ABSTRACT
Two main considerations, one scientific the other politico-economic, have underpinned this new collaborative mode. Scientifically, it has been a response to the transformation in the nature of experimental work which began to take hold in the United States before the war, and which became ever more widespread after it. The availability for some fields of science of the resources required to build and use increasingly heavy equipment containing state-of-the art technology has redrawn the contours of disciplines (like nuclear physics), created entire new fields (as in high-energy physics or space research using rockets) and put otherwise unthinkable projects on the research agenda (like the human genome project). Experimental work now brings together scientists and engineers from a variety of disciplines who demand massive financial support from the state to build and to buy the instruments and machines required for their research, and to put in place and to manage the teams of researchers to exploit them.
