Pasteur on lactic acid yeast: a partial semiotic analysis.

One of the interests of studying scientific practice from the vantage point of literature is that it adds another series of mediations to the many that historians, sociologists, and philosophers are unfolding when they analyze laboratories, instruments, controversies, disciplines or institutions.1 Scientific texts, to be sure, have no privilege,but neither are they inferior to the many sources we have forunderstanding science. Indeed, when properly studied, they offer a convenient model to show how many mediations can be retrieved from the scientist's own practice. A scientific text is not only a more or less transparent medium to convey information to the author's scientific colleagues, nor is it only a document to help historians, psychologists, or sociologists retrieve the state of mind of its author or the context in which it has been written. As many decades of literary theory have helped us to see, texts are a little bit less and a good deal more than information and document. They build a world of their own that can be studied as such in relative and provisional isolation from the other aspects. They are localized events, with their own matter and their own practice.