ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how machines are incorporated into laboratory practices of generating data from samples in genetic research. A research laboratory may seem far away from the medical settings, but the clinic is not the only possible site for medical practices. Medical understandings, and with them practices, are continuously being developed. This chapter discusses these roles, showing how laboratory staff talked about machines in general and worked with individual machines, two distinctly different sets of practices that nevertheless were connected through referring to the same underlying concepts of humanness and machineness. The chapter focuses on material collected through fieldwork ethnographic observations and interviews in five different laboratories of various sizes in the southern half of Sweden. The cultural practices discussed in the chapter are the laboratory practices that interwove humans, machines and valid data.
