Description:

NICOLE NELSON: History of Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Knowledge Byproducts in the Mouse Laboratory: Learning about Environments While Doing Genetics"

Description: What kinds of knowledge do mouse model models of psychiatric disorders produce? Animal behavior geneticists use mice as experimental subjects to generate knowledge that would be impossible in human studies, such as information about genetic risk factors gained through selective breeding or molecular mechanisms gained through probing the brain. But STS studies of tacit knowledge and non-knowledge suggest that these highly valued scientific findings are not the only kinds of knowledge produced through laboratory work. This talk will examine how these “knowledge byproducts”—knowledge that accumulates in the laboratory in the process of constructing findings that are explicitly valued and sought after—figure into the overall economy of the animal behavior genetics laboratory. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I will show how practitioners who are explicitly seeking out genetic contributions to behavior also acquire knowledge about environmental factors impacting behavior through their work with animals. Indeed, researchers arguably end up accumulating much more knowledge about environmental factors than they do genetic ones, since so much of their daily practice is devoted to enacting the environmental controls that are needed to make the sought after genetic effects visible. Taking into account this environmental knowledge and its asymmetric distribution between practitioners and knowledge fields has implications for understanding how animal behavior genetics research frames the human. While practitioners may gain an intimate sense of how multiple factors work together to produce behaviors through their daily practice, it is typically only the sought after genetic findings that circulate in published or popular accounts, contributing to framings of psychiatric disorders that are myopically focused on genes.

Bio: Nicole Nelson is an Assistant Professor in the History of Science department at University of Wisconsin--Madison. She uses qualitative methods to investigate the social dimensions of biomedical knowledge production,and she is especially interested in how genetic explanations for disease are produced, circulated, and change over time. She is currently completing a book, tentatively titled Model Behavior, and she is also a Collaborating Editor at Social Studies of Science.

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