This is an ambitious book, written by four researchers at work over five years. The immediate focus is upon the activities of scientists at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne in order to explore the way that these activities are shaped by social, political, financial and intellectual influences. Part One, 'The life-world of the Institute', sketches the recent history of ideas in immunology, the field where the Institute gained world renown when its Director, Macfarlane Burnet, shared a Nobel Prize with Sir Peter Medawar. Part Four is written in the same descriptive vein with a broader geographical scope, detailing some of the intellectual and political elements of the worldwide quest to find a vaccine for malaria. Part Two, 'The subjective side of science' includes a chapter on 'The myth of objectivity' which lays the foundation for the major purpose of the whole work - to challenge received views on the philosophy and methodology of science. Part Three, 'The mode of scientific production' closely examines the way that scientists approach their daily tasks, with the central image being the laboratory as a factory to produce data.
The book operates at several levels, from high journalism and science criticism to the ecology of excellence and the philosophy and methodology of science. As a piece of high quality reporting it is impressive in its scope and depth, though a hostile insider (Leon Wolpert) described it as 'mere' journalism. This unfair because the writers achieve a standard of science writing that will provide a challenge to all comers.
The major and overwhelming defect of the book is the failure to engage, or even mention, the most robust and fruitful body of ideas in the field. This is a striking example of the phenomenon they describe as 'socially structured forgetting' or 'structural amnesia' (p 101). They have neatly excised Karl Popper's theory of conjecture and refutation from their account of the philosophy and methods of science. But Popper's work surely represents either the orthodox view of scientific method (as accepted by a number of eminent scientists who took their philosophy seriously such as Medawar, Eccles, Monod and Einstein), or a formidable rival to the traditional form of Baconian induction, still championed by David Stove.
An amazing revelation appeared recently when the senior author wrote a review of the reissue of David Stove's critique of Popper and others. He reported that Popper was the only philosopher of science who was held in any regard by the members of the Institute. This evidence would have refuted their major, though unstated, thesis, that Popper does not count in the real world of science. Apparently that particular evidence was regarded as superfluous when it came to writing up the research. Of course scientists discard data when they think that the experimental apparatus was malfunctioning. In this case it appears that was the scientists were considered to be malfunctioning!
Life Among the Scientists is located in the tradition of the 'social construction of science', a form of thought that thrives in the intellectual wasteland created by the popular reception of T. S. Kuhn's work on the diffusion of scientific innovations. To their credit the authors fall short of the strong form of relativism that is common in this tradition and this may indicate that their interest in science is strong enough to resist the debilitating effect of their theoretical framework. The popularity of the 'social construction' view and its serious limitations raise two questions. What is going on in academic departments of philosophy and the social sciences to account for their structural amnesia regarding Popper? And is there any way that philosophers or other metascientists can provide assistance to scientists?
The answer to the first question awaits further anthropological studies, though Bartley throws out some clues in his contribution to In Pursuit of Truth (ed P. Levinson, Humanities Press, 1982). As to the second question, philosophers may have nothing to offer at the tactical level of science where the major requirements are better data and new or revised descriptive theories. However there are times when progress is blocked by problems at a higher (or deeper) strategic level and attention needs to be paid to the unstated assumptions and metaphors that guide the formulation of problems and determine the kind of solutions that are sought. For example the immune reaction by the body to foreign matter was supposed to involve a mechanism of instruction from the invaders to the immune system to produce the appropriate antibodies. Burnet followed a hint from Jerne to demonstrate that the mechanism at work is one of selection among a range of responses generated initially by the immune system. A similar shift of focus, from a mechanism of instruction acting on an essentially passive or reactive organism, to one of selection among trials generated by the organism, has important implications in epistemology and evolutionary theory. Popper has drawn out some of these in his critique of inductive and Lamarckian thinking in his intellectual autobiography, Unended Quest.
In conclusion, Life Among the Scientists succeeds in some of its objectives despite the problems at its conceptual heart. It is a good read for the most part provided that one is not distracted by the potentially irritating device of the first person narrative. It probably deserves a place in the bookcase (though not on the same shelf) with Medawar's Pluto's Republic, Koestler's The Sleepwalkers and Barzun's Science: The Glorious Entertainment.