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Cline's Recombinant DNA Experiment as Political Rashomon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Troy Duster*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720
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Extract

Robin and Markle's “Let No One Split Asunder: Controversy in Human Genetic Engineering” is a notable contribution to the sociology of science and a clarification of some important social and political issues in the current controversy around the new recombinant DNA technologies. Their four-fold taxonomy of levels of inquiry and analysis is a theoretical advance. It is also a device for illuminating, decoding, deciphering, and finally for bettering our understanding of what happened structurally in the Cline case. Much of the contemporary work in the sociology of science touches on a few, or even several of these dimensions, but because the analytic categories are frequently (if inadvertently) run together, one is often burdened with a confusing vault between levels. (Few authors make the analytic distinctions of different levels as do Robin and Markle, so it is hardly surprising that they would “run them together.”)

Type
Articles and Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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References

Note

1. My recollection of the precise language may be slightly off the mark, but I have captured the essence of what was said. Please refer to the relevant passages of the Congressional testimony cited in U. S. House of Representatives, 1982.Google Scholar