The Invisible Industrialist

Book excerpt: Industrial methods, and industrially produced instruments, reagents and living organisms are central to research activities today. They play a key role in the homogenization and the diffusion of laboratory practices, thus in their transformation into a stable and unproblematic knowledge about the natural world. This book displays the - frequently invisible - role of industry in the construction of fundamental scientific knowledge through the examination of case studies taken from the history of nineteenth and the twentieth century physics, chemistry and biomedical sciences.