Word: goodfield
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...somehow, science keeps its won time and June Goodfield in An Imagined World. listens for its special rhythm. It is surely an uneven one--one marked by doubts and detours. impasses and retreats. Science is often a process of impulsive decisions and leaps into darkness. Long silences are followed by the harsh cries of results. and data and--with luck--maybe even a little understanding comes through...
...June Goodfield, a historian of science, steps inside this process of scientific discovery, inside the struggle known as basic research. She moves into the laboratory of an immunologist. Anna Brito (her real name is not given) for five years, taking notes, recording conversations, and asking questions. She partakes in the late night seances that pass for discussions in labs around the world. She charts the double dialectic of the scientist:the external one between subject and object. and the internal one between ideas and hypotheses. She is, in effect, our tourguide--herding us past centrifuges, culture rooms, refrigerators, through...
...Goodfield chooses for her example. Anna Brito an immunologist studying lymphocytes the white corpuscles of the blood. Lymphocytes are the body's soldiers patrolling the blood on the lookout for invaders. They are microsopic warriers: cells that defend us from the bacteria viruses and parasites that constantly attack...
...THIS BOOK were merely a record of experiments and results, it would appeal only to scientists. and this is not Goodfield's intent. With simple clarity she spends as much time on the method of attack as she does on the results. and in such sections she adds her own voice to the book. For Imagined World is not simply a journal: it is annotated. commented on and probed. Thus, the science we see is the science Goodfield wants us to see. One wonders then--what is Goodfield's vision...
...accounts it is a romantic one. She feels affection for the lonely self-doubting scientists who work late into the night. For Goodfield, solitude reflects the quality of science. We are continually told that science is best done when one is solitary, both literally and scientifically. While this is sometimes true. often it isn't. Science is increasingly done in interdisciplinary groups. Such exchanges of ideas are as critical to the process as the most private of thoughts. Very rarely do scientists sit for days simply thinking. except of course for that small breed of theoreticians...