ABSTRACT
"Social" conduct and "scientific" conduct do not neatly discriminate themselves in the setting of their production. The setting investigated is a university-based psychobiology laboratory operated under the supervision of a professor in the biological sciences. The ultrastructure project was an electron-microscopic study of axon sprouting which involved two full-time research assistants and was overseen by the lab director. A key topic in the lab's studies of brain plasticity was that of the phenomenon of "axon sprouting." The work of the project involved a methodic series of renderings of laboratory rats that "prepared" the animals for electron microscopic visibility. As a way of showing this temporal order for any simple living brain's regenerative process, a procedure was used in which a series of electron micrographic montages was constructed at different "day" intervals after an entorhinal lesion. The observed alignment of the axons, dendrites, and cell bodies in the hippocampus was rendered into a two-dimensional graphic display through microscopic preparatory work.
