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What Moves When Technologies Migrate? “Software” and Hardware in the Transfer of Biological Electron Microscopy to Postwar Australia Nicolas Rasmussen (bio) In 1944 A. L. G. Rees, a twenty-eight-year-old research and development scientist at Philips Electrical in England, answered a summons from Australia’s central research agency to return to his homeland and establish a new laboratory there. His chemical physics laboratory in Melbourne would boast the latest in technology for investigating molecular structure: an infrared spectroscope, X-ray diffraction apparatus, and also—thanks to the top-level government action required by war production priorities in the United States—arguably the world’s most sophisticated commercially manufactured scientific instrument at the time, the brand-new “Universal” electron microscope (EMU) model from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). By special arrangement, Rees’s slow trip back to Australia in mid-1944 featured visits to many key industrial and academic laboratories in Britain and the United States that had built or purchased the sort of technology that Rees would be using, including RCA Laboratories itself and numerous electron microscopy research groups in the United States. 1 On these laboratory visits, [End Page 47] Rees took careful note of the procedures and ideas to which he was exposed, learning how to operate his RCA microscope and the other scientific instruments. Rees, of course, had only done what efficient technology transfer demanded. But he brought back to Australia more than hardware and mere operating instructions: he also brought back “software” for putting his transferred instrument technology to use in scientific experiments, to draw a rough-and-ready distinction between material and intellectual technique. 2 This sort of technology transfer, in which cutting-edge instrumentation migrates from one scientific culture to another, offers a chance to study not only how cultural context is implicit in the design of apparatus, as with typical cases of technology transfer, but also how that context may influence the research work in which the apparatus is employed. This article retraces the replication and adaptation of biological electron microscopy in isolated Australian conditions during the immediate postwar years, a period when Rees’s instrument was the only electron microscope on the continent. 3 For purposes of this study, one can set the hardware to one side as a constant, since the same commercial electron microscope was owned by the Australian and American labs. This circumstance helps focus attention on what I am calling the software of research, providing a natural experiment in the history of science, in which the tyranny of distance isolates a scientific culture after initial inoculation with technique, thus simplifying the study of its growth. The strategy resembles that of Ludwik Fleck’s study of bacteriology research under the even more insular conditions of a concentration camp. 4 This article discusses three early Australian research programs in biological electron microscopy, each manifesting a different mix of transferred and indigenous elements of practice. [End Page 48] One line of research showed particular originality, involving locally invented material and intellectual techniques (both hardware and software, so to speak) blended with what was imported. Another research program remained largely conventional in its use of transferred material technique but more innovative in its intellectual technique, or software. The last program showed a remarkably faithful replication of technique, on both hardware and software levels, transferred from abroad. Indeed, this last line of research reflected such a successful transplantation of foreign experimental practice that it independently duplicated an artifactual “discovery,” that is, a blunder being committed simultaneously in the lab that originally served as the source of technique. The transferred software of electron microscopy—the intellectual side of experimental practice imported along with the hardware—comes especially to the fore in accounting for the duplication of findings and interpretations in this third line of research, since the faulty conclusions follow from the evidence only in combination with distinctive interpretive practices also derived from the source. Experimental techniques, and especially instruments, stand at the interface of the history of science and the history of technology. Historians of technology have long appreciated and documented the way that technology transferred without modification from one cultural context to a substantially different one often functions differently...
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