The sixth workshop of the "How Well Do 'Facts' Travel?" project was held on Monday 31 March and Tuesday 1 April 2008. The explored how scientific facts "live their lives" - how are facts born, how do they mature, lead independent lives, reproduce themselves and pass away? Alternatively, a life history may be better understood as a process of metamorphosis, so that as caterpillars turn into butterflies, travelling facts undergo radical transformations. Sometimes, well established (old) facts disappear, only to be reborn later. The main characters in these narratives are the travelling facts, but by focussing not only on their personal life histories but on their environment and context we may learn about why some facts are malleable and other remain stubborn during their travels, and about why some travel far and others remain closeted.
About the Workshop
The first day of the workshop focussed on facts from the natural and medical sciences, for example, about infectious diseases: private facts for the individual patient yet public for those concerned with the spread of such diseases. The aim is to trace both the short life cycles and the long-term developments, for example, how were microbiological facts about diseases first articulated in such a way that they could travel to new sites or be made relevant for other diseases. How were old facts awakened to explain and predict the unknown, as the data from the 1918 Spanish flu is used in modelling current threats of avian flu. How do such facts travel through various technological interfaces and platforms (such as models and simulations), and between various communities such as researchers and policy makers. How do identities change during the life histories of facts, how are they guarded or transformed, disappear and reappear. This first day is designed to encourage complementary perspectives from practitioners (epidemiologists, mathematical modellers) and historians, social scientists, anthropologists and policy researchers on the ways in which epidemiological facts live their lives.
The second day of the workshop focussed on how biographies, cycles and metamorphoses help us to conceptualise the ways in which facts travel well. Can we sharpen our ideas about travelling facts by looking at specific moments within these life histories? Is it useful to think of these moments in terms of dialogues and encounters or trust and mutual dependence? What do we learn about travelling facts by characterising them, describing their identities, and exploring their functional roles across the communities and contexts through which they travel? Here the agenda is not field specific, and we encourage contributions that study travelling facts within the framework of the workshop title. (The programme can be found here).
Abstracts and Speakers
- Erika Mattila: Life histories of facts: Introducing the conceptual frame of the workshop
Thinking of biographies may bring us memories of dusty books documenting heroic deeds of significant individuals. Or, perhaps, they are telling us about fascinating and extraordinary lives - stories of struggle and survival, which will lead us to believe in 'happy-endings'. But what kind of research agenda is in front of us, if we follow the vocabulary of biographies, life-cycles and metamorphoses? How do we study life histories of facts? What are the differences between life histories and life-cycles? How about metamorphoses: What do we achieve by getting engaged with the natural cycles as they appear in the lives of butterflies, for example? Or is there a danger of entering a Kafkaesque metamorphosis? The vocabulary of life histories, life-cycles and metaphors addresses relatedness, historiality and potentiality of change of factual knowledge. Yet these observations do not ignore the domain of 'facts', nor their usability or applicability in other realms of activities. In other words, the bright focus on 'facts' may, unintendedly, cast a shadow on the actors, on those who actually relate the facts into new research questions, who benefit from their historiality, and for whom the potential of change - 'factual metamorphosis' increases their applicability. In this presentation, I will provide insights into the key concepts of this workshop by analysing three cases in infectious disease epidemiology. Firstly, I will elaborate the concept of life history of facts by studying how our understanding of disease transmission evolved over time and found its form in mathematical representations utilised in infectious disease modelling. Secondly, I will share some observations of life-cycles of facts by studying how facts about past pandemics enter the predictive simulation models of future threats. Thirdly, I will analyse the metamorphoses of facts by studying how facts may change their identities, or function differently when they become adopted and re-interpreted in new domains of research or decision-making processes. Through these three cases, I will discuss the implications of this vocabulary to the ways in which facts are understood, how they are interpreted, and how they are related to their context. It seems to me that whereas life histories remind us of the continuation in time, life-cycles underline the repetitiveness, the idea of 'returning back' to particular facts, that might be useful in surprising - and yet unknown - contexts. Furthermore, metamorphoses - the processes after which something does not seem to appear as it was, yet carrying something slightly familiar with it- allow us to consider how facts change their identities, how they are characterised in novel domains, yet expressing something of their past. Through these preliminary observations, I wish to address the broader issues of dissemination of factual knowledge and the role of technological platforms, such as models and simulations in that process.
- Kari Auranen and Tuija Leino: Transmitting models from bacteria to viruses
We describe our personal experience from a long-standing collaborative work on epidemiological modelling of infectious diseases. Initially, the specific aim of our research was to understand, post hoc, the rapid disappearance of disease caused by Haemophilus infuenzae type b bacteria after the onset of large-scale vaccinations in Finland. The interests among the project group were scientific and academic and, eventually, turned out to inform new research projects as well as the programmatic evaluation of vaccinations in Finland. The requisite for the latter step was a shared view of the value of epidemiological models among researchers from different fields. In each application, models are often only as good as they are in exemplifying and quantifying known, sometimes paradoxical facts. Iterative explanation and sheer intuition play a central role in conveying the 'trueness' of the analysis. In our projects, epidemiological models are currently used to evaluate the impact of vaccination with new pneumococcal vaccines in developing countries. In addition, the effectiveness of varicella zoster and human papillomavirus vaccinations is being evaluated in Finland as part of the national decision-making process.
- Sarah Whatmore and Catharina Landström: Manning's n - a fact packaged for travel
This paper traces Manning's n (a hydraulic roughness value) through different moments of articulation from the late 19th century to the present. We argue that the success of this fact has depended on what it can do, rather than what it is. In 1891, the Irish engineer Robert Manning suggested a simple general formula for calculating the 'velocity or surface inclination of water flowing in an open channel of given dimensions'. The 'n-value' is an estimation of roughness based on visual information, estimated by looking at the river. Today Manning's n is encountered by every user of 1-dimensional hydraulic software packages as a required input value. Manning's equation is the standard numerical solution that ties water levels, velocity and river bed characteristics together in hydraulic models central to the highly political business of flood risk prediction. Such commercial software 'black-boxes' this equation as an automated function, where the user enters an 'n-value' for the river studied in order to calibrate simulated water levels with physical measurements. The force of Manning's n has shifted from a tentative formulation in the hands of its eponymous Victorian proponent, through standardisation in river engineering handbooks in the 1960s, to an unexamined law or fact in the virtual engineering of flood modelling today.
- Lenny Smith: Hard Facts Travel Light, But Fictions are Faster Still
Facts originating in mathematics, statistics and physics often follow an interesting interdisciplinary journey, as facts with good figures tend to be popular. I will discuss the spread of insights, misconceptions and clarification associated with two mathematical facts. Each journey starts within its original discipline and quickly moves beyond; these examples suggest that as facts travel more broadly they tend to lose important background information regarding uncertainty, reliability and relevance. One example will follow facts about chaos and its detection in Nature, the second is drawn from climate science. Fast moving facts can often travel best as sound bites, discarding the baggage of context and sometimes evolving into fictions driven by hope. Without answering whether this is cause or effect, I will suggest that a second wave of argument and understanding may sometimes be required to convey a fact satisfactorily. In addition to a great deal of excitement, confusion, disappointment and publications, this process can lead to a delay of decades before insight arrives. What might mathematicians and physical scientists do to increase the baggage allowance of facts, allowing more effective dissemination of insight?
- Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: From Traces to Data, from Data to Facts
Facts are peculiar scientific things that need to be looked at more closely. The Latin term points to them as things made. Usually, however, they are taken to be things given. What I would like to do in my short presentation, is first to look how facts get produced before looking at how they travel. I start from how traces are generated in experimental systems and see how they work as data that in turn are assembled to form what we call facts. In this context, I will also try to clarify the relation between scientific objects - epistemic things - and scientific facts. In order to do that, I will consider a particular technology, that is, radioactive tracing, and fact generation in a particular area, that is, molecular genetics and genomics. They are taken as examples for clarifying my points.
- Alberto Cambrosio: Disciplining Facts: Institutions of Objectivity in the Field of Clinical Trials
Clinical trials - the "gold standard" for producing clinical facts (at least according to "evidence-based medicine") - are institutions (or, to use Deleuze's notion, arrangements) that regulate the circulation of findings before they are translated into the official outcomes of a given trial, the aforementioned facts. According to Harry Marks, clinical trials reframed the issue of trust and objectivity by replacing reliance on the judgment of human experts with the mechanical workings of a (double-blind, randomized) statistical machine. Yet, in a somewhat iterative twist, the machine itself became suspect, because not completely impervious to the corrupting influence of human interpretation of findings and the interpretations of those interpretations. The issue first emerged in the clinical trial literature in the 1970s when methodologists realized that with knowledge of interim results, the outcome of a trial could be qualified as positive or negative before it was officially over, with the result that clinicians and researchers would become increasingly reluctant to enter patients on to trial. The trial would then flounder and the enterprise abandoned 'faute de combattants', the interim findings thus attaining the de facto status of a fact. Methodologists, however, claimed that having the status of fact and being a fact were not the same thing, for interim results entertained two symmetrical deceptions: positive interim results might have been negative had the trial been competed as initially designed, and vice versa. Briefly, the valued findings masquerading as fact could easily slide into fiction. The suggested remedy was to restrict access to interim data and interim data analyses to members of a small group of investigators known as Data Monitoring Committees (DMCs), yet another component of the institution that would follow strict rules for qualifying findings as facts. DMCs, according to one of the variants of this scheme, should be completely external to the design and conduct of the trial. Since the late 1980s, DMCs have become an essential part of clinical cancer trial methodology and practice. They have furthermore evolved considerably in a constant search for ethical neutrality and objectivity through a combination of sophisticated statistical techniques, ad hoc precepts and novel organizational strategies. They have also been beset by a fundamental tension as to who or what should count as objective in such an undertaking and consider it part of their mandate as a reflexive institution to continually call into question the rules that establish the rules of the game. Accordingly, the paper will focus on the institution that transform findings into facts by directing the circulation of the former through an evolving series of "qualculatory" tools (to use Callon's term), i.e., tools that combine qualitative and quantitative assessments.
- Helen Lambert: Evidence as contagion? The evolution and spread of evidence-based medicine
This paper will focus not on a particular 'scientific fact' or set of facts through which to explore the nature of evidence, but instead on evidence itself as a fact or rather, on that particular variety of 'evidence' which forms the basis of the approach known as 'Evidence-Based Medicine' (EBM) that has come to dominate clinical biomedicine. The paper traces the rise of EBM from epidemiology into clinical medicine, its methodological elaboration within medical statistics, and its spread into other forms of health care and broader arenas of social policy. A social historical account of EBM may offer some insights into the reasons for its rapid colonisation of medical territory and its increasingly hegemonic status in policy formation if not in clinical practice. Certain political and social configurations are seen as fostering receptiveness to evidence-based approaches, while specific features of EBM can reciprocally be identified as appealing to a range of potential constituencies.
- Olga Amsterdamska: Making Autism Genetic
The transformation of autism from a psychosociogenic to a genetic disorder has been a complicated and contested process. Today, the notion that autism is at least partially genetic appears as a solid biomedical fact supported by incontrovertible evidence; hardly a month passes without a new announcement of progress in the identification of genes or chromosomal flaws responsible for the disorder.
This paper will trace the life history of this fact: the construction of evidence in its favor and its changing meanings and functions in debates and research on autism. From individual claims made in debates about the responsibilities of parents of autistic children and their parenting styles, to studies of the epidemiology of autism conducted in Great Britain and Scandinavia which focused on the incidence of autism in twins and siblings, to today's genome scans involving researchers from many countries, institutions, and disciplines and requiring cooperation of many groups and founders, the fact that autism is a genetic disease has undergone a number of transformations. It has been made compatible with a number of different (and changing) claims about autism, acceptable to a number of different constituencies, and usable in a variety of settings. In the process, the acceptance of this fact was made dependent not only on the initial or accumulated evidence in its favor, but also on its ability to fit with facts and claims in other domains, on its consequences for patients, parents, doctors, and policy makers, and on its instrumental utility as a starting point for research.
Speakers and Participants
- Jon Adams, LSE
- Olga Amsterdamska, University of Amsterdam
- Kari Auranen, University of Helsinki
- Virginia Berridge, London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
- Marcel Boumans, University of Amsterdam
- Alberto Cambrosio, McGill University
- Albane Forestier, LSE
- Jim Griesemer, University of California, Davis
- David Haycock, the National Maritime Museum
- Walter Holland, LSE
- Peter Howlett, LSE
- Helen Lambert, Univeristy of Bristol
- Catharina Landström, University of Oxford
- Tuija Leino, National Public Health Institute, Helsinki
- Sabina Leonelli, LSE
- Harro Maas, University of Amsterdam
- Julia Mensink, LSE
- Martina Merz, University of Lucerne
- Ashley Millar, LSE
- Mary Morgan, LSE
- Ed Ramsden, LSE
- Brian Rappert, University of Exeter
- Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
- Max-Stephan Schulze, LSE
- Leonard Smith, LSE
- Stephan Turner, University of Florida
- Simona Valeriani, LSE
- Aashish Velkar, LSE
- Patrick Wallis, LSE
- Sarah Whatmore, University of Oxford
- Abigail Woods, Imperial College London