Constance Perin

I presented this colloquium paper on March 30, 1998 to the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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CULTURE AT WORK:
BIOTECH SCIENTISTS ON AND OFF THE BENCH

Constance Perin©

In January this year, in a classroom on the first floor of the biology building, Philip Sharp, Nobel Laureate and head of the MIT biology department, offered an Independent Activities Period session, ‟Biotech: Past, Present, and Future.” He said that he would outline a history of the scientific events culminating in Biogen, where he is on the Board and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee. He asked us to look for several things in his talk: how new knowledge creates wealth, how it is possible to be in the right place at the right time with respect to fundamental advances in science and create a new industry, how it required a lot of capital to cover a seven year gap from start-up at the minimum, how science makes the step to application to society ‟so another cadre would have the chance to do science and be involved in creating something new.” He emphasized that the scientists who formed Biogen had ‟fun” bringing the company into being, but they were ‟naive” about organizational issues -- their original ‟interlocked” organization mandated everyone’s approval; they learned that didn’t work. They had begun by having no respect for business skills but soon found that what they knew as molecular biologists didn’t translate into motivating people, structuring organizations, or financing them. They came to recognize and respect the special knowledge needed. Keeping the science and the business separate is important.
Toward the end of "Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology," Paul Rabinow asks several people for a ‟summing up...about PCR and the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Kary Mullis.” Tom White, who had been director of R&D at Cetus, says:
"Six points: One, this is the first Nobel Prize based on science done at a start-up biotechnology company, which I think is very significant. It affirms that creative science was being done in these companies in the 1980s, as creative as that being done in any other labs in the world. Two, the work was rapidly published....Three, it shows that although they are usually considered to be incompatible, such science and its patenting don’t inherently have to conflict. Four, the idea was clearly Mullis’s, no one contests that. Five, the key experiments to prove the concept worked were done by a team, not by Mullis alone, in a specific environment. Without that team and that environment there would have been no PCR at that time. Six, there were at the time good research reasons to doubt that the concept would work and to doubt his ability to make it work" (Rabinow 1996, 162).

My questions today center around two conditions of knowledge production of university-based and firm-based scientists at and away from the bench: the social organization of work and of households. I draw on a corpus of materials I’ve been collecting over the last year or so, partly from interviews and observations at two small biotech firms and partly from other studies and industry discourse.

I’ve interviewed 41 scientists, lab technicians, administrators, and executives, and observed lab work, science update meetings, project review meetings, a journal club meeting, management meetings, and a state-wide industry meeting. The scientists and science professionals divide evenly between women and men, but administrators and executives are mostly male. I’ve engaged in what Latour calls ‟restitution” and that I call ‟iteration” -- discussions of my preliminary observations at each firm with any of those who had originally volunteered to an interview. The monograph I’m writing will fill out the story I sketch here with interviews and other materials.

My research is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, through a two-year grant to the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute. One of the Institute’s goals is to educate citizens and policymakers about issues involved in shifting to an economy that acknowledges the social and cultural importance of work arrangements that allow for the time employees need for care-giving to young and old, for self-development, and for community activities. Another goal is to strengthen women’s career opportunities. This project is one of several the Sloan Foundation is funding in a multimillion dollar ‟work and family” initiative -- economists, psychologists, and sociologists at several universities are also participating.

This research program is concentrating on the relationships among employees’ work, home, and community activities and how they arrange these. I’m one of three study directors, each asking particular questions in the same firms -- Lotte Bailyn and Susan Eaton are studying the social and psychological dimensions of science professionals’ careers, Ann Bookman and Paula Rayman are studying familial and community-based relationships. Francoise Carre is developing data relating to industry-wide trends vis a vis financing, regulation, and industry demography.

I’m trying to characterize institutionally and culturally the intersections of scientific and technical work processes, business objectives, and professional employees’ obligations and interests at and away from the workplace. By culturally, I mean how technoscience professionals themselves understand their lifeworlds on and off the bench, by institutionally I mean the constraints and opportunities within which they act. I’m working with interviews of women and men who have been involved in two kinds of projects, one ongoing, the other completed. I ask them to talk about these experiences and how these intersect with their activities and interests away from work.

Most I interviewed are in their late 20's and in their 30's; only a few are in their late 40's and early 50's. Their household situations are various. One man and three women are unmarried; two women are single parents, one with two teenagers, the other with four children in college and high school. Spouses of women and men are professors, teachers, computer scientists, science professionals, businessmen, home-health aide, nurse, lawyer. Spouses are more likely to bring work home than employees of these firms are. Four couples have no children and both work; the others have children ranging from newborns to young adults. Preschoolers are mostly in day care or with relatives; many elementary school children are in extended-day programs for which parents pay tuition. Some employees have responsibilities for parents and relatives with health problems. In both firms the only person of color I have seen was a receptionist who quit to find a job closer to her home; a visitor-operated check-in system has replaced her.

Study Overview
Our choice of the biotech industry was largely fortuitous. It fit several criteria. Women and men in professional and technical occupations are employed in about equal numbers, and in biotech as elsewhere, women are not well represented in upper management. The industry creates new jobs and is oriented to significant social needs. The choice of small firms is deliberate. One firm now employs 57 people, the other 45; in each, just over half are directly involved in research, and the others work in development, regulatory affairs, and administration. About one-third of biotech companies (1,287 as of 1996) employ fewer than 50; more than two-thirds employ fewer than 135.

In less elaborated bureaucracies, we expected to find ‟leading-edge” innovations in ‟family friendly” policies largely built around flexible schedules for work and for careers, such as parental leave without career penalty, support for child- and elder-care, part-time positions, and job-sharing. In both firms, part-time work is discouraged in every position as are four-day 40-hour weeks; there are no policies for job-sharing or alternative career tracks for those who want to stop the clock for various reasons. Work during ‟core hours” (say, 9:30-4:30) is the main flexibility policy. There are, however, instances of a four-day week for a new mother, six month sabbaticals to accompany a spouse, and time off for family illnesses, but unpaid or counted against vacation days. We also expected to find that overtime work would be regularly expected of some employees, but start-up fever is long since past for these two firms -- one has existed for about 15 years, the other about 13 years. Employees by and large report that their firm is "compassionate," "flexible," and "a really good place to work." As in most of American industry such off-normal schedules and absences are personally negotiated between supervisor and employee, senior professionals have more flexibility prerogatives than junior, and firm policies are pegged to the federal requirements of the Family Medical Leave Act and to biotech industry benchmarks, which are little different from those of other industries -- which is to say, minimally flexible. When scientists are involved in external relationships their work is governed by contracts organized around deadlines, which create the usual demands for availability and add time pressures.

In any case, the general industrial rule is that the firm comes first. Those employed in process development work -- scaling up bench-quantity materials and meeting regulatory requirements for reliability -- are likely to be allowed less flexibility than those in discovery work, partly because development tasks are more routinized and answerable to a wider social and technical system. Studies in other sectors suggest similar patterns and observe that work+family innovations are largely the province of large companies with more slack in their production system, more people to cover absences, and deep pockets. In line with industry patterns, these firms depend on intellectual partnerships, financial alliances, and licensing arrangements with others, small and large, as well as on research collaborations with university-based scientists and with clinical sites. These two firms are actors in networks that are their lifelines: one firm has about one year of cash remaining, the other only about half again as much time to burn (an industry term -- a firm’s ‟burn rate” marks its movement toward incineration as a viable commodity on Wall Street. In this, these firms exemplify more general trends toward insecurity in professional employment.

Each firm has experienced a range of woes that are destabilizing and disappointing: financial mismanagement, shortage of lab space, stock price drops, conflictful alliances, ineffective products, over- and under-hiring, a succession of top managers, patent death, lawsuits, sale of subsidiaries, and employee layoffs and turnover (less in R&D than in other functions). At the same time, each firm has made progress in its terms -- narrowed its objectives, filed and received patents, formed new alliances, enrolled collaborators, produced research materials at the bench, improved a cell line, produced peer-reviewed publications, made good hiring decisions, developed animal models. At one firm, the research director said, "Our population is now much older than when we started but we have a new group of young PhDs who give it the zip we need."

Even as biotechnology is regarded as a major growth industry, the record shows that most firms live in situations where survival is tantamount to growth. In 1997 "twenty-seven biotech products have made it to Phase III [human] trials before crashing...Only eight biotech companies [of 1500] have ever made a profit, only ninety have products that are even remotely close to market, and the industry as a whole has been losing a few billion dollars every year" (Brownlee 1997, pp. 64, 65, 66). "We’ve been honed down to a group of true believers" who are highly esteemed and trusted by one another and by business and scientific managers.

Sites of Production
My data support Paul Rabinow’s account in "Making PCR," which suggests that many scientists in industry perceive a commercial venue as being a better venue than a university for their curiosities and energies. In these firms as at Cetus, the ‟new cadre” includes women and men with BA’s and MA’s who get on the job training, are socialized into science norms and values, get their names on publications, and are often highly esteemed by PhD scientists -- I’ve heard several described as being ‟creative,” ‟talented,” ‟outshone the PhD’s.” Nevetheless, "PhD-itis" and "degreeism" are nevertheless well-noticed by some with and without one.
After postdocs, some came into industry ten or fifteen years ago when they felt they had little choice -- academic jobs were scarce and another postdoc meant serious financial hardship, especially if they had children. Kurt says:
‟When I was looking there weren't a lot of jobs out there, and I applied to places I didn't want to go. I hadn't considered industry very seriously except perhaps at Pfizer, large, very stable. At a scientific meeting I was talking to a guy with strong interests in what I was doing research in, and he said, "You should apply for that position we had in Science." Here was a big ad I had completely ignored -- but it was advertising exactly for what I was doing. When I made that decision to go into industry, I had all the reservations that a person raised in an academic environment has: I was going to have a lobotomy, I would never write a paper again or write a grant. I've written 50 papers and several research proposals since working in industry. There are a lot of misconceptions about what happens" (K, 3).

Stan puts it:
"A lot of the stories were that in industry you couldn't do good research. What everyone warned me about industry isn't true, and all that nobody warned me against are true. Research is getting very similar, even though people don't realize it....One thing what you worry about in industry is patenting and the legal side, and now everybody in academics worries about patenting and there’s a lot more collaboration between the academy and industry. It’s a converging evolution.
"When I came from academics everyone told me what would be the differences, but no one told me about what would be better. The big thing is you have to get along with other people. In academics you could be an extremely difficult person -- most of them end up at [University X] -- who could be put off in a corner to work by himself. Everyone would ignore you, and you’d be tolerated and secure. In industry that won't work. Even if someone is talented and productive, if they won't work well with others, that person would not find continued employment in industry. You've really got to try to get along with other people. If you don't want to make the effort you shouldn’t be here" (S, 4).

Rex, a senior scientist, recounted his expectations of a career in biotech.
"I went in with a combination of total naivete and gung ho excitement about the opportunities, the availability of resources -- much better resources than in a university. We all came from a university of course. There was the potential excitement of discovering a drug. There was the team oriented approach which appealed to me very very strongly. So I would say in all honesty that I was very excited to come here. It increased my salary tremendously, which was wonderful. I finished my PhD through blood sweat and tears -- it practically dissolved our marriage. I spent five years working for someone who left me by myself to figure out the science. I was working from early in the morning to after midnight. I was going to kill him -- it almost dissolved my marriage. But we survived. Then a first postdoc was a disaster for a million reasons, and I didn't end up publishing many things. I saw very clearly my direction -- I realized that writing grants and grantsmanship would not be a plausible avenue for me, I'm not a particularly creative person. I did come up with several ideas here, much more than other people. I'm extremely good experimentally. I didn't see getting grants as a good option for my career. I thought industry would give me a combination of options and tools to progress.
"My second postdoc was 70 hours a week for a year, often going home at 3 in the morning. After that, I managed to find this job, published few things, and suddenly there was interest in me. I came here with excitement and my relief was tremendous. My daughter was born at the time. Living under the uncertainty of grantsmanship did not appeal to me at all" (R, 5).

David Gelfand, a senior scientist and research administrator at Cetus, expresses a similar enthusiasm, qualifying it by asking, ‟Are you going to be able to do what’s important for you to do? That requires a commonality of interests between your scientific goals and corporate goals. And second, who are you doing it with? Because 90 percent of what you do is collaborative.
"It’s very difficult, as an academic scientist, to do interactionist, collaborative science. The acculturation process is one that is keyed to individual, personal achievement. You first learn that as a graduate student. To get into the best lab as a first- or second-year graduate student, you’d better excel on the individual achievement scale....You have to prove that you can do independent experimental research...."
Gelfand goes on to work out the scenario of competition: post docs who compete on the same problem in two different labs, then as assistant professors’ competing for grants, renewals, tenure...with the added irony, he says, that if you should collaborate with your former mentor -- by definition famous -- ‟All of your independent work done as an assistant professor will be ascribed to the brilliance of former major mentors, making it ever so much more difficult to get tenure.” The lessons are all organized around ‟how not to collaborate” (Rabinow 1996, 44-45).
Ellen Daniell, the first woman in the molecular biology department at Berkeley and denied tenure there, held administrative jobs at Cetus, one of which was as director of personnel. She was also married to David Gelfand. She recounts the firm’s recruiting strategies.
"The thing that we were able to honestly recruit people with, that turned out to be what our scientists were most excited about, the thing that they could pass on to the new people, was the fact that science was so much more cooperative than at most universities. There was also more promotion and evaluation of people on their merits; demonstrated achievement was more important than paper credentials. At Cetus someone with a B.A. could get promoted to a position of responsibility. That was absolutely impossible at the university" (Rabinow 1996, 107).

In her study of how biotech scientists legitimate their firm-based research jobs, Laurel Smith-Doerr finds that they cite greater access to funding resources at a time when these are declining at universities as well as more time for research (instead of spending time writing grants and recruiting students) (9-12). Still, they needed academic scientists evaluations of particular firms to see their move as legitimate. They see NIH grants as endorsing their commercial enterprise. And they see biotech as ‟a new, different, exciting field where collaboration and gender equality moved beyond rigid academic roles” (ibid. 20).
In one of the biotech firms there are, however, overt frictions and gender issues. It is also a firm where a small management group (some of whom are scientists) holds the reins tightly, by contrast to the other firm, which overtly maintains a consensual ethos, even as responsibility is allocated hierarchically. A woman scientist with the firm for ten years recently published two papers, the basis for patent applications. She responds to my question, ‟Do you observe gender patterns in science?”
"Not just in science but in business and engineering and anywhere that's male dominated, women haven't been in high positions until recently. It does affect things. Men in science who've been around, they've already formed their networking. A lot of women are more new on the scene, and women who have made it are more pushy, aggressive, egotistical. The thing that hurts me too is that I look a lot younger than I am. I have a lot of experience, but I have to get over that hurdle. It doesn't affect me except in newer situations. What I've seen here, women seem to be much better at communicating and organizing, but they are not really rewarded for that. Other people can clean up and do the dirty work while the men cut to the chase, do the creative thing, or follow their own agenda. They'll push that. I try to be more of a team player and try to satisfy everybody's desire about how things should be done. Other women here are a lot like that" (I, 3).

Conditions of Work at the Bench
Biotech professionals understand that their responsibility is to "focus," the opposite of which is "drift." Drift includes "side issues, side lights, tangents, or new things". In an academic lab, scientists are seen to have the license to pursue those in a quest for understanding, whereas theirs is a quest for a marketable drug. A woman scientist says, ‟Focus isn't as important in academic research because pursuing side things might give you better understanding. In biotech your goal is to develop a drug. It's nice to know various aspects of the process, but it's not essential. These takes some time to figure out.” Some scientists are ambivalent. One man puts it, ‟We try to keep focussed. But we love to have new things come along.” A woman says, ‟ [A] side issue is something interesting -- you wouldn’t be in science if it quit being interesting.” One man speaks of ‟science hunger” as the motivation for himself and others.

Yet there may be less ‟drift” possible now in academic labs. Phyllis, a senior scientist says:
"It's been years since I was in academia, but things there are changing. It used to be it's your own project, so you could spend twenty years to get a PhD. With resources now limited, a friend who has her own lab in a university loses sleep over what a student is doing. If it had been only that student’s problem, then maybe she would let it go, but it's the grant for the whole group that depends on the results" (P, 3).

Lux and Lucre
At two forks in the road, commercial and scientific interests cannot defer their conjunction: deciding whether to cancel a project and stabilizing the knowledge produced by assays, experiments, and preclinical and clinical trials. At these moments, scientific knowledge is on a see-saw with commercial knowledge.

A project review I sat in on illustrates the number of intersections collapsed in the term ‟biotech” -- intersections of scientific, regulatory, and market criteria, of scientific dissent and organizational authority systems, and of the significance of data. This landmark meeting was organized to discuss next steps based on the results of a year-long clinical trial. Supported by the second-largest project budget in the company, the goal of Project Bodoni is a vaccine for a specific disease target. Work had been going on for several years

Months before this meeting, interviews with several scientists revealed long-standing dissension over the merits of the science. Helen has been with the firm for about 12 years and holds patents from which the firm earns revenues. Her views were echoed by four other scientists who spoke with me.
"I'm not on Project Bodoni, but I've seen a project review. As formulated now I don’t think it is a particularly good vaccine. The testing is not showing that it is. That’s the general opinion of most other scientists here. Yale, the project leader and Robert, the head of R&D think it’s OK. I went in to talk to Robert and voiced my qualms, and I was not able to get very far. That's a case where there's scientific dissent, but because I'm not on the project, my opinion was noted but not appreciated. I feel it’s important to voice my misgivings. I think Robert is making a mistake to push the project the way it’s being pushed....They’re going into trials with something substandard because it’s expeditious in the short term. There are benefits to the company to say publicly we're in those trials" (H, 1, 4-5).

The review was scheduled for all day. Sitting around a conference table are Yale, the project leader, Robert, the head of R&D, David, the leader of the university collaboration, Peter, head of process development, Vicky, the firm’s regulatory affairs specialist, and Larry, a senior scientist. There are also two outside observers: George, a federally employed research scientist knowledgeable about this area, and Stewart, a consultant with a firm specializing in biotech marketing. Sitting around the perimeter of the room are several staff scientists who had followed the project (not all the doubters attended), the VP for regulation and quality, the medical director, the firm’s project coordinator who is also a marketing specialist, myself, and, popping in and out, the firm’s CEO.

The head of R&D, Robert, opens the morning with an overhead of the six topics that would organize the day’s discussions: What the basic R&D approach and methodology has been, Does the vaccine have the expected biological effect, What performance characteristics are expected of the vaccine, What are the alternative options, and Can the product be improved?

David presents the data analysis tentatively, disclaiming deep expertise in statistical methods and crediting a member of his research group. Of three groups in the efficacy trial, the results in one are decidedly negative. The afternoon begins as Stewart says,
"What’s needed now is a product profile [a profile publicly states their expectations of the product] now that you have data. You have to go back to the original product profile because you know there’s a fish there but you don’t know what it is. A vaccine is one thing, but if it’s seen as biological product, you don’t call it a vaccine.
"Simultaneous trials, which are a big cash and work burden on small company, are a possible option. Safety and efficacy would be shown together. If it doesn’t work it doesn’t work. It’s not a vaccine now and perhaps it will not ever be. The data doesn’t show prevention."
His main recommendation was:
"The R&D group should draft a product profile and circulate it for all others in the company to comment on. R&D should meet in one month on the claims the science is going to pursue. If you can’t agree, the marketing people will take the lead -- the deciding vote goes to the commercial people. You have to get this done, otherwise you’re going in circles. You don’t have a vaccine but you have another product. It isn’t what you thought, so it’s either nothing or something else. The sooner to clinical studies the better." Among other things, he also said, "You need more science and research to understand how the product works. "Set a timeline to the end of June next year. Decide then to scuttle the product if the science doesn’t support the claims” (ST, Review 8).

Over a beer in the company cafeteria at the end of the meeting, I ask a few of the doubters how they felt. They agree that they are satisfied that the important issues had surfaced, but that not all their concerns are allayed. The next day, I interviewed Mary, head of manufacturing and quality, about that morning’s meeting of the Bodoni project group to hear what happened at the review meeting.
"They will be bringing in Stewart for follow up discussions, which I think is really good. There were no decisions on which pathway we'd be taking. In general people did feel better, not necessarily that the product was going to work better, but that it was more of a team and that the right issues were being addressed.
"One of the largest issues for us as a company is finding new programs or projects we want to pursue. We don't have much in the pipeline that we're excited about. We have some cash and we need to merge or buy something, so I think that puts pressure on programs we have. I don’t know that anyone else agrees. It would be very hard to say let's stop doing Project Bodoni until having another program to replace it. If we were to cancel this program that would be material information [an SEC requirement], and we’d have to put out a press release -- the stock probably is not going to go up. It has to be a consideration. It's still possible that this vaccine will do much of what it’s meant to do" (M, 4).
In an earlier interview when I asked in general about dissent and consensus around cancelled or shelved projects, Robert told me that there is no appeal from his and the CEO’s decisions. ‟This is not a democracy,” he declared. Despite, these scientists understand themselves as part of a collective -- ‟We talk about everything here.”

The collaborative values operating in biotech firms seem to be shaping an institutional sea change by shifting the locus of knowledge production, when scientists feel they can do their work only outside of academic environments where fates are so differently decided. Then, in these commercial sites, many find that their expertise is no match for business strategies. What I’m unable to speak to is to what extent, given competition and grantsmanship, there is another kind of see-saw that scientists ride in universities and another kind of authority system. When scientists in university labs have a commercial application in mind, they take on the ‟character of ‛quasi-firms’,” according to one sociologist (Feller 1990, in Powell and Owen-Smith 1998, 29). Or is this observation born of surprise at finding the collaborative form in the lab? Is it an observation of ‟focus” to the exclusion of ‟drift”? Surely when a university scientist is preparing her next grant proposal, she is ‟focused.” I suspect that these approaches oscillate in both academy and industry.

Early on in both firms, a division of labor mimicking academic departments eventually gave way to a project-based organization. The project is the scientific collective and so understood by its participants. I see the firm as a holding company for projects -- firms that focus on only one or two projects can fail on Wall Street. It is as well the holding company for patents: scientists’ names may be on the patent but rights belong to the firm. This is a collectivizor, as employees concretely realize benefits from work identified with others.

The fervor of those who seek the collaborative form in science is a structural force to reckon with as a shaper of their choices and their science. They see this form as both emotional and intellectual capital that only firms can provide them with. While the collaborations aren’t always full-bodied in these firms (in one firm there are loners and personal animosities), I find that there is at least no sense that a collaborative spirit is mandated from the top, nor is there the false bonhomie around ‟teamwork” I’ve observed in other industrial organizations. Focused on products as they may be, the scientists talking to me see themselves as pursuing ‟basic science.” Diane, a senior scientist, said she was underwhelmed by a project to develop a diagnostic product but then she found in it several ‟really interesting” questions, which she could pursue only because she was doing that work. In one firm, they say that a ‟tangent” and a ‟side thing” became promising projects.

Several questions arise. How have biotech scientists’ demand for and satisfactions with a collaborative environment affected academic science? More significantly, are there different kinds of scientific knowing when a scientist understands her work as ‟I” or as ‟we”? Do the growing number of university-industry affiliations and their financial and intellectual interdependencies express as well an acknowledgement of this cultural difference? By what criteria would we know whether firm-based science is basic science?

Household Dynamics
In the sixteenth century, Deborah Harkness tells us, Jane and John Dee lived in an ‟experimental household,” where John, then the ‟most eminent natural philosopher” of Elizabethan England, conducted experiments and received visitors, patrons, students, and clients. In their house and its auxiliary buildings, Jane Fromond Dee ‟moved about [and] managed the hundred details that were her responsibility as John Dee’s wife” (Harkness 1997, 248) -- offering hospitality to visitors and townsfolk, coping with hysterical and drunken servants, accommodating resident students, and being mother to an unspecified number of children. During their marriage, at least 27 female and 29 male servants were employed; in 1592 there were 17 people living in the household, 9 family members and 8 servants.

Although John was the sole manager of his assistants and apprentices, their sometimes troublesome personalities affected the entire household (Dee recruited melancholiacs for their susceptibility to the divine and astral influences he investigated). Jane was given to fly into ‟what John described as her ‛mervaylous rages’” (ibid, 254).

John’s career and Jane’s household management were joined, Harkness tells us, ‟during the early modern period, at a time when sites of knowledge production were in transition...For a relatively brief time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the household bridged the gap between monastery and laboratory as a site for the practice of natural philosophy....[T]he world of sixteenth-century natural philosophy was the domestic sphere, where women presided as wives, partners, and managers” (ibid. 248-249). It was then an ideal that ‟husbands and wives were to form a managerial partnership.” Yet John’s space was to be private and exclusive: ‟[I]t was [Jane’s] responsibility to maintain household order and efficiency, but it was not her right to question her husband’s professional activities” (255). The consequences of these nevertheless spilled over into Jane’s space. Dee’s pursuit of his professional activities ultimately invaded her very body when he coerced Jane, kicking and screaming, into a wife-swapping arrangement.

We might imagine that if Jane one day had had enough and gone home to mother, John would have found a woman to keep his ‟experimental household,” or maybe a butler. That is, the household was a social and material precondition to John Dee’s work. Today, when it comes to characterizing the contexts of knowledge production, scholars other than biographers tend to ignore the household. Knowledge production they are likely to locate only in the other social systems associated with work and career -- the ‟laboratory,” the ‟office,” and of course the ‟actor network,” usually composed only of people also in labs and offices.

"Making PCR," Rabinow claims, is an account of ‟the ‛style of life’ or form of ‛life regulation’ fashioned by the young scientists who chose to work in this new [biotech] industry rather than pursue promising careers in the university world” (Rabinow 1996: 2). Throughout, he begins his interviews with Cetus scientists by asking them to "start with your family background" (1996, 37), and to keep them talking, asks "What happened next in your professional life" (e.g., 71). His interlocutors spontaneously provide tantalizing glimpses of what they apparently consider to be momentous intersections of their professional choices and private lives. They reveal themselves as partners, spouses, lovers, and parents, as living in the orbit of others’ interests and priorities and of being embedded in relationships that, they report, affected their choices in their work and careers. Each case makes it clear that courtship, coupling, kinship, and household location are bound up in the practice of science and the trajectory of career.

Rabinow does not follow up any of these moments in his line of questioning or analyses nor do his subsequent quotations from his interlocutors speak again directly of such intersections, even as they recount career moves that are also geographic moves in which significant others presumably have an interest. There is no discussion of the household effects of work weeks lasting 70 to 90 hours (98). ‟As an anthropologist,” he says, ‟I am curious about the form of life in the making both within the labs and beyond (as tentative, divergent, and emergent as it is)" (2; italics in original). Still, scientists’ understandings of their lifeworlds ‟beyond” their labs remain unremarked. Their ‟milieu,” these scientists claim, consists not only of science, state, and market, but of the events and activities I sum up as household -- a site of their and significant others’ affections, constraints, and forms of life.

The household as one element in the contexts of scientific production is perhaps entirely relegated to biography and autobiography, if it is mentioned at all. Only there are we likely to find ‟household” elaborated into its special and unique activities, affective and cognitive, around kin and friends, sustenance, sexuality, health, hygiene, consumption, finances, community, lineage, sociality, children, parents, pets. We need to ask after the explanatory status of the household system as others ask about character, personality, genius. In his claim that family dynamics are a source of sibling strategies that shape approaches to ideas, for example, Frank Sulloway reframes those categories.

I am asking what the consequences might be for our understandings of the conditions surrounding the production of knowledge in science and technology if we were to honor life events that actors themselves regard as significant, yet which are likely to be regarded as nonintellectual, private, domestic moments appropriate only perhaps for individuals’ biographies, psychobiographies, or gossip. Properly examined, households are sites of dynamics, contingencies, events, affects, activities, norms, values, and motivations....all of whose variety and multiplicity can be compared systematically and referred to collectively shared ideas, values, and praxis. Households do not inevitably conjure up individualistic or psychological explanations.

It is certainly possible to view the erasure of household and community spheres from accounts of technoscience praxis as a sign of gender hierarchy -- household is feminized, the technoscientific workplace is masculinized. Household is organized subjectively and affectively, technoscience objectively and rationally. Household is a domain of ideology, religion, and politics; and of course the workplace is not. It might be possible to approach the question of continuities between these spheres in parallel with feminist studies that track gender bias into scientific and technological concepts, models, claims, or methods. At the moment, I am not asking those questions. Nor am I questioning capacities for scientific disinterestedness as a function of whether technoscientists do or do not overlap domains.

My questions are instead meant to try to make explicit the relationship between life at and away from the workplace for its influences on praxis, in this case of small biotech firms, standing as exemplars of science and technology in the world: their organization of research, ways of choosing projects, assigning tasks, using instruments, and scheduling work, among others. This means asking, through closely examining these material, existential practices, what are the consequences of dissociation of life at and away from work for our understandings of the production of scientific and technological knowledge?

For example, in both firms, women and men professionals alike declare that, in general, women are ‟naturally” attuned to detailed work which men eschew. Women doing science are said to be risk averse, while men favor risky, ‟glossy” experiments, leaving the proving out work to others. Women with children are careful in another way: keeping their heads down in order to preserve their jobs. If they had to work elsewhere, they believe, they would start at the bottom of the trust ladder and thereby deprived of the flexibility they need as parents and as single parents. One male scientist with teenage children, whose spouse is a professor, is also wedded to these perks.
‟[E]xistential biography,” Thomas Söderqvist writes, is an edifying ‟genre which conveys an understanding of what it means to live a life in which scientific work and rational thinking are part of an existential project and involve existential choices. The aim of existential biography is to help scientists and nonscientists alike to strengthen their abilities to live fuller and more authentic intellectual lives” (Söderqvist 1996 76-77). To help achieve that empathy and self- and social knowledge, science biography might inquire into the characteristics of the cultural and material conditions of technoscientists’ households and their relationship to existential choices and their perceived and actual degree of freedom to make them. This question resonates with those we already ask about race, gender, class, for example.

Household activities are modulated by finances (income, inheritance, debt, consumption) and ramifying throughout is the division of labor between spouses and partners, between adults and children, between paid and unpaid services. Marie and Pierre Curie had not only the wherewithal for paid household help, but they could also count on Pierre’s father, who came to live with them as a widower and cared for his granddaughters for about ten years (Pycior, p 199, in Abir-Am and Outram, 1989). In these firms, household location matters greatly -- some have ‟terrible” long commutes but are reluctant to move until the firm’s future is clearer.

With industrialization came the spatial separation of workplace from household, which has since been translated into employers’ denial of employees’ other life obligations and interests. The denial recurs in the expectation of ‟ideal workers” who are ever available, whose primary loyalty is to the firm or the laboratory. Dismantling this artificial wall has always been contentious, yet where a business interest is acknowledged there are programs for child care and alcohol and drug abuse programs, for example, and, lately, the federal Family Medical Leave Act. But what have recently been justified as business efficiencies -- layoffs, decreases in pension contributions, and increases in contract employment -- I read as employers’ strategy for rebuilding this wall through intimidation.

Is there a new question on this battered bargaining table, now that ‟dual career” professional men and women have been forced to sit down at it? Are moves such as the Sloan Foundation’s research program and the proliferation of ‟family friendly” programs acknowledging that continuities among domains may be a precondition for productivity and ‟human flourishing,” as Margaret Jane Radin characterizes it, as much at work as at home? This would be a momentous shift -- but one that runs the danger of being confined to those not employed in manufacturing or service sectors; those who are, are least able to finance their own flexibility or rearrange their tasks.

The possibility of a shift puts us in a position to ask a new question. What might the moral economy of households have to do with the moral economy of technoscience? Lorraine Daston delineates several moral economies of science that are ‟constitutive of those features conventionally (and, to my mind, correctly) deemed most characteristic of science as a way of knowing,‟ namely ‟certain forms of empiricism, quantification, and objectivity” (Daston 1995, 3). By her definition, a moral economy consists of ‟a web of affect-saturated values that stand and function in well-defined relationship to one another....a balanced system of emotional forces, with equilibrium points and constraints” (1995, 4). Discussing quantification, for example, Daston says:
"The point here is that impersonality and impartiality are cultivated by [those who value quantification] as much for moral as for functional reasons. It is proverbial that both require dutiful self-abnegation so as to repress individuality and interest, and neither accrues automatically to quantified procedures and results" (ibid, 10).

There are, Daston suggests, paths her excursion might open for institutional, philosophic, and sociological studies. ‟There is excellent evidence that the moral economies of science derive both their forms and their emotional force from the culture in which they are embedded -- gentlemanly honor, Protestant introspection, bourgeois punctiliousness -- and here are promising grounds for an alliance of science studies with the new cultural history and its anthropological affiliates” (ibid. 24).

We might ask of the moral economies of households what their consequences are for the production of knowledge in a scientific domain about which men and women are equally passionate but to whose intellectual possibilities they may be, by force of culture and household circumstance, unequally open. We know all too little about how men and women, at various life stages, modulate and are allowed to modulate career interests and pressures that can weigh against household participation and satisfactions, and what consequences these have for their science. Men remain vulnerable to breadwinner pressures on the job; taking advantage of flexible options or task rearrangements has become feminized in that women are more likely to make use of or to ask for them. Against both men’s and women’s will, much subtly reinforces gender hierarchy, even where a collaborative, more egalitarian form prevails. Yet that form appears to offer more hope than hierarchical or heroic forms for people to reconsider the moral economies of work and home.

Acknowledgements
Research for this paper was conducted under a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute at Radcliffe College for a study "Opportunities for Work and Family Integration for Professionals: A Study in Small- and Medium-sized Biotechnology Firms." At the time of writing, the project team included: Françoise Carré (Co-principal Investigator), Paula Rayman (Co-principal Investigator), Lotte Bailyn (Study Director), Ann Bookman (Study Director), Constance Perin (Study Director), Susan Eaton (Research Associate), and Sandra Resnick (Research Associate).

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