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The experiment has long been seen as a test bed for theory, but in Split & Splice, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger makes the case, instead, for treating experimentation as a creative practice. His latest book provides an innovative look at the experimental protocols and connections that have made the life sciences so productive.
Delving into the materiality of the experiment, the first part of the book assesses traces, models, grafting, and note-taking – the conditions that give experiments structure and make discovery possible. The second section widens its focus from micro-level laboratory processes to the temporal, spatial, and narrative links between experimental systems. Rheinberger narrates with accessible examples, most of which are drawn from molecular biology, including from the author's laboratory notebooks from his years researching ribosomes.
A critical hit when it was released in Germany, Split & Splice describes a method that involves irregular results and hit-or-miss connections – not analysis, not synthesis, but the splitting and splicing that form a scientific experiment. Building on Rheinberger's earlier writing about science and epistemology, this book is a major achievement by one of today's most influential theorists of scientific practice.
Originally published in German in 2021 as Spalt und Fuge: Eine Phänomenologie des Experiments by Suhrkamp Verlag.
List of Figures
Introduction
Part I Infra-Experimentality
1 Traces
2 Models
3 Making Visible
4 Grafting
5 Protocols
Part II Supra-Experimentality
6 Shapes of Time
7 Experimental Cultures
8 Knowing and Narrating
9 Thinking Wild
10 A Eulogy of the Fragment
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Names
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger is an honorary professor of the history of science at the Technical University of Berlin and director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He is the author, with Staffan Muller-Wille, of The Gene: From Genetics to Postgenomics and A Cultural History of Heredity, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
"What's in an experiment? In this English edition of Split & Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation, a leading historian and philosopher of biology returns in fine form to renew his long-standing plea for scholarly attention to the human and material elements shaping experimentation in the life sciences. In this book, Rheinberger again pulls from the primary literature with which he is most familiar, that in molecular biology, to probe how both research materials and researchers' encounters with them, through experiments, shape the emergence of scientific knowledge [...] There is much of interest to the working biologist in Split & Splice. Rheinberger offers a convincing way of characterizing the biologist's role in her craft: She is the mediator between the real and the written; between the world of the living and the books and papers that, eventually, report new discoveries."
– FASEB Journal
"Perched between recursivity and transgression, precision and poetics-just like the research practices it discusses – this eagerly awaited volume is the ultimate exploration of the constellation of technologies, techniques, materials, and 'savage moments' that make experiments into a quintessential form of inquiry. Building on three decades of world-leading research in the history and philosophy of biology, Rheinberger shows how, in life as in science, experiments epitomize the human aspiration to intervene in the world with predictable results, and yet their power lies in exposing the limits of attempts to control and foresee the future. An unmissable read for anybody wishing to understand how science thrives by failing to carve nature at its joints."
– Sabina Leonelli, University of Exeter
"In this new book, drawing on his groundbreaking Toward a History of Epistemic Things, Rheinberger explores the logic of a 'phenomenology of experimentation.' Attentive to the materiality of science, it brings out the creative, epistemic, and collective dimensions of scientific production in experimental context. Written by a historian and philosopher of science trained in molecular biology, Split & Splice opens up the path to a genuine historical epistemology of the forms of scientific practices for the twenty-first century."
– Pierre-Olivier Methot, Universite Laval
