ABSTRACT
It is, I confess, with great weariness that I turn to this topic. Perhaps we may begin on a slightly distanced note. Historians of science have recently been much concerned with the ‘closure’ of scientific controversies. Bruno Latour’s picture is particularly relevant to the present topic.1 Controversies, he argues, close when one party has marshalled so many ‘allies’ of various kinds-including already closed controversies-that the cost (both economic and intellectual) of keeping the topic open becomes simply too high for dissenters to meet. An additional, very pertinent, feature of his account is the apparent futility of trying to draw any clear line between an internal purely ‘scientific’ realm and an external ‘social’ one. The network of allies extends in intricate fashion beyond the laboratory to sources of funding, political interests, industry and the media. Scientific activity is, in today’s world, locked into vast inter-penetrating ‘associations’ of interests. Let us bear this in mind in what follows.
