Abstract Summary
Michael Dietrich (University of Pittsburgh), Nathan Crowe (University of North Carolina) - Understanding scientific change in terms of the components of repertoires (Ankeny & Leonelli 2016) can shed important insight into how science is conducted, organized, and communicated. Following Silvia Culp and Philip Kitcher’s approach (1989) to piecemeal scientific change, in this paper, we will articulate repertoires in terms of their components and argue that we should expect the continuity or change of a repertoire as a whole to be rare in science. While repertoires are ubiquitous in science, as an extended set of components repertoires change over time in a piecemeal fashion, as their individual components vary. Moreover, we argue that the continuity of the same components of a repertoire is not necessary for successful scientific practice, research community stability, or field identity (cf. Leonelli & Ankeny 2015). We will illustrate the process of piecemeal change in repertoires by following a network of embryologists who originated and extended Organizer research from 1921 to 1951. In 1921, Hans Spemann and Hilde Mangold used microsurgical transplantation experiments on amphibian embryos to discover the Organizer, a region that seemed to control and coordinate important features of embryogenesis (Fässler 1997). Spemann developed a ‘school’ of researchers who trained with him, but after his retirement this ‘school’ became more of an internationally distributed network of researchers in England, Japan, South Africa, the United States, China, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, and Uruguay (Nakamura & Toivonen 1978). As the network grew over time, the number of different repertoires used in the network diversified in a piecemeal fashion, especially as its members developed research programs in different institutions and nations. The value of repertoires for this case study and others lies in drawing our attention to some components of scientific change that are rarely considered, such as means of communication, community formation, and material distribution. In doing so, it offers an important expansion of our understanding of piecemeal scientific change.
