From setting the distance to adjusting the focus

As biotechnologies and nanotechnologies are becoming paradigmatic of nowadays science, what happened to science as we (thought we) knew it? Are we witnessing a break of an epochal character? Science Transformed? is a collection of essays that revolve around the question whether recent science hallmarks an epochal break. The book is organized in two sections: the first one gathers essays that discuss the pertinence of the epochal break thesis as a whole, and the second provides empirical support to test the thesis in a number of fields: scientific experimentation practices and ideal-types, digital imaging media, robotics, medical research and computational modelling. The book ends on a series of ‘sticking points’ on which further research should focus. While each chapter adopts a singular vantage-point to address the epochal break issue, the book as a whole offers a coherent and well-organized panorama of the problem. Each contribution nicely responds to the others and they share conceptual tools taken from common bibliographical references: ‘mode-I/mode-II production of knowledge’ (Gibbons et al. 1994), science/technoscience (Hottois 2005) or Paul Forman’s shift from modernity—where the means of the scientific method culturally prevail over technological ends—to postmodernity—where ‘technology is simply all there is’ (Forman 2007: 72) and sanctions the hegemony of purely utilitarian values. The introduction reviews the current trends of concepts used to describe the changes occurring in science: ‘postnormal’ (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993), ‘postacademic’ (Ziman 2000) or ‘entrepreneurial science’ propelled by a university–industry–government ‘triple helix’ (Etzkowitz 1983; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1998). But fortunately, the book does not propose new labels. Most of its articles are actually rather critical about the pertinence of using such catchwords: They are more normative than descriptive and tend to oversimplify the history of science and engineering. Whereas most of these expressions were forged to label transformations occurring in the social and political context of science policy and funding, this volume focuses primordially on the shifts occurring in the practices and the values of scientific research. The major purpose is rather to look for the argumentative and methodological patterns that are the most appropriate to address these issues. Amongst the contributions four different interpretations of the changes in recent science and technology are to be distinguished: (1) that there is an epochal break; (2) that today’s changes are more a matter of intensification rather than rupture; (3) that other patterns than epochal break should be proposed to reflect on science’s current transformations; (4) a rejection of the epochal break thesis.