The Politics of Sources Meets the Practices of the Librarian: An Interview with Esther Chen

[I] want to single out one phenomenon that could be called the 'politics of sources'. It points to the extent to which the histories that both scientists and historians can write are artifacts of the available sources. The Rockefeller Foundation not only opened its archives very early on for historical work but also invested a lot in making the archives readily available for historical exploration. During the 1980s, many young historians took advantage of this opportunity. Thus, in a relatively early phase of the professional historiography of molecular biology, one could have gained the impression that the development of the new biology as a whole was a bio-politically directed enterprise of the Rockefeller Foundation sustained by the vision that social processes could ultimately be controlled by biological processes.