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More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14947 Mads Solberg A Cognitive Ethnography of Knowledge and Material Culture Cognition, Experiment, and the Science of Salmon Lice Mads Solberg Department of Health Sciences Norwegian University of Science and Technology Aalesund, Norway
Culture, Mind, and Society ISBN 978-3-030-72510-5 ISBN 978-3-030-72511-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72511-2
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Mads Solberg’s ethnography invites readers to a journey into the world of the science of salmon and their parasites. At the same time it explores the cultural production and transfer of knowledge as carried out through the materiality of scientific work. Such work means that human knowledge is not merely a representation of nature but intimately part of it. The ethnography examines in particular how materials and interactions in the lab produce knowledge; how scientific practices combine the discursive, material and the social, and how implicit cognitive processes are sorted out through this work. The book is a contribution to the anthropology of knowledge— following on the ground the work of experimental biologists with an emphasis on the cognitive processes embedded in their work. Solberg is interested in developing the concept of “distributed cognition” and in following how “materiality” plays out in the lab. These concepts allow for following scientists’ work not just as individuals and not just by analyzing their sociality as such. The book is about understanding the
v vi Series Editor’s Foreword broader experimental system of a lab—the physical, social, and concep- tual spaces in which scientists work. Solberg then asks how such a system is pragmatically shaped, and how cognitions are formed in such spaces. Solberg explores these analytical questions in the concrete world of Norwegian scientists (at the Sea Lice Research Centre) who interrogate salmon lice, and situates this site within the larger world of aquaculture and its history. The ethnography delves into new technologies of RNA- interference and how they are used in “reverse vaccinology”. Solberg demonstrates how cognition is pragmatically worked out by following collective and interspecies collaborations in the lab. He follows “chore- ographies” of enacted understanding in which scientists and technicians transform isolated, meaningless materials into meaningful wholes. Understanding how scientists repress gene expression in the lice genome means following the epistemological work in which researchers, materials (like lice tissues or microscopes), techniques, perceptions and various representations thereof (including imaging, semiotics, and note taking) are all put together and interact. This collaborative work forms what Solberg calls “ecological assemblies.” Analyzing them allows for understanding how “thinking through things” is worked out. Finally, Solberg draws attention to the ways distributed cognitive ecological systems are laden with values, emotions and political interests, which, Solberg suggests, should invite further inquiry and reflection.
Jerusalem, Israel Yehuda C. Goodman Acknowledgments
This book should not have come to fruition without generous assistance from the clever people at the Sea Lice Research Centre. Director Frank Nilsen and Ingunn Wergeland made this study possible, after I showed up at their door in May 2012, asking whether they would mind an anthropologist spending a few years alongside their crew, observing their work. With kindness they provided a workspace, access to the lab, and let me tag along on events big and small. No small favor to accord a stranger, and more than I could have hoped for. Your hospitality is deeply appreciated, and I remain impressed by the community you have built. A big thanks to Lars Hamre and Per-Gunnar Espedal for showing me the ropes in the wet lab, teaching me about the secrets of salmon lice, and for many laughs. Rune Male kindly let me attend his lectures on the structure and function of genes, and offered enlightening conversa- tions about the past, present, and future of molecular biology. The hard- working Ph.D.-students and postdocs at the Centre kindly answered my childlike questions about their work over the years, while they really had more important things to do. I owe them much. Christiane Eichner, Sussie Dalvin, and Sindre Grotmol gave generously from their time to
vii viii Acknowledgments satisfy my curiosity about their work. Collaborating with Sussie on a conference paper on how salmon lice were framed in online resources for SeaLice 2014 in Portland (Maine), offered a great learning oppor- tunity. Heidi Kongshaug and Wenche Telle explained the minutiae of work in the DNA lab to a fledging observer. Michael Dondrup and Inge Jonassen helped me understand basic principles about the digitization of life, and the bioinformatics of salmon lice. I would also like to thank other members of the community who kindly answered my questions, big and small. Various members of the SLRC have offered close readings of various parts of the manuscript and given valuable feedback. For this I am eternally grateful. Grants from the Meltzer Foundation, the Mobility Fund at the University of Bergen’s Faculty of Social Sciences, and the Mobility Fund for the Norwegian Research School in Anthropology, made it possible to spend the winter quarter 2014 at the Department of Cognitive Science, University of California—San Diego. Edwin Hutchins kindly sponsored my stay and thought me how to better think about cognitive anthro- pology. Hutchins and co-director Jim Hollan offered me a desk in the DCOG-HCI lab, and let me attend their research seminars, as well as many excellent lectures. My gratitude goes to faculty and graduate students affiliated with the lab for teaching me about their work, crit- ically shaping this book in its infancy. Morana Alaˇc deeply influenced my thoughts about how to respecify cognitive studies of science from an interactional perspective, offering perceptive and invaluable comments on later versions of this text. Thanks to Beverly Walton for getting critical paperwork in order. I am grateful to John McNeil, who convinced me about the need to situate the science of salmon lice in the bigger context of parasitism and the evolution of human domestication of other species. Much of this research was completed during my employment at the University of Bergen’s Department of Social Anthropology, which provided resources and intellectual freedom. I also learned much from productive colleagues at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and Humanities, an affiliation made possible through Matthias Kaiser, who weighed in with valuable perspectives as the project took shape. Andrea Acknowledgments ix
Bender, and the late Sieghard Beller, invigorated the debate about anthro- pology’s place in cognitive science and were remarkably supportive of this work, inviting me to present ideas in sessions at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Anthropological Sciences in Vancouver 2016, and at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in London 2017. Also, thanks to Radu Umbres who joined a stranger to host a panel on cogni- tive anthropology and cultural transmission at the conference for the European Association of Social Anthropology in Milan 2016. Michael Vina has been a great sparring partner, collaborator, and good friend since his arrival in Bergen in 2013. In December 2015, I relocated to my native city, Ålesund. Møre- forskning kindly provided an office space in a welcoming, interdis- ciplinary environment for applied research. A big thanks to director Agnes C. Gundersen, who generously offered a desk to a homeless anthropologist. A huge intellectual debt is owed to Ståle Knudsen, who supported my project from early on and into maturity. He relentlessly commented on drafts and brought clarity. Thanks for giving me freedom to roam different intellectual avenues, and for helping me find a way back to the important anthropological questions. More recently, my colleagues at the Department of Health Science at NTNU’s campus in Ålesund, have provided an excellent working envi- ronment to finalize this manuscript. It has also been a pleasure to work with the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan. My family has been an immense support. My father-in-law, Ottar Ulla, deserves special gratitude, for providing valuable insider perspec- tives on the industry’s past and prospects. The biggest debt of all is owed to my beloved wife Solfrid, our daughter Liv, and our son Dag. These delightful human beings, whom I sojourn together with, have pushed me when I needed a kick in the pants, and offered endless comfort when things were hard. All remaining errors are my own responsibility. I am sure readers will help point them out. About This Book
This book asks how scientists create and transform meaning about biological objects in the laboratory and gives a frontline perspective on how research materials and ideas come to life through experimenta- tion. An exercise in the anthropology of knowledge, the study integrates recent advances in cognitive anthropology on distributed, extended, and embodied aspects of thought and action, with historical and philosoph- ical perspectives on scientific experimentation. To account for acts of scientific meaning-making I argue for an integration of cognitive and social approaches through cognitive ethnography of biologists at work. As a fundamental relationship in the evolutionary process, parasitism poses a challenge for all domestication projects. It inevitably shapes this precarious dynamic, whether it takes place on land or in water. One persistent problem for salmon farmers in the past five decades has been a small crustacean parasite by the name of Lepeoptheirus salmonis, collo- quially known as “salmon lice” or “sea lice.” Copepods like the salmon louse are at the center of fierce controversies about the future of salmon farming, in Norway and elsewhere. In marine aquaculture, a fast-growing
xi xii About This Book sector of the global food supply, scientific knowledge has become indis- pensable for handling parasitism and other fish health problems. Conse- quentially, insights derived from biosciences are fundamentally shaping the industry’s trajectory. This monograph presents an ethnographic study of a community of biologists in Western Norway, who have created a novel environment for conducting experimental research on L. salmonis and its relatives. Drawing on a range of techniques from molecular biology and other areas of the life sciences, the group creates new insight about the organism’s genomic constitution. Their hope is that knowledge from molecular parasitology can lead to novel pest management tools, such as vaccines and other efficacious biomolecules, that may help bring this resilient parasite under control, before it causes more mischief. Progress in scientific sensemaking is sustained by a complex material culture, which the research community describes as their “pipeline” for research. Here, I investigate this infrastructure through the concept of “experimental systems,” a notion that draws attention to material, cogni- tive, practical, and social aspects of experimentation as a distinct family of epistemic activities. Through the framework of distributed cognition, the ethnography offers a window on the making of an experimental system, showing how biological phenomena and their representations are skill- fully transformed and propagated to become meaningful entities through epistemic actions in the lab. To account for the operation of experimental systems in cognitive terms, I must widen the unit of analysis beyond the level of the individual scientist and the making of scientific theory, to encompass a larger system of interaction. Through this move, I show how the lab is a “cognitive ecology” that sets up divisions of labor, and distributes cognitive tasks in time, space, through artifacts, and between collaborators engaged in creating new knowledge. Conventional accounts of experiments suggest that their purpose is auxiliary, as “handmaiden” to theory. By looking closely at laboratory action, the book instead shows how experimentation not simply tests theory but contributes to knowledge production through a set of broader epistemic strategies that rely on exploratory activities. In cognitive terms, such experimental practices fundamentally rely on a process of repre- sentation and re-representation. Through many epistemic iterations, the About This Book xiii objects of scientific interest, in this case aspects of the molecular biology of a small ectoparasite, are transformed and brought into focus. A case is made for the value of video-supported cognitive ethnog- raphy to capture these distributed aspects of scientific practice, so that the minutiae of multimodal engagements between scientists and their cognitive ecology can be subjected to careful interactional analysis. A methodological implication of the book’s approach to culture and cogni- tion, is that the unit of ethnographic analysis must be constantly shifted, depending on what kind of phenomena is being explored. This requires a story that intermittently zooms in and out from different levels of activity, sometimes bringing into focus the “biological skin-bag” of the situated individual, and sometimes widening the frame to capture more long-term interactions between human actors and an immersive material culture of scientific instruments and artifacts. Reconciling cognitive and social accounts of science has been difficult in the past. The first chapter sets the stage for my integrative project and describes how I approached the field. It also introduces conceptual prob- lems in psychological anthropology, and tools for integrating cultural, social, and cognitive perspectives on science in a conciliatory spirit, to respecify the anthropology of knowledge from an interactional perspec- tive. Chapter 2 tells the environmental history of salmon lice, and chron- icles how biological science came to play an important function in fish health work and pest management in salmon aquaculture. Chapters 3 and 4 describes the creation of a new molecular paradigm for salmon lice research, emphasizing the domestication and cultivation of lice-strains in the laboratory, the emergence of a new system for experimentation, as well as the adoption of RNA interference technology for learning about the function of genes, and identify vaccine candidates alongside other therapeutic interventions. Chapter 5 launches the book’s second part, centered around a cogni- tive ethnography of the fine micro-structures of epistemic activity. It is based on video-supported interactional analyzes of RNA-interference experiments, measurements of gene expression, and microanatomical work with the microscope. Each of the activity-complexes described in Chapters 5, 6,and7 involves the composition of “ecological assemblies” within the lab’s cultural-cognitive ecosystems. These support embodied xiv About This Book agents as they execute epistemic tasks using a wide collection of mate- rial resources. In sum, these chapters draw out the cultural practices of cognition in experimental life science. Chapter 8 brings together threads from preceding chapters and sketches recent developments in the science of salmon lice. I spell out implications of this ethnographic study for future work on distributed cognition, cultural transmission, and the contribution of material culture to the evolution of scientific knowledge. Contents
1 Tools for the Study of Scientific Practice 1 Approaching the Field 7 Outline 14 Primer on Cognitive Anthropology 17 Distributed Cognition 26 Related Germinations 35 Connecting Cognition, Materiality, and the Social in Studies of Scientific Practice 41 Cognitive Bloat and the Question of Agency 48 References 54 2 Salmon Lice: The Environmental History of a Troubled Relationship 63 Parasites 65 Domesticating Fish 66 The Great Acceleration of Marine Domestication 69 Salmon Farming and Salmon Lice 70 Early Experiments in Norwegian Aquaculture 74 From Rural Sideline to Industrial Production 77
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Foregrounding Fish Health 83 Managing Salmon Lice: Coevolution and Resistance 89 A Mutual Causation Process 91 References 98 3 Making a Cognitive Ecology for Experimental Practice 103 The Nature of Experimental Systems 105 Taming Lepeoptheirus salmonis 109 Incubators 113 Laboratory Bricolage 117 The Single-Tank System 121 Extending the System 131 Scaling up: The Sea Lice Research Centre 133 Material and Physical Space: Sites and Settings 139 Dividing Epistemic Labor 148 The Epistemological Features of Lepeoptheirus salmonis 152 References 163 4 RNAi: An Instrument for Exploratory Experimentation 169 Screening Salmon Lice 171 RNA Basics 174 MicroRNA: Converging on Biology’s Dark Matter 175 RNA Interference 178 Reception 183 RNAi and the Science of Salmon Lice 185 Exploratory Experimentation: From Basic RNA Research to RNAi in Salmon Lice 192 Three Modes of Inquiry in the Molecular Parasitology of Salmon Lice 200 Exploratory Experimentation as Distributed Cognition 207 References 212 5 Thinking Through Experiment: Enacting RNAi 219 Orchestrating Molecular Manipulations: The Checklist 225 Choosing a Fragment 228 Contents xvii
Thinking Through Trees: Phylogenetics as Epistemic Enhancers 231 Final Preparations 242 Injection day 245 Microinjections 249 Reinfection 251 Running the Experiment 253 Termination 255 Wrapping up 266 Concluding Remarks 268 References 273 6 Making Meaning and Measurement in Gene Expression Analysis 277 Fibronectin Type II 284 In the DNA Laboratory 289 The Polymerase Chain Reaction 293 Quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction 296 Making Data 299 Making Meaning: Image Schemas, Conceptual Blends and Material Anchors 304 Maintaining Conceptual Structure in QPCR with Material Anchors 310 Meaning and Measurement on the Benchtop 316 The Pedagogy of Ecological Assemblies and Cookbook Biology 321 Conclusion 328 References 334 7 An Anatomy of a Microanatomy 339 Overview 343 Microscopes and Histology at the Centre 345 Visualizing Biological Structure 349 Exocrine Glands 353 The Scientist’s Microscope and the Blind Man’s Stick: Theory and Technique 357 Establishing Spatial Reference During Microscopy 364 xviii Contents
Traveling Through Histological Landscapes 373 Tracing Anatomical Reasoning in Notes 379 Creating Spatial References in the Notebook 387 Spatial Reference in the Manuscript 391 Structuring Microscopic Experience 398 Toward a Cognitive Ethnography of Microscopic Vision 402 References 408 8 Concluding Remarks and Future Prospects 413 Surmounting Crisis 417 Toward a Cognitive Anthropology of Experimental Knowledge and Material Culture 420 Bounding the System 423 Dark Matters 425 Cumulative Culture, Materiality, and Scientific Progress 427 Prospects for Future Studies 432 Articulating Scientific Practices 437 References 439
Index 445 About the Author
Mads Solberg is Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Health Sciences in Aalesund. He teaches and does research on how people interact with technology in healthcare.
xix List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Gravid female adult lice, 8–18 mm long, with egg-strings clustering on salmon specimens (photos courtesy of Lars Hamre) 3 Fig. 3.1 A new material culture for the science of salmon lice 116 Fig. 3.2 Three iterations of the single-tank system 128 Fig. 3.3 Scenes from LiceLab 147 Fig. 3.4 Organizational chart for the Sea Lice Research Centre 150 Fig. 4.1 Rendition of the Center’s pipeline for discovery 172 Fig. 4.2 A simplified diagram of the RNAi pathway 183 Fig. 4.3 Three models of scientific progress (after Galison, 1997) 197 Fig. 5.1 Pre-computations in an RNAi trial 246 Fig. 5.2 Tracking experimentally modified salmon lice and RNA fragments 252 Fig. 5.3 Hanna is seated on the left; Sara sits on the right. The intern who delivers specimens from the technician in the adjacent room enters with fresh specimens from the left (not visible in image) 261 Fig. 6.1 Author’s rendering of an annotated heatmap used by Veronica 288 Fig. 6.2 Feeding the qPCR machine and setting up the reaction 290
xxi xxii List of Figures
Fig. 6.3 An algorithmic-level description of how “Delta-Delta CT” is calculated 303 Fig. 6.4 Bar graph rendered by the author, based on a working spreadsheet exemplifying relative expression levels as a “fold-difference” in RNAi-treated adult lice 305 Fig. 6.5 Conceptual blends, and blends with a material anchor 309 Fig. 6.6 Creating stable representations of phenomena and keeping track of test-tubes in DNAse treatment 313 Fig. 6.7 A spreadsheet acquires epistemic function through ecological assemblies for the intelligent use of space 317 Fig. 6.8 Rapid Amplification of cDNA ends is a method to obtain full length-sequences of cDNA 326 Fig. 7.1 Orchestrating representational artifacts on the bench during microscopy. Simplified birds-eye view of relevant parts in the scene, including placement of camera and ethnographer (E) 340 Fig. 7.2 In line 1–2 (left image), Hanna moves specimen into the center of the visual field by adjusting the knob with hand. In line 9 (right image), Hanna moves her hand from the lower knob to upper knob, to control an arrow pointer in the visual field that allows highlighting of microscopical objects 342 Fig. 7.3 Collaborative scanning electron microscopy of exocrine glands using whole-mount specimens. Tom annotates visuals on the screen for Hanna using deictic gestures 353 Fig. 7.4 Slide boxes with stained lice tissues. Each slide is numbered and chronologically organized from the first to last section. This facilitates easy location and retrieval of relevant points of interest 355 Fig. 7.5 Establishing spatial reference in collaborative microscopy 376 Fig. 7.6 Transcript from two pages in the notebook 383 Fig. 7.7 Sketch of a preliminary anatomical map, marking assumed locations of the exocrine system 385 Fig. 7.8 Sample from a notebook entry with a transcript (on the right) 390 List of Figures xxiii
Fig. 7.9 An annotated montage of micrographs from SEM (b, d, f and g) and light microscopy (a, c, and e), supporting the locative description (Øvergård et al., 2016). Reproduced with permission from Wiley & Sons 394 Fig. 7.10 Basic schematic structure of containment and source-path-goal 400 List of Tables
Table 1.1 Elements of laboratory practice, summarized after Ian Hacking (1992) 44 Table 7.1 Excerpt from conversation 341 Table 7.2 Relative properties of figure and ground constructions, based on Croft and Cruse (2004: 56) 371 Table 7.3 Excerpt from conversation 375
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