Research institutions

Research is not undertaken by individual scientists or by specialized research groups; strictly speaking, it is undertaken by institutions. The basic organizational ‘entities’ that typically devise and perform research projects are usually too small to stand alone as independent enterprises [§5.10]. It is true that there are now many commercial firms, ranging in size from self-employed individuals to sophisticated outfits employing dozens of scientists, engineers and management experts, offering research and consultancy services or even undertaking speculative near-market R&D in the hope of producing saleable technological innovations. But an enterprise trying to live on grants to do basic science cannot be financially viable unless the overheads and uncertainties can be spread over a large number of different research projects. Although research entities may behave very much like independent small firms in bidding for research projects, they are almost always embedded legally and organizationally in what we might define generally as research institutions – that is, substantial corporate bodies such as universities, hospitals, charitable foundations, research councils, government departments, quasinongovernmental agencies, and industrial firms.

The policy of privatizing some of the research establishments in the public sector [§4.2] does not seem to be an essential feature of ‘steady state’ conditions. It may well seem politically desirable to cut taxes and solve the resource allocation problem at a stroke by putting on to the private sector the responsibility for funding the research in question.

The shape of science today

Imagine a space-time traveller, returning after 30 of our earthly years. For Dr Winkel van Rip, it seems only a few months since she hurtled off at nearly the velocity of light in a secret biotest of General Relativity. Now she has come back to her job as lecturer in astrophysics at Loamshire University. Until now she has been a dedicated researcher, entirely uninterested in any aspect of science beyond her textbooks and laboratory bench. What features of contemporary science might catch her innocent eye? What account would she give of scientific life and work in Britain today?

At first, she would be delighted and overwhelmed by all the good science that had been done in her absence. She would enjoy learning about the theoretical explanations of old mysteries, and getting her hands on to marvellously powerful new observational techniques. She would also soon realise that many of the old questions had still not been answered, and that many exciting new questions were emerging. Astrophysics happens to have made conspicuous progress in the last thirty years, but it is not unique. In almost every other field of the natural sciences she would find the same buzz of activity, immense technical achievements, and ever widening challenges and opportunities.

Instrumental sophistication

Scientific research has always been a highly technical activity. Scientists have always employed the most advanced technologies available to them. The scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century were only made possible by such recent inventions as the airpump, the microscope and the telescope. It is simply not true that the best research always used to be done with ramshackle apparatus consisting of bits of glass tubing held together with sealing wax and string. A new piece of equipment often has to be improvised or specially designed for a novel experiment, but scientific instruments in general have always been at the very forefront of the state of their art. Throughout history, major scientific discoveries can be traced back to the use of new or improved technological capabilities – a more refined optical glass, more accurate machine tools, purer chemical compounds, better defined breeding stock – many of which had been developed outside the research world.

The striking feature of our own times is the extent to which scientific advances fuel general technological progress. But general technological progress, in its turn, fuels the development of more powerful techniques of research, thus providing the means for further scientific advances. This cyclic process within the science/technology complex is not merely self-sustaining: it has begun to spiral wildly outwards in scope and scale.

The demography of the scientific profession

The transition to steady state conditions is having a profound effect on research careers. Ever since science became a regular profession in the late nineteenth century, it has continually expanded in numbers and in employment opportunities [§4.1]. This has kept it a buoyant open-ended enterprise, where talented newcomers were welcome, and where they could look forward to opportunities for personal advancement right through their working lives. Yes, it was an uncommon profession, open only to a gifted, dedicated, minority. Yes, it was highly competitive, requiring exceptional tenacity to get to the top. Yes, it was not very well paid, and the reward of success was fame rather than fortune. But, even for the socially unambitious, it provided a secure, well-respected niche from which to explore nature, and seek honestly after truth.

Of course, the scientific profession has seen some hard times. At various periods, in various countries, military defeat, economic depression, or political repression have temporarily disrupted research careers. The biographies of many of the greatest European scientists of the twentieth century are punctuated with episodes of personal insecurity, hardship or exile: the stories of many of the lesser figures are even more tragic. In Mao's China, almost the whole scientific community was banished into squalid rural drudgery for a generation.

Two young women – sisters, beautiful and intelligent, trapped in an oppressive family setting – meet two men – best friends, of respectable income and social standing, apparently in need of mates. They become attracted to one another; after many setbacks, each couple reaches an understanding and fulfills its foreordained destiny. They live happily ever after.

This bare outline recounts the familiar plot of Pride and Prejudice. Excepting the last sentence, it also tells the story of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. The similarity both is and is not surprising. Lawrence seems to have viewed Austen's fiction as the antithesis of his own work. In “A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover” he criticized Austen's intellectual detachment, calling it unpleasant and snobbish. References within Women in Love to the world of Jane Austen are more ambivalent. In “A Chair” Birkin represents Austen's England as a place where people could be happy and productive. Ursula responds by claiming to be sick of this sort of nostalgia. According to historian Martin J. Wiener, England had by the turn of the century chosen to define itself as a rural, aristocratic, unchanging society – a land of green fields and quaint local customs. As the hierarchical, agrarian structures of traditional Britain lost force in the nation's political and economic life, they became increasingly the subject of a sentimental myth that appealed to all sectors of British society.

Sir Walter Scott was educated in the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. The eighteenth-century Scottish intellectuals, like the “natural philosophers” from whom they drew inspiration, held that all knowledge of human and natural phenomena was derived from empirical observation, that the world was constantly undergoing change, and that these changes followed certain fundamental laws which could be detected by the careful observer. Scott's comments in essays and letters suggest a fairly thorough assent to these mechanistic assumptions. In Life of Dryden, he praises Dryden for recognizing the beginning of the era of experimental science and for celebrating the “downfall of the Aristotelian tyranny.” Edgar Johnson, arguing that Scott was no reactionary enemy to constitutional change, cites a comment Scott made to Edward Cheney near the end of his life: “If the machine does not work well, it must be mended.” The use of the term “machine” as a non-pejorative metaphor for the political system is striking in one who has sometimes been identified as a Burkean conservative. Scott implemented the tenets and products of mechanistic science in immediate practical concerns as well. A proponent of applying the latest scientific findings and technological contrivances to agriculture, Scott was renowned an “improver” of his own estates. He also admired Sir Humphry Davy, whose research into soil compositions gave impetus to the early nineteenth-century “improving landlord” movement. Moreover, Scott was one of the first entrepreneurs to employ steam presses in his printing plant, and he praised mechanical innovations in other industries.

One mark of science's influence upon the academic establishment is the institution-wide privileging of specialization. A pioneer in the revolutionary science of chaos explains the traditional scientific approach:

Other disciplines have followed suit, building the empire of knowledge incrementally through a cognitive policy of conquest through division. As has often been noted, the emergence of English departments early in this century grew out of a perceived antithesis between literary ways of seeing and communicating and scientific ones. Champions of literature observed that literature speaks figuratively, its propositions are universal, while scientific language is representational, its claims local and specific. Or sometimes the poles have been reversed, with the sensuous immediacy of literary language contradistinguished from science's abstracting tendencies – what Alfred North Whitehead called its “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.” In either case, literature's place in the culture has been defined through its opposition to science.

Yet literature as an institutional field of study is still for the most part structured in terms of the specialization model borrowed from the sciences.

When Jane Austen began writing Pride and Prejudice (1796), Sir Isaac Newton had been dead some seventy years. His Principia Mathematica was published in 1687. The atomistic-mechanical model embedded in Newton's works was firmly established by Austen's day in studies of human nature and human behavior as well as in the physical sciences. Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding appeared in 1690. Jeremy Bentham began publishing his doctrines of “utility” in ethics and politics during the mid-1770s. Bentham's disciple James Mill (1773–1836) was almost exactly the novelist's contemporary (Austen was born in 1775 and died in 1817). According to Floyd W. Matson, “By the close of the eighteenth century Newton's method, the method of causes and mechanisms, had become standard procedure throughout the respective sciences of nature, of life and of man.” Similar intellectual currents made themselves felt in British social life. Reform societies composed mainly of artisans and tradesmen began appearing in urban areas in the early 1790s. These societies, often fueled by ideals of atomistic individualism, supported the egalitarian goals of the French Revolution and criticized the British government for failing to protect the rights to liberty and secure property for all its citizens. Newtonian modes of thought began to find favor with certain segments of the aristocracy during this time as well. Scientific organizations such as the Royal Institution (founded in 1799) provided interested landlords with the latest findings in chemistry and biology for use in their agricultural and mining concerns.

Classical Mechanics is the name given to the science of Isaac Newton. The seminal Newtonian text is the Principia, which not only gave birth to modern mechanics but also offered the first complete scientific theory of the universe since Aristotle's Physics. Newton replicated some findings of earlier scientists – Galileo, for instance, was the first to claim that motion is more normative than rest (Newton's first law) – but the Principia gave the insights systematic form and provided an appropriate mathematics. As the scientific paradigm grew in prestige during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the word “mechanistic” was applied to a widening range of phenomena and beliefs. Prior to Newton, “mechanics” and “mechanical” had referred only to the operation and maintenance of machines or were associated with manual labor and the working classes generally (as with the “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare'sA Midsummer Night's Dream). With the emergence of the Newtonian science, however, the words came to apply to any entity or system whose component parts moved regularly and predictably or exhibited other machine-like characteristics. The terms also began at that time to refer to the philosophy we now think of as mechanistic: one that habitually conceptualizes the whole universe as “a system of mutually adapted parts working together … in a manner analogous to mechanical action.” One survey of Western history explains the concept's metaphoric extension thus: “People had long been familiar with such complex machines as watches and clocks. Was it not logical, after Newton, to believe that the universe itself was a grand machine?”

Mechanistic science is concerned above all with order. Despite changing conceptions of the domain and scope of scientific investigation, one constant for scientists throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth was their common ambition to articulate the laws (preferably expressed as mathematical equations) behind various material phenomena. A corollary assumption – perhaps the most distinctively nineteenth-century contribution to the mechanistic tradition – is the belief that all phenomena possess such regularities. The “matter, motion, and laws” approach which allowed Newton to explain the movements of celestial bodies led nineteenth-century scientists to insights about atomic structure, energy transference, and speciation, among other things; it continues to produce spectacular results today (in microchip technology, for instance) even though current views on the structure of matter and the nature of force diverge considerably from those held in Newton's day. In a 1980 lecture on the future of physics, Stephen Hawking proclaimed: “We already know the physical laws that govern everything we experience in everyday life.” Implicit in Hawking's confident assertion is a cognitive ploy central to the mechanistic tradition: the gesture of looking beneath or beyond sensory experience for patterns to organize these experiences. This generalizing or reductionist element in modern science has long been singled out for criticism. Alfred North Whitehead called it the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness,” a tendency to confuse scientific abstractions with reality as it is seen and felt.

The crumbling of the Natural Theology paradigm – prefigured by Dickens's inability in Bleak House to make Esther Summerson's worldview morally and epistemologically convincing – was made explicit with the 1859 publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. But while it supplanted the mechanistic model in one sense, Darwin's theory reified it in another: Darwin's version of the mechanistic worldview still relied on empirical observation and induction to detect underlying regularities among apparently diverse phenomena and explained these regularities in terms of universal laws or principles of behavior. The notion that the world is knowable and orderly but much more complex than previously imagined makes itself felt in novels of the late Victorian era in a number of ways. The Victorian preoccupation with the concept of “ the gentleman” takes on a new urgency in the 1860s and 1870s, for instance. For Dickens the question of gentlemanliness seems to center on the issue of good private citizenship. David Copperfield legitimizes his claim to be considered a gentleman when he becomes able to exercise good judgment regarding personal commitments – to live within his means and attend to the needs of his friends and family. Failure to live up to these standards causes much personal anguish and family hardship (as in the Micawbers' case) but poses little direct threat to the well-being of larger social units. By contrast, the consequences of failure to do one's duty are much broader in works like George Eliot's Middlemarch and George Meredith's Beauchamp's Career.

The first installments of Bleak House (1852–53) were published only months after the opening of the Crystal Palace Exhibition – an event which one historian has called the “high water mark” of British enthusiasm for industrialism and its values. As another scholar explains, “There was a firm belief that the year 1851 prefigured an age of peace, progress and universal happiness. The nation was inspired by a grandiose vision of man's power, a power capable of mastering matter without falling into materialism.” Of course not everyone in England was so optimistic about the kind of power involved in the mastery of matter. If some of the 1850s saw the spread of mechanistic systems and products to all phases of life as a blessing – the bringer of order and prosperity after the chaos and anarchy of the “hungry forties” – others believed just the opposite. They viewed machines, mechanistic relations, and sometimes science itself as systems that undermined rather than enhanced civilized human existence. John Henry Newman's concern over science's gradual supplanting of religious dogma as the source of meaning in life is one manifestation of this anxiety. John Ruskin's outcry against the alienation of labor in industrial society – the “degradation of the operative into a machine” – is another.

Charles Dickens's later novels are filled with images that reflect the mechanization of life (literal and metaphorical) in the 1840s and 1850s and illustrate the conceptual conflation of science, industry, and technology that made “mechanism” a powerful yet elusive metaphor for a variety of cultural phenomena. Railroads scar the landscape in Dombey and Son.

At the beginning of chapter three of The Secret Agent, Michaelis, “the ticket-of-leave apostle,” expounds his deterministic view of history:

Like Dr. Moynihan in Nostromo, Michaelis looks upon a world in which “material interests” direct people and determine events; man has no real control over the conditions of his existence.

Michaelis's speech is beset with ironies. For one thing, the anarchist professes allegiance to the complex dynamics of “real” material existence and denounces “idealization,” but his own philosophy is extremely idealized. Evolved in the isolation of his prison confinement, Michaelis's vision seems utterly incommensurable with the dark and grimy everyday London of the novel. Furthermore, as the narrator slyly notes, Michaelis's philosophy cannot even withstand the vicissitudes of ordinary conversation. Any interruption confuses him, shattering “that sentiment of isolation necessary for the continuity of his thought” (49). Even more ironically, Michaelis's beatific vision is in a way nothing more than a defense of his own slothfulness.

Introduction

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is framed, if not burdened, by many histories. There are histories of past epidemics and diseases, including sexually transmitted diseases; histories of scientific investigation, and of medicine and social hygiene; histories of the various groups affected by HIV and AIDS: of homosexuals, of drug users, of the poor and racially disadvantaged in the urban centres of western nations, and of the poor and exploited in the developing world; and there are histories of social policy and of welfare policies, or of their absence, which can help us to understand the various phases of the political and governmental response to HIV and AIDS. AIDS is already a deeply historicised phenomenon.

But at the centre of any attempt to understand the response to the epidemic in the west must be the history (or rather histories) of sexuality. At the most basic level this is because sexual intercourse is one of the most efficient means of transmission of the virus, and changing patterns of sexual interaction helps explain its rapid spread from the late 1970s. There is, however, a more profound reason why we need to situate HIV and AIDS in a history of sexuality. AIDS was identified at a particular moment in that history, when values and behaviour were in a period of unprecedented flux, and when sex-related issues came close to the top of the political agenda.