Project knowledge and its resituation in the design of research projects: Seymour Benzer's behavioral genetics, 1965-1974

Abstract

The article introduces a framework for analyzing the knowledge that researchers draw upon when designing a research project by distinguishing four types of “project knowledge”: goal knowledge, which concerns possible outcomes, and three forms of implementation knowledge that concern the realization of the project: 1) methodological knowledge that specifies possible experimental and non-experimental strategies to achieve the chosen goal; 2) representational knowledge that suggests ways to represent data, hypotheses, or outcomes; and 3) organizational knowledge that helps to build or navigate the material and social structures that enable a project. In the design of research projects such knowledge will be transferred from other successful projects and these processes will be analyzed in terms of modes of resituating knowledge. The account is developed by analyzing a case from the history of biology. In a reciprocal manner, it enables a better understanding of the historical episode in question: around 1970, several researchers who had made successful careers in the emerging field of molecular biology, working with bacterial model systems, attempted to create a molecular biology of the physiological processes in multicellular organisms. One of them was Seymour Benzer, who designed a research project addressing the physiological processes underlying behavior in Drosophila.

Introduction

In 1968, Seymour Benzer (1921-2007) provided the first proposition of a new research program on which he had embarked formally only one year earlier: the “search for defects in non-phototactic mutants describes the outline of a research program to attack the mechanisms underlying behavior by genetic methods” (Benzer, 1968, p. 52). A research program, or rather an actual project informed by a program, is a complex arrangement. As the quotation makes clear, it addresses a domain of phenomena under investigation (behavior), and typically a subset of the phenomena that can be studied in an exemplary manner (phototaxis), and it is based on an idea about the appropriate form of result (mechanistic explanation) and a suitable methodology (genetic methods). The goals (here, the mechanistic explanation) will be divided in several subtasks and the methods to achieve these tasks will involve several techniques specific to the material at hand that involve suitable instruments (e.g., behavioral screening devices), reagents (e.g., mutagens), and, in biology, typically an experimental organism (in this case, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster). Furthermore, employing the techniques, making the organisms available, and coordinating the work in a collective requires the project to be embedded in physical infrastructures, institutions, and social relations (in this case, a lab at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the social hierarchy of a principle investigator and the postdocs and graduate students working in the lab, and the Drosophila community and its systems of communication and exchange of protocols, mutant stocks, and other resources). In part 1 of this article, I will develop a framework for analyzing the kind of knowledge researchers draw on when designing and embedding a research project. The proposed account facilitates the identification of the sources of such “project knowledge” and the analysis of the processes of its resituation. The framework is developed from the case of Benzer's work in behavioral genetics presented in part 2, and in turn helps to understand how new research programs emerged around 1970 in biology and engendered conceptual change. The study thus also contributes to the history of this period, which was characterized not only by a molecularization of physiological processes, but also by the encounter of molecular biology with higher organisms, as well as new models of gene action (Burian & Thieffry, 2000; Morange, 1997; Suárez-Díaz & García-Deister, 2015). It furthermore contributes to the history of behavioral biology broadly construed.