Standardizing practices: a socio-history of experimental systems in classical genetic and virological cancer...

This paper presents a narrative history of technologies in cancer research circa 1920-1978 and a theoretical perspective on the complex, intertwined relationships between scientific problems, material practices and technologies, concepts and theories, and other historical circumstances. The history presents several active lines of research and technology development in the genetics of cancer in the United States which were constitutive of proto-oncogene work in its current form. I write this history from the perspective of technology development. Scientists participating in cancer research created tools with which to study their problems of interest, but the development of the tools also influenced the questions asked and answered in the form of concepts and theories developed. These tools included genetic ideas of the 1920s, inbred mouse colonies, chemicals and antibiotics developed during World War Two, tissue cultures and their technical procedures, and viruses. I examine these tools as standardized experimental systems that standardized materials as well as practices in laboratories. Inbred animals, tissue culture materials and methods, and tumor viruses as experimental systems gave materiality to "genes' and "cancer'. They are technical-natural objects that stand-in for nature in the laboratory.