Steven Shapin

One of the defining sites for modern social science was the doorway dividing the kitchen from the dining-room in an early 1950s Shetland hotel. On the kitchen side of the door casually employed crofters swiped their filthy fingers through any passing pudding they found particularly toothsome; smelly socks hung steaming on tea-kettles; and butter partially unused by guests was reshaped for...

The rhetorical yield from the first atomic explosion was low – only one entry for the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. When the plutonium bomb exploded on the Jornada del Muerto near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, Robert Oppenheimer, the Scientific Director or of Los Alamos, remembered the line from the Bhagavad Gita where Vishnu says: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ One other remark deserves to be immortalised, which Oppenheimer himself later judged the best thing said at the time. When the blast subsided, the physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, in charge of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and declared: ‘Now we’re all sons of bitches.’’‘

Physicians have historically walked a fine line between expertise and common sense, between innovation and tradition. If what they said to their patients was unintelligible, they ran the risk of being ignored. If, on the other hand, it was believed that doctors’ knowledge and advice were little different from common sense, what was the point of listening to them? What doctors know and what they can do have changed enormously over the past centuries. So has lay knowledge about health and disease, and it is a truism that much common sense on these matters is now shaped by the pronouncements of medical expertise. In the part of the culture I inhabit it counts as common knowledge that an LDL-cholesterol level over 160 means that you should go easy on the butter and the beef; that a blood-pressure reading higher than 140/90 is a sign that you’ve got to take some tablets and do something about your way of life; and (if you’re a late middle-aged male) that a Prostate Specific Antigen level of more than 2.5 augurs a biopsy and maybe worse. All this is testimony to the medicalisation of the common culture (especially in the United States), and to a vocabulary shared by modern doctors and their more medically literate patients.

The DNA molecule is as interesting in social theory as it is in science. It is the great Modernist molecule: the ultimate chemical basis of our common humanity, what makes biologically equivalent all those whom the Enlightenment supposed to be created equal. The fact that we know these things about DNA testifies to the authority of the greatest Modernist cultural enterprise, the natural sciences. DNA is also an anti-Modernist molecule: a molecular warrant for all the natural differences the conservative thinker could ever want to identify and insist on – differences between unique individuals, between the sexes, races and nations. From this point of view the idea of French DNA – its distinctive populational characteristics – makes as much sense as the idea of, say, Bill Clinton’s DNA. And DNA is a Post-Modernist molecule, since fragments of our contemporary expert culture insist that the reflexive condition for believing these things about DNA, or indeed disbelieving them, is ultimately ascribable to the workings of DNA itself, while the knowledge of those workings is an authentic item of our culture. So what are the intellectual, institutional and legal schemes of things in terms of which the Frenchness of DNA might come to be insisted on?’

In one of the most celebrated expressions of scientific humility, Isaac Newton said that he felt himself to have been ‘only like a boy playing on the seashore … whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’. Kary Mullis approaches the seashore from a different direction. On the day he won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Mullis went surfing. The camera crews tried to follow him down the Southern California coast, ‘asking everyone who came out of the water whether he was Kary Mullis’. Mullis was enjoying his new-found anonymity and got a surfer-dude friend to admit to being the great man himself. How does it feel to win the Nobel Prize? The surfer-dude was word-perfect: ‘It’s like a dream come true.’ By the time Mullis had towelled off and chilled out, the paparazzi were laying siege to his house. ‘As it turned out,’ he writes, ‘none of the other Nobel laureates that year were serious about surfing, and “Surfer Wins Nobel Prize” made headlines.’‘