| This PhD research project is about the changing character of science and the scientific profession in our contemporary world, thereby focussing on life sciences as a field that is currently in transition. While the search for the structure of DNA in 1953 can be characterised as a scientific quest of a small group of scientists taking place in a relatively small-scale academic environment, fifty years later the Human Genome Project shows a completely different world. The HGP presents the planning and management of a large and dynamic project with a clear mission, involving huge amounts of money, expensive instruments and numerous scientists in laboratories all over the world. Moreover, the academic environment is substituted by an international and political setting, figuring academia, governments, funding bodies, business, media and the public. These changes have been characterised as the emergence of Big Biology , the appropriation of the Big Science concept to the field of biology. This thesis explores the question of Big Science both as a discourse in the social organisation of science, and also as a way of conceptualising scale and cooperation in scientific and technological projects. Attention is focussed on increasingly large dimensions in science, the composition of collaboration, the institutionalisation of science and relations between academia, government, industry and society. Next to the innovation regime, the projectification of science comes to the fore, with its focus on the organisation and control of the research process and its emphasis on accountability. To investigate how these general developments come together, interact and materialise in specific situations, diverse large-scale research projects are examined, dealing with bioinformatics, virology and life in the oceans. Moreover, the implications of the changing research environment for (young) scientists who have to engage with this new world of biology research are explored. |
