John Krige

Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence

The promotion of the benign atom as an instrument of American foreign policy and hegemonic ambitions was important to scientists and policy makers alike who sought to win “hearts and minds” in the early years of the cold war. The distribution of radioisotopes to friendly nations for research and medicinal purposes in the late 1940s was followed by Eisenhower’s far more spectacular Atoms for Peace initiative, announced at the United Nations in December 1953. This chapter describes the polyvalent significance of the diffusion first of radioisotopes, then of reactor technology, notably at the famous conference in Geneva in 1955. It places particular emphasis on the role of scientists and their appeal to scientific internationalism to promote national scientific leadership. It is stressed that openness and security, sharing knowledge or technology and implementing regimes of surveillance, were two sides of the same coin.

Publication and Citation Practices of Brazilian Agricultural Scientists

The formal communication system of agricultural scientists working at two major teaching and research centres in Brazil is investigated with an eye on formulating policies to improve it. To avoid the pitfalls surrounding the use of sources like the Science Citation Index in this area, a sample of the articles actually published by the scientists was used to construct the data base. Results are presented on where the scientists publish, on the content of their papers, on whom they refer to, and on the age distribution of their references. The picture which emerges is one of a fragmented scientific community whose members have only tenuous links with their colleagues in other domestic institutions, and whose work appears to be lagging behind the research frontier in their field. Policies for ameliorating this situation are suggested.

Introduction:: Science, Technology, and International Affairs

Science and technology play a significant role in international affairs. Many global environmental issues, in particular global climate change and ozone depletion, depend on science and technology. Equally, many security concerns focus on the proliferation of weapons technologies and the scientific and technical knowledge associated with uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing, radiological sources, viruses, bacteria, and chemical agents. Other international debates focus on geneticallymodified organisms, intellectual property rights, the exploitation of oceans and marine resources, and the numerous threats to global health by infectious diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, SARS, and the recent H5N1 avian flu virus. Finally, information technologies have also enabled a shift of economic power from states to markets and to international financial bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Computerized financial markets, high-tech competence, and competition now also shape economic development and the interactions of states. The relevance of science and technology to the conduct of international affairs, to the relationships between states, to the changing balance of power between the nation-state

The birth of EMBO and the difficult road to EMBL

Abstract Why was the road to EMBL ‘more difficult than anticipated’, as Francois Jacob put it? The standard account, advanced by scientists, is that it was because molecular biology did not require big, complex and expensive equipment like high-energy physics. European governments therefore lacked the incentive to pool their efforts and to build together a supranational laboratory ‘modeled on CERN’. This account is one-sided. It overlooks the fact that many scientists themselves were less than enthusiastic about building a European molecular biology laboratory in the early 1960s. Taking John Kendrew and Conrad Waddington as representative of two different and opposing views on how best to promote molecular biology in Europe at this time, I argue that a supranational laboratory project could only come to fruition once the field had been entrenched in national institutional niches (or after determined efforts to do so had failed). Until that time, the usual fear that a European laboratory would drain essential human and financial resources away from incipient or planned programmes in universities and national research centres dominated the horizons of most molecular biologists in Europe. Hence their preference to first establish EMBO to coordinate existing activities and only later to set up a supranational laboratory.

NATO and the Strengthening of Western Science in the Post-Sputnik Era

In the immediate post-Sputnik era, the member governments of theAtlantic community were deeply concerned about the growingquantity and quality of scientists and engineers in the SovietUnion, which threatened to outstrip the supply of manpower in theUnited States and Western Europe. One of the main tasks of theNATO Science Committee, formally established in December 1957,was to redress this educational imbalance. Its preferredinstruments were international scientific exchange and trainingin fields of basic science. This paper charts the actionsundertaken by this committee to strengthen Western science,exploring its achievements, and analysing why it failed to couplethe research it supported to the interests of the defenceestablishment.

Some Socio-Historical Aspects of Multinational Collaborations in High-Energy Physics at Cern Between 1975 and 1985

One of the most striking features of the postwar development of high-energy physics has been the growth of large teams of physicists on the experimental workfloor. Before the war experimental research, even with big accelerators like that at Berkeley, was generally done with relatively simple equipment, and remained an essentially individual affair (1). However, as detectors became more complex, costly, and time-consuming to build, increasing numbers of physicists from different institutions and from different countries began to do experiments together with the device. This phenomenon emerged in the late 1950s, and the size and multinationality of teams has tended to grow ever since. Very roughly, the number of physicists in a collaboration taking data with the largest detectors used in high-energy physics has been doubling every five or six years since the mid-1960s, and might reach 1,000 by the year 2000 (2). At the same time collaborations in high-energy physics have become major foci for international scientific work. A typical paper from one of CERN’s (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) largest detectors was recently signed by 521 people from 44 institutes in 19 countries.

A Critique of Irvine and Martin's Methodology for Evaluating Big Science

The work of John Irvine and Ben Martin (IM) deserves serious attention. The range of their studies is wide, they address themselves to issues of importance, particularly to science policy makers, their output is considerable, and they have made a marked impact not only in the scientific community, but also well beyond. Yet impact is not the same thing as quality, as IM would readily agree. And though there is much to recommend in IMs work; its value is, we believe, vitiated by a number of methodological inadequacies. It is on these that we wish to focus in what follows. The paper is divided into three main sections. In the first we summarize briefly the main stages followed by IM in presenting their results. We then go on, in the core of the paper, to criticize several aspects of their methodology. In conclusion we try to assess the value which their work has, despite the limitations we have identified. Rather than trying to cover the whole corpus of IMs work, we base our discussion primarily on their recent studies on high-energy physics, and CERN in particular.2 There are two reasons for this.

Hybrid knowledge: the transnational co-production of the gas centrifuge for uranium enrichment in the 1960s

The ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of knowledge circulation is explored in a study of the encounter between American and British nuclear scientists and engineers who together developed a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium in the 1960s. A fine-grained analysis of the transnational encounter reveals that the ‘how’ engages a wide variety of sometimes mundane modes of exchange in a series of face-to-face interactions over several years. The ‘why’ is driven by the reciprocal wish to improve the performance of the centrifuge, though this motive is embedded in the asymmetric field of the ‘special relationship’ in nuclear matters between the United Kingdom and the United States. The result of the encounter is co-produced, hybrid knowledge in which the national provenance of the contributions from each side of the Atlantic is at once diluted and a contested site for the affirmation of national power.

Distrust and discovery: The case of the heavy bosons at CERN

This essay describes the microhistorical process whereby different groups of scientific actors (competing teams of physicists at the research front, the laboratory directorate) came to claim that a new fundamental particle (the W boson) had been discovered at CERN. Particular attention is paid to the role of trust, and of distrust, in the directorates planning of the experimental program and in their interpretation and promotion of its first results. Distrust demanded independent replication; it also influenced the way in which the CERN director general managed the credibility of the results for the worlds press, turning a plausible but not yet widely accepted hypothesis into an undisputed fact. Produced and circulated in a context that included physicists, funding agencies, governments, and national power blocs, the discovery of the bosons by physicists in Europe challenged American domination of the field and shaped U.S. accelerator policy for the 1990s.

The commercial challenge to Arianespace: the TCI affair

Abstract The question of how far rockets used for commercial launch services are subsidised by their respective governments remains highly topical. This article traces the history of the first legal challenge to be made on this basis by a US launch service provider against Arianespace, a case which also called into question the pricing of the Space Shuttle. The perceptions, deliberations and negotiations of both sides are traced and it is noted that their most important outcome was not settlement of the case itself but agreement to start serious consultations on defining ‘rules of the road’ regarding government support to the commercial launch industry.