maize Genetics Cooperation News Letter, the Cellular Slime Mold Newsletter, the Worm Runner's Gazette and the Neurospora Newsletter. For the purposes of this article, my analysis has focused on the social and communication aspects of these newsletters rather than particular conceptual problems.

  6. Considerable efforts have been made to keep the idea of an ‘invisible college’ on life support throughout the years. But invisible colleges aren’t invisible: they exist in newsletters and other minor, grey, quotidian features of everyday activity in science. As ephemera, they might disappear, but they are not invisible. Derek John de Solla Price (1963) and Diana Crane's (1972) initial formulations of the concept sought to capture the growth of science as a phenomenon using published papers as a proxy, but newsletters are not published papers; for critiques see Lievrouw, 1989. Beginning at least with Collins (1974) work, the ‘invisibility’ of scientific networks has been made visible, among other ways, by looking at objects rather than objectivity (Daston, 2000; Daston and Galison, 2007), experimental systems rather than hypotheses (Rheinberger, 1997), ‘metrology’ rather than measurements (Latour, 1986; Schaffer, 1992; Wise, 1995) and infrastructure rather than its logical structure (Star and Ruhleder, 1994; Bowker and Star, 2000; Keating and Cambrosio, 2003). Newsletters also make science visible, periodically and centrally visible, to those who participate (and literally: most newsletters are centrally concerned with keeping up to date lists of active researchers and their addresses). Related work on the nature and significance of authorship in science is contained in Biagioli (2003).

  7. Though I do not do so here, one might track the pre-cursors of newsletters in other prior communicative media of the eighteenth and nineteenth century: newspapers, pamphlets, broadsheets and other forms of inexpensive and widely distributed media, as well as the growth of catalogs, mailing lists and other techniques of managing communities via the postal system or telegraphy. On labor in producing such communication networks see, for example, (Downey, 2002; Blok and Downey, 2004). In recent work, Bruno Strasser makes the case that the collections of DNA sequences that are the sine qua non of contemporary biology represent a continuation of the tradition of natural history collections (Strasser, 2011); Daston and Galison's (2007) analysis of scientific atlases is also a sort of precursor insofar as atlases represent a similar kind of collective stabilization of complex reality as that at work in the newsletters in genetics. In a very different idiom, Murray and O’Mahony (2007) have approached the scientific accumulation visible in informal networks in an organizational studies approach.

  8. A profile of Roy Robinson appears in ‘A very professional amateur’, New Scientist, 16 June 1977, p. 642.

  9. DIS, number 1, 1934, p. 2.

  10. Kohler's book contains two chapters that detail the system of exchange developed by the early Drosophila geneticists in the period 1910–1930, along with a description of the role that the DIS played (Kohler, 1994, Chapters 4 and 5).

  11. A table in DIS, number 11, p. 7 lists a total of 319 recipients from 16 countries, primarily United States, Russia, Japan, Germany and Britain, but extending to the Philippines, China and Australia.

  12. ‘Constitutive closure’ here refers to the fact that an open community of scientists comes into being at the same time that it produces a kind of closure. Such an insight owes much to the work of Shapin and Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air Pump, where they note that ‘solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order’ (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, p. 332).

  13. For instance, the 1976 amendment removed the requirement to register works in order to have copyright status. In 1934, therefore, the contributions to DIS would have been uncopyrighted; by 1980 they would be automatically copyrighted. The difference is that in the former case, objection to the copying of a contribution to DIS (either the initial ‘publication’ or a subsequent reproduction) would have little legal basis and instead would be governed by the norms of the community, and presumably adjudicated there as well. In 1980, individual contributors would have far more legal basis for objecting to the reproduction of a contribution. Studies of such ‘privately ordered’ regimes – though not in science – are in Bernstein (1992, 1996 and 2001).

  14. In other work I have discussed the notion of a ‘recursive public’ as a way to articulate how hackers and geeks working on Internet infrastructure and free software conceived of their community as inescapably enabled by the technology, legal rules and communal norms they created in order to create free software and the Internet. This case shows a similar phenomenon at work in the newsletter, but instead of a ‘public’, it aims instead at the creation of concepts, materials, maps and techniques that enable the theory of genetics (Kelty, 2008).

  15. Two issues of DIS recount the history of these conferences: DIS, number 56, March 1981 and DIS, number 75, July 1994.

  16. One of the earliest academics to explicitly diagnose the problem of ‘open science’ and intellectual property right protections was Paul David (David, 1998, 2004). These concerns have been very well developed within the legal literature at least since the mid-1990s (see, Rai, 1999, for a review). A National Research Council conference in 2003 was an early call for a more open science (Uhlir and Esanu, 2003, 2004). A handful of books and articles have also made the call for open science, such as Hope (2008); Waldrop (2008); Varmus (2009); Cribb and Sari (2010); Nielson (2012). As of 2012, there have been several conferences devoted to open science, such as the ‘Open Science Summits’ organized by Joseph Jackson (opensciencesummit.com).

  17. Scholars such as Boyle, Lessig and Benkler are well aware of this double appeal to science as both origin of openness and in need of more. The Science Commons project, an offshoot of creative commons is one key example (sciencecommons.org).

  18. Significant work on synthetic biology has already been pursued by a number of scholars. Among other relevant work Calvert (2008, 2010) deals directly with intellectual property; Campos (2009) recounts the history; O’Malley et al (2008), Fox Keller (2009), Morange (2009) and Pottage (2006) have debated both the intellectual and legal legacies. Rabinow and Bennett (2012) contains a complete analysis of the SynBERC engineering center of which Endy and Knight were a part. In addition, there are many students actively researching related topics: Sara Aguiton (Sciences Po), Caitlin Cockerton (LSE), Susanna Finlay (LSE), Alex Hamilton (LSE), Sara Tochetti (LSE), Talia Dan Cohen, Sophia Roosth, Anthony Stavrianakis (UC Berkeley), Christina Agapakis (UCLA) and Alessandro Delfanti, among others.

  19. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (2009a, 2009b) has recently taken up the problematic of invention in chemistry and nanotechnology as has Andrew Barry (2005) with respect to pharmaceutical chemistry.

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Acknowledgements

This article was first presented at a Workshop of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation (CSynBI) on ‘Synthetic Biology and Open Source: Normative Cultures of Biology’ organized by the BIOS Centre on 23 and 24 September 2010 and funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. I would like to thank Claire Marris and Alain Pottage for the invitation and for help with the published version; Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent for fantastic comments on the initial presentation; the Institute for Society and Genetics fellows for review and comments; Andrew Hogan for sharing his research; Hannah Landecker for careful reading and editing; and three anonymous reviewers at BioSocieties for extraordinarily helpful comments. UCLA undergraduate Gabriela Lazalde created the accompanying table and helped conduct excellent research for this article.

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Kelty, C. This is not an article: Model organism newsletters and the question of ‘open science’. BioSocieties 7, 140–168 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2012.8

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