Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research in a medical science laboratory, this presentation examines the sites of material and data translation as “border zones” where coded ideals, for good scientific practice and disease treatment discovery, inform the daily activities of scientists in this process.

Paper long abstract:

Bioscientific experiments have always necessitated a transfer of substances from one form to another. Historically, “wet” data like cellular assays became autoradiographs in the laboratory, just as the scientific discoveries they represented were transformed first into talk among researchers, and then into text for publication (Cetina Knorr, 1990). The logics of translation which guide these activities have frequently been a focus of laboratory ethnographies, but with the advent of “drier” forms of data production these practices are growing increasingly complex. Substances like human cells take on multiple, even simultaneous, iterations as they move from the hospital to the petri dish and into the binary language of computers. At each moment of transformation, bioscientists must work to preserve the essences they aim to investigate, while they sort and remove what’s been classified as noise in their materials. As research on the translation of literature has already shown, texts undergo transformation with logics that are diverse and constantly shifting, and that are equally dependent on the deft decision-making of translators themselves; for example, whether to create translations that maintain the flavor of the original language at the cost of loss in accuracy of meaning (Gambier, 1995). What logics then inform this bioscientific practice today? Based on ethnographic research conducted in a medical research laboratory in Japan, this presentation examines the sites of material and data translation as “border zones” (Steiner, 1996) where coded ideals, for good scientific practice and disease treatment discovery, inform the daily activities of scientists in this process.