---
title: "Laboratory Life"
chunk: 1/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_Life"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:32:57.624544+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts is a 1979 book by sociologists of science Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar.
This influential book in the field of science studies presents an anthropological study of Roger Guillemin's scientific laboratory at the Salk Institute. It advances a number of observations regarding how scientific work is conducted, including descriptions of the complex relationship between the routine lab practices performed by scientists, the publication of papers, scientific prestige, research finances and other elements of laboratory life.
The book is considered to be one of the most influential works in the laboratory studies tradition within science and technology studies (STS). It is inspired by but not entirely dependent on the ethnomethodological approach. In turn, it served as the inspiration for actor–network theory (or ANT); many of ANT's core concepts (like transcription, inscription, translation, and the deployment of networks) are present in Laboratory Life.

== Introduction and Methodology ==
Latour and Woolgar state that their work "concerns the way in which the daily activities of working scientists lead to the construction of scientific facts" (pp. 32).  Laboratory Life therefore stands in opposition to the study of scandalous moments in which the so-called "normal" operation of science was disrupted by external forces.  In contrast, Latour and Woolgar give an account of a how scientific facts are produced in a laboratory in situ, or as it happens.

== An Anthropologist Visits the Laboratory ==
The initial methodology of Laboratory Life involves an "anthropological strangeness" (40) in which the laboratory is a tribe foreign to the researcher.  The study of the lab begins with a semi-fictionalized account of an ignorant observer who knows nothing of laboratories or scientists.  In this account, Latour and Woolgar "bracket" (44) their previous knowledge of scientific practice and ironically ask seemingly-nonsensical questions about observed practices in the laboratory, such as "Are the heated debates in front of the blackboard part of some gambling contest?"  In the asking and answering of these questions, the observer's understanding of laboratory practices is gradually refined, leading to a strong focus on the significance of paper documents.
The observer soon recognizes that all the scientists and technicians in the lab write in some fashion, and that few activities in the lab are not connected to some sort of transcription or inscription. The foreign observer describes the laboratory as "strange tribe" of "compulsive and manic writers ... who spend the greatest part of their day coding, marking, altering, correcting, reading, and writing" (48-9).  Large and expensive laboratory equipment (such as bioassays or mass spectrometers) are interpreted as "inscription device[s]" that have the sole purpose of "transform[ing] a material substance into a figure or diagram" (51).  In this way, the observer works to organize and systematize the laboratory such that it "began to take on the appearance of a system of literary inscription" (52).
Having concluded that the "production of papers" for publication in a scientific journal is the primary focus of a laboratory, the observer next aims to "consider papers as objects in much the same way as manufactured goods" (71).  This involves asking how papers are produced, what their constituent elements (or raw materials) are, and why these papers are so important.  First, the authors recognize that in papers, "some statements appeared more fact-like than others" (76).  From this observation, a five-element continuum of facticity is constructed, which spans from type 5 statements which are taken for granted to type 1 statements which are unqualified speculations, with various intermediate levels in between.  The conclusion reached is that statements in a laboratory routinely travel up and down this continuum, and the main purpose of a laboratory is to take statements of one level of facticity and transform them to another level.
However, Latour and Woolgar recognize that this semi-fictionalized account of an ignorant observer aiming to systematize the alien laboratory has several problems.  While the observer's rich descriptions of activity in the lab are taken as accurate, the observer has not established that the interpretation of this data in terms of literary inscription is exhaustive or the only way in which laboratory life can be analyzed.  In the authors' words, the observer's account is not "immune from all possibility of future qualification" (88).