Embryo Project Encyclopedia

Findings

The Embryo Project will help identify and understand the agents of change shaping embryo research and its multiple contexts, as a case study.  We started from historical recognition that science involves a mix of contingencies influenced by (1) particular actors working in particular places, (2) decisions about what organisms to study, equipment to use, experiments to design, and other technical factors that make possible scientific practices, and (3) the multiple social and cultural contextual factors that shape what is possible in science. 

As the Project has developed, we have focused on identifying and analyzing several defined categories of factors – people, places, practices, concepts, context, literature and images -- and their often intricately linked relationships with each other.

To date, eight months into our funding, we have three kinds of findings in addition to the usual sorts of scholarly publications:

1.  The Science.  Because of the way we are examining the science, looking at the different factors as agents of change, we are already seeing things differently than we previously did.  Traditional historical work selects from among the vast world of empirical facts to tell a story.  Instead, we are telling many smaller stories and are finding that the linking among the pieces is much richer and much more revealing about the multitude of agents shaping scientific change that we had imagined. 

2.  The Process.  The process of identifying projects and building collaborative networks of researchers who previously did not work together, as well as bringing undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow into the research team has been extraordinary.  We each challenge each others’ assumptions and already each find ourselves asking different questions in different ways than we used to.  In addition, we are finding ourselves working as a team that interacts many times a day and learns from each other.  This is exciting. 

3.  The Encyclopedia.  All our work is becoming part of the Fedora repository and the relationships between them can be searched and visualized.  This part of the Project is undergoing testing and further development, and the search functions of the website should become public.  The library at Arizona State University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin are providing the technological work. 

Click on Search in the left menu to begin.