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The analysis of technoscientific regulatory controversies is now an established genre within science studies, with a small but important methodological and meta-literature. That literature has only rarely noted how published accounts of particular controversies inevitably employ narrational strategies, including decisions about emplotment, time-frames, character-motivation, and the use of tropes, to endow these stories with political and epistemological meaning. In an exercise designed to recover these narrational elements and promote narrative consciousness, this paper presents two separate accounts of a single important controversy: Canada's recent regulatory experience with the Monsanto Corporation's recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST). The discussion points out the different narrational strategies employed in each account, and analyses how these strategies interact with explicit or theory-based interpretive approaches to determine how the accounts contribute to `public moral argument' about regulatory affairs. It concludes with broader speculations on the advantages that a greater reliance on narrative form has to offer the field of controversy-analysis and science studies in general.

Programs for the reform of K-12 science teaching today usually insist that science teachers must introduce their students to the nature of science, as well as to scientific content. The academic field of science studies, however, evinces no consensus about what the nature of science really is. This article examines how science educators and educational researchers have drawn on the fragmented teachings of science studies about the nature of science, and how they have used those teachings as a resource in their own projects. It identifies three competing movements for the reform of science teaching that owe a particular debt to science studies: history and philosophy of science (HPS), science, technology, and society (STS), and constructivist pedagogy. The article analyzes some of the deep assumptions about the relationships between research science, school science, and children’s learning that pervade the educational literature.

By the mid-1980s nucleic-acid based methods were penetrating the farthest reaches of biological science, triggering rivalries among practitioners, altering relationships among subfields, and transforming the research front. This article delivers a "bottom up" analysis of that transformation at work in one important area of biological science, plant pathology, by tracing the "molecularization" of efforts to understand and control one notorious plant disease—the late blight of potatoes. It mobilizes the research literature of late blight science as a tool through which to trace the changing typography of the research front from 1983 to 2003. During these years molecularization intensified the traditional fragmentation of the late blight research community, even as it dramatically integrated study of the causal organism into broader areas of biology. In these decades the pathogen responsible for late blight, the oomycete Phytophthora infestans, was discovered to be undergoing massive, frightening, and still largely unexplained genetic diversification—a circumstance that lends the episode examined here an urgency that reinforces its historiographical significance as a casestudy in the molecularization of the biological sciences.

THE SOCIOLOGIST AVRAHAM ZLOCZOWER produced his remarkable master's thesis, "Career Opportunities and the Growth of Scientific Discovery in Nineteenth-Century Germany, with Special Reference to Physiology," in 1960. His basic argument became widely known during the next few years through journal articles written by Zloczower himself and by his thesis director, Joseph Ben-David, and in 1973 the thesis was published in German translation.' The Zloczower thesis represents the most ambitious and persuasive attempt yet made to demonstrate quantitatively that scientific creativity is governed by institutional factors and career motivations external to the cognitive features of the science. In this essay we point out that the original Zloczower argument implicitly contains a "weak" and a "strong" version of his central thesis, each appealing to somewhat different evidence, and we advance a tentative criticism of the strong version. Since most readers are unfamiliar with the detailed evidence on which Zloczower's thesis rests, we begin with a summary that stresses more clearly than did the original the quantitative relationships central to the argument. We acknowledge, however, that our summary hardly does justice to the richness of Zloczower's original, which draws on comparisons between German physiology and that of other nations, and which appeals extensively to historical testimony of the physiologists of the day. Zloczower begins his analysis by assembling a numerical index of scientific creativity or research achievement, specifically the number of "discoveries" or

A massive bibliography of works on physiological optics allows an approximate reconstruction of literature production in this science between 1840 and 1894. It shows how relative levels of productivity varied in over seventy constituent problem areas and challenges us to explain the shifting foci of research activity in terms of what is known about the institutional and theoretical development of the field. This paper describes the growth of the science and offers such an interpretation, arguing that physiological optics passed from a `pre-paradigm' to a `paradigm' stage between 1850 and 1870. The elements of the paradigmatic formulation affected literature production in various problem areas differently, depending on the nature of the consensus they imposed, and the formulation did not prevent chronic disagreements on important theoretical questions from re-emerging.

The term ‘Ohm's law’ traditionally denotes the formula of Georg Simon Ohm relating voltage, current, and resistance in metallic conductors. But to students of sensory physiology and its history, ‘Ohm's law’ also denotes another relationship: the fundamental principle of auditory perception that Ohm announced in 1843. This aspect of Ohm's science has attracted very little attention, partly because his galvanic researches so thoroughly eclipsed it in success and importance, and partly because Ohm's work in physiological acoustics had so little immediate impact on the science of his time. On announcing his hypothesis in 1843, Ohm found himself drawn into a bitter dispute with the physicist August Seebeck, who successfully discredited the hypothesis and forced Ohm to withdraw from the field.