1 - Introduction: On discipline history

Summary

Histories of the scientific disciplines are not new, but in recent years historians of science have begun to write them in a new way. Older histories were often written by scientists turned historians and were insiders' accounts of the accumulation of more perfect knowledge. They did not inquire why the world of knowledge is divided up as it is, or how it got that way, any more than naturalists before Darwin's generation worried about the origin and extinction of species. There was no particular reason for scientist historians to see how their disciplines were shaped by processes of social and economic adaptation and competition. Disciplines were the framework for descriptive natural histories of knowledge, not for analyses of the evolution and perpetuation of social forms.

Disciplines are political institutions that demarcate areas of academic territory, allocate the privileges and responsibilities of expertise, and structure claims on resources. They are the infrastructure of science, embodied in university departments, professional societies, and informal market relationships between the producers and consumers of knowledge. They are creatures of history and reflect human habits and preferences, not a fixed order of nature. There have as yet been few studies of sciences as institutions, and it is this aspect of the discipline of biochemistry that will concern me here. I will have less to say about biochemistry as a system of ideas than about biochemists' collective efforts to build and maintain their own institutions.