Studying Scientific Controversy from the STS Perspective

Trevor Pinch and Christine Leuenberger

Paper presented at the EASTS Conference "Science Controversy and Democracy"
http://sts.nthu.edu.tw/easts/conference.htm

There is a long history now of studying different sorts of controversies within S&TS. In this
concluding comment we plan to talk about some of the main approaches and try and relate them a little
to the papers presented at this conference both the papers on the session on Citizen Participation and
Science and Technology and the papers on the Hwang controversy.

First off we note that in general the quality of the papers at this meeting has been very high and
they auger very well for the new venture in S&TS publishing which you are embarking upon. As one of
us said already the Hwang controversy is the Perfect Case Study and being located here in Asia you
are in the perfect place to bring the S&TS analysis of this controversy to the attention of the wider
S&TS community.

In handling our comments today I (Trevor) will start by making some general comments about
the S&TS approach towards controversy and then Christine will say a bit more about the specific
papers and how they fit into this approach.

The importance of scientific controversy has been recognized by scholarship within Science and
Technology Studies (S&TS) since the 1970s. Indeed the study of controversies has become an
important methodological tool to gain insight into key processes which are not normally visible within
the sciences.

Longstanding disputes, hotspots and scientific revolutions

What makes something a scientific controversy? It is important to distinguish longstanding
disputes, such as that between science and religion, or the merits of socio-biological explanation as
applied to humans, or whether the fundamental constituents of matter are particles or waves, from more
localized disputes such as over the existence of a new particle or a new disease transmitting entity. The
latter sorts of controversy are more like a "hot spot" which erupts for a while on the surface of science
than a deeply entrenched long-running battle. Also controversies are not be confused with the bigger
sea changes which science sometimes undergoes during scientific revolutions. Although defining a
scientific revolution is itself contested, the all-pervasive nature of the changes in physics brought about
by quantum mechanics and relativity seems different from, for example, the controversy over the
detection of large fluxes of gravitational radiation or over the warped zipper model of DNA. Similarly
long-running debates on the relative impacts of nature and nurture on human behavior have a different
character from more episodic controversies, such as the possibility of interspecies transfer of prion
disease. Of course, intractable disputes and revolutions share some of the features associated with
controversies, but it is the bounded nature of controversies which has led to their becoming an object of
study in their own right, especially within the tradition of S&TS associated with the sociology of
scientific knowledge (SSK).

The Methodological Importance of Controversies

One metaphor for understanding why controversies have taken on such methodological
importance is that of "punching" a system. Scientists on occasion gain insight into natural systems by
punching, or destabilizing, them. For example, one may learn more about the laws of momentum by
bouncing one billiard ball off another than by watching a stationary billiard ball. Similarly Rutherford
famously used scattering experiments in which gold foil was bombarded with alpha particles to uncover
the structure of the atom and in particular the presence of the nucleus. The methodological assumption
underpinning the study of controversies is similar. By studying a scientific controversy one learns
something about the underlying dynamics of science and technology and their relations with wider
society. For instance, during a controversy the normally hidden social dimensions of science may
become more explicit. Sites of contestation are places to facilitate the investigation of, for instance, the
metaphors, assumptions and political struggles embedded within science and technology.

Four Different Approaches to Controversy

We can note four different influential approaches towards the study of scientific controversies.
(1) The school of sociological research associated with Robert Merton (1957) first recognized the
importance of controversies within science. Of particular interest to Merton was the existence of
priority disputes. Many well-known controversies center on who is the first scientist to make a
particular scientific discovery.
(2) A second approach toward the study of scientific controversy developed in the 1960s as
concerned citizens increasingly protested what they took to be the negative effects of science and
technology. Here the source of controversy is the perceived negative impact of science and technology
on particular groups and it is the study of these political responses which forms the core of the analysis.
(3) The new sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) which emerged in the 1970s and which
largely displaced the Mertonian school provides a third approach towards the study of controversies.
Here the focus is on controversies at the research frontiers of science where typically some
experimental or theoretical claim is disputed within an expert community.
(4) Modern science and technology studies owes a heavy debt to SSK but is less likely to make
distinctions between the content of science and its impact. Within this fourth approach, controversies
are seen as integral to many features of scientific and technological practice and dissemination. Their
study forms a key area of the discipline today.

Merton and Priority Disputes

Merton's interest in priority disputes stemmed from his claim that science has a particular
normative structure or "institutional ethos" with an accompanying set of rewards and sanctions.
Because so much of the reward structure of science is built upon the recognition of new discoveries,
scientists are particularly concerned to establish the priority of their findings. Such priority disputes are
legion, such as the famous fight between Newton and Leibnitz over who first discovered the calculus,
or the more recent unseemly dispute between Ian Wilmut and his colleagues as to who is the real
father of Dolly the cloned sheep.

It was Thomas Kuhn (1962) who first raised a fundamental problem for the analysis of priority
disputes. A priority dispute is predicated upon a model of science, later known as the "point model" of
scientific discovery, which can establish unambiguously who discovered what and when. Asking the
question who discovered oxygen, Kuhn showed that the crucial issue is what counts as oxygen. If it is
the dephlogisticated air first analyzed by Priestly then the discovery goes to him, but if it is oxygen as
understood within the modern meaning of atomic weights then the discovery must be granted to
Lavoisier's later identification. The "point model" requires discovery to be instantaneous, and for
discoveries to be recognized and dated. A rival "attributional model" of discovery, first developed by
Augustin Brannigan (1981), draws attention to the social processes by which scientific discoveries are
recognized and "attributed". This approach seems to make better sense of the fact that what counts as a
discovery can vary over time. In short, it questions the Eureka moment of the point model. For
example, Woolgar (1976), in his analysis of the pulsars discovery, shows that the date of the discovery
varies depending on what stage in the process is taken to be the defining point of the discovery. If the
discovery is the first appearance of "scruff" on Jocelyn Bell's chart recording of signals from the radio
telescope, then it will be dated earlier than when it was realized that the unambiguous source of this
"scruff" was a star. This case was particularly controversial because it was alleged by the dissonant
Cambridge radio astronomer Fred Hoyle that the Nobel prize winners for this discovery should have
included Jocelyn Bell, who was then a graduate student. Priority disputes can touch in this way on the
social fabric of science, such as its gender relationships and hierarchical structure.

Despite the challenge posed by the attributional model, it is the point model of discovery which is
embedded in the reward system of science. As a result priority disputes still abound. In modern
technoscience, discovery can mean, not only recognition, but also considerable financial reward, as for
example with patents, licensing arrangements or stock in a biotech company. In such circumstances,
priority disputes have added salience. One has only to think of the battle between Robert Gallo and the
Pasteur Institute over priority in the discovery that HIV is the cause of AIDS. In this case there was not
only scientific priority at stake, but also the licensing of the lucrative blood test for identifying AIDS.
The controversy could only be settled by intervention at the highest political level. The Presidents of
America and France, Ronald Reagan and Jacques Chirac, agreed to share the proceeds from the
discovery. Again what was at stake scientifically was not simply who was first past the post; the
protagonists initially claimed to have isolated different retroviruses and disagreed over the effectiveness
of the various blood tests. This case was marked by additional controversy because of allegations of
scientific misconduct raised against Gallo which led to Congressional and NIH investigations.

Controversy over the impact of science and technology

That a priority dispute could require the intervention of national political leaders is an indication
of just how important science and technology can become for the wider polity. In response to the AIDS
crisis, activist groups have campaigned and pressured scientists and government officials to do more
scientifically and have intervened in matters of research design, such as the best way to run clinically
controlled trials. Such activist engagement dates back to the political protests which science and
technology generated in the 1960s in the context of Vietnam-era issues such as war and
environmentalism. There has been increasing recognition that science and technology are neither
neutral nor necessarily beneficial and that many developments stemming from modern science and
technology, such as nuclear power, petrochemical industries, and genetic engineering, raise profound
and controversial issues for a concerned citizenry.

Dorothy Nelkin, a pioneer in analyzing these types of disputes identified four types of political,
economic and ethical controversies which engage the public in the US (Nelkin 1995). One set revolves
around the social, moral and religious impact of science. Issues such as the teaching of evolution in US
schools, animal rights, and the use of fetal tissue such as stem cells fall into this first category. A second
type of controversy concerns a clash between the commercial and economic values surrounding science
and technology and that of the environmental movement. Ozone depletion, toxic waste dumps, and
green house gases are pertinent examples. A third set has been provoked by health hazards arising from
the transformation of food and agricultural practices by the use of modern science and technology.
Genetically modified foods, the carcinogenic risks posed by food additives and the use of bovine
growth hormones in the dairy industry all belong in this category. A fourth group centers on conflicts
between individual rights and group rights - a conflict that has been heightened by new developments
in science and technology. For example, the mass fluoridation of water to improve dental health denies
individuals the right to choose for themselves whether they want fluoride in their water supply. This
latter sort of controversy is further fanned when controversies enter the legal arena. As Sheila Jasanoff
has argued in her study of the silicon gel breast implant controversy, the mass tort cases that follow are
settled by individual litigants being replaced by statistical objects and the power of juries losing out to
court appointed experts in the relevant science and technology.

Research on these sorts of controversies by Nelkin and her colleagues focused mainly on the
interest politics of the groups involved. How and why do they get involved in political action over
science and technology; what underlying political values do such groups exhibit; and how do they
effectively intervene to protest some perceived deleterious development stemming from science,
technology or medicine? The positions taken by the participants are consistent with their interests,
although these interests may not enable the final outcome or closure of a debate to be predicted. For
instance, the demise of nuclear power had as much to do with economics as with political protest. Since
scientists themselves often play an active part in these disputes, a full analysis will touch upon how
scientists deploy their science for political aims. But, by and large this research tradition has avoided
using the entry of scientists into these disputes to examine the core processes by which scientific
knowledge is developed and certified. In short, the attention was focused upon seeing how scientists
became political rather than upon how politics might itself shape scientific knowledge. Political
controversies were treated as analytically separable from epistemic controversies and as resolved by
distinct processes of closure (Engelhardt and Caplan 1987). Typically epistemic controversies were
thought to be closed by application of epistemic and methodological standards, while political
controversies were closed through the intervention of "non-scientific factors", such as economic and
political interests.

Even when the micro details of how people make technical decisions in participant decision-
making processes are examined it is important to analyze how the technical aspects of knowledge are
dealt with. The different contours of expertise of different lay groups would seem to be important. Thus
the paper by Juraku, Suzuki and Sakura on decision making around Japanese nuclear power needed
integrating more with S&TS approaches towards expertise and how technical arguments are resolved. It
is not only the social processes and social networks which citizens form which are important but the
socio-technical networks and how technical knowledge is also operationalized amongst such networks.
Their focus on the interchange and tensions between formal policies and informal networks ties in with
recent work in S&TS on Goffmans notion of front stage and back stage as applied in science
policy by Stephen Hilgartner. One of us, Christine, in a forthcoming paper about psychological disease
categories, points to the importance of how national policies are transformed in the process of being
adopted into local institutional cultures.

Scientific Controversy and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

With the emergence of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) in the late 1970s, it was no
longer possible to avoid examining how scientific knowledge was shaped and how this shaping
contributed to the dynamics of controversies. A key tenet of this new sociology of science, as
formulated by David Bloor (1991) in his "Strong Programme", was that of symmetry. This principle
called upon sociologists to use the same explanatory resources to explain both successful and
unsuccessful knowledge claims. It raised to methodological status the necessity of examining the
processes by which science distinguishes the wheat of truth from the chaff of error. SSK soon turned its
attention towards examining scientific controversies because it is during such controversies that this
symmetry principle can be applied to good effect. With each side alleging that it has "truth" on its side,
and disparaging the theoretical and experimental efforts of the other, a symmetrical analysis can explain
both sides of the controversy using the same sorts of sociological resources. This differs from the
earlier interest approach to controversies in that it applies this symmetrical sociological analysis to the
very scientific claims made by the participants.

Bloor and his colleagues of the Edinburgh school pursued their program mainly through
theoretical analysis supported by historical case studies. H.M. Collins and the "Bath School" by
contrast, developed an empirical method for studying the sociology of scientific knowledge in
contemporaneous cases -- a method based primarily upon the study of scientific controversies. One
early application of the method was to the study of parapsychology (Collins and Pinch 1979). Collins
and Pinch suggested that controversies such as that provoked by parapsychology were resolved by
boundary crossing between two different forums of scientific debate - the constitutive and the
contingent. Generalizing from several case studies of controversies, Collins (1981) argued that during
controversies scientific findings exhibited "interpretative flexibility", with the facts at stake being
debated and interpreted in radically different ways by the parties in the controversy. This interpretative
flexibility did not last forever: by following a controversy over time researchers could delineate the
process of "closure" by which controversy vanished and consensus emerged. Collins defined the group
of scientists involved in a controversy as the "core set". Only a very limited set of scientists actively
partook in controversies, the rest of the scientific community depended upon the core set for their
expert judgment as to what to believe. This was particularly well illustrated by Martin Rudwick (1985)
in his study of the great Devonian Controversy in the history of geology.

As researchers followed controversies from their inception to the point of closure, it became
necessary to address matters of scientific method as they were faced in practice by the participants.
Factors that had usually been seen as issues of method or epistemology thus became open to
sociological investigation: for example, the replication of experiments, the role of crucial experiments,
proofs, calibration, statistics, and theory. In addition other factors such as reputation, rhetoric and
funding were shown to play a role in the dynamics of controversies.

An important finding of this research was what Collins (1992) called the "experimenter's regress"
which he developed from examining the issue of replication of scientific experiments. Controversies
clearly were messy things and were very rarely resolved by experiments alone. Collins argued that in
more routine science experiments were definitive because there was an agreed upon outcome which
scientists could use as a way of judging which scientists replicating experiments were the competent
practitioners. If one could get ones experiment to work one had the requisite skills and competence; if
one failed one lacked the skills and competence. The trouble was that when there was a dispute at the
research frontiers there was no agreed upon outcome by which to judge the competent practitioners.
Experiments had to be built to investigate a claimed new phenomenon, but failure to find the new
phenomenon might mean either there was no new phenomenon to be found or that the experimenter
failing to find it was incompetent. This regress was only broken as a practical matter by the operation of
a combination of factors such as rhetoric, funding, and prior theoretical dispositions.

Often the losing side in a scientific controversy continues to fight for its position long after the
majority consensus has turned against it. Those who continue will meet increasing disapprobation from
their colleagues and may be forced to leave science altogether. "Life after death" goes on at the margins
and often finally passes away only when the protagonists themselves die or retire (Simon 1999). The
uncertain side of science is clearest during moments of controversy. Most scientists never experience
controversies directly, and often it is only after exposure to a controversy that scientists become aware
of the social side of science and start reading in science studies and even employ ideas drawn from
science studies to understand what has happened to them. I wonder if this will happen in the case of Dr
Hwang?

This work on scientific controversy has been exemplified by a number of case studies of modern
science such as memory transfer, solar neutrinos, gravity waves, high energy physics and famously cold
fusion. The approach used by sociologists has also been taken up by historians and the sociological
methods have been extended to a number of historical case studies. Such studies pose particular
methodological challenges because often the losing viewpoint has vanished from history. Shapin and
Schaffer's (1985) study of the dispute between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over Boyle's airpump
experiments was a landmark in research on scientific controversy, because it showed in a compelling
way how the wider political climate, in this case that of Restoration Britain, could shape the outcome of
a controversy and at the same time help institutionalize a new way of fact making --experiments-- in the
Royal Society. It also drew attention to the literary and technological dimensions of building factual
assent in science. By documenting the witnesses to particular experimental performances a culture of
virtual witnessing was born.

The SSK approach to scientific controversy has also been influential in the study of technology.
The social construction of technology (SCOT) framework uses concepts imported from the study of
scientific controversy such as "interpretative" flexibility" and "closure". A variety of competing
meanings are found in technological artefacts and scholars study how "closure mechanisms" such as
advertising produce a stable meaning of a technology (Pinch and Bijker 1984, Bijker 1995).

Another influential approach to the study of controversies in sciences and technology has been
that developed by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon. Again the initial impetus came from studies of
scientists. Callon's 1986 article on a controversy over a new method of harvesting scallops is one of the
first articulations of what later became known as Actor Network Theory (ANT). Callon argues that the
outcome of a controversy cannot be explained by reference to the social realm alone, but the analyst
must also take account of the actions of non-human actors, such as scallops, which play a part in
shaping the outcome. Subsequently Latour's work on how "trials of strength" are settled in science and
technology has become especially influential within the new sociology of scientific knowledge. Such
struggles, according to Latour (1987), involve aligning material and cognitive resources with social
ones into so-called immutable mobiles or black boxes, objects which remained fixed when
transported along scientific networks and which contain embedded within them sets of social, cognitive
and material relationships.

Latour and Woolgar (1979) in their now classic study of a molecular biology laboratory showed
that literary inscriptions play a special role in science. They indicated how controversies could be
analyzed in terms of whether certain modalities are added to or subtracted from scientific statements
making them more or less fact-like. The role of discourse in scientific controversies has been examined
in great depth in a study of the oxidative phosphorylation controversy by Gilbert and Mulkay (1984).
They showed how particular repertoires of discourse, such as the "empiricist repertoire" and the
"contingent repertoire", are used selectively by scientists in order to bolster their own claims or
undermine those of their opponents. Subsequently there has been much work on how a variety of
rhetorical and textual resources operate during controversies (e.g. Myers 1990). Sometimes the
resolution of controversy is only possible by drawing boundaries around the relevant experts who can
play a role in the controversy. Sometimes particular scientific objects cross such boundaries and form a
nexus around which a controversy can be resolved. Such "boundary work" (Gieryn 1983) and
"boundary objects" (Star and Griesemer 1989) form an important analytical resource for understanding
how controversies end.

In addition to analyzing scientific controversies, SSK has itself become a site of controversy.
Most notably, lively controversies have occurred over the viability of interest explanations, over the
extent to which the sociology of science should itself be reflexive about its methods and practices and
over the role of non-human actors. The "science war" involving debates between natural scientists and
people in science studies over the methods and assumptions of science studies and cultural studies of
science is another area of controversy that is ripe for sociological investigation.

Scientific Controversy in Science and Technology Studies Today

In contemporary Science and Technology Studies the sites of contestation chosen for analysis
have become more heterogeneous. One strength of the new discipline of S&TS is the wide terrain of
activities involving science and technology which it examines. For example, similar methods can be
used to examine controversies involving science and technology in the courtroom, the media, quasi-
governmental policy organizations, and citizens action groups. Indeed, many of the most contentious
political issues facing governments and citizens today involve science and technology: issues such as
genetically modified foods, gene therapy and in vitro fertilization. We have good examples of these
sorts of approaches at this conference. For example, Jinhee Park, in her paper Womans Body as
Wasteful Materials argues that gendered social practices in Korean society meant that there was a lack
of regulation of IVF treatments which enable the Kwang team to use frozen embryos in his science
without the consent of patients. The line of argument can be related to Nelly Oudshoorns study of
contraceptive devices where she points out that dominant gender relationships effect the sort of research
problems posed. In her case she shows that the lack of research on the male pill is because
contraception and reproduction have been defined as womens issues. Park further points out that the
dominant gender relationships affect the likelihood of the commercialization of womens bodies.
Dorothy Nelkin and Lori Andrews has a paper in the Hastings Center Report (1998) on the
commercialization of body tissue where they point out that the capitalist logic has permeated
research on human tissue and people are in fact no longer in charge of their bodily tissue once it is
in the hands of the medical authorities. It is then available for scientific research and can become a
commercially traded product. To what extent the commercialization of body tissue is an issue that
disproportionately effects women would therefore be a research question yet to be answered.

Park also implies that womens bodies are more likely to become what she calls
experimental material. Anne Eckmann has shown that when it comes to scientific research men
have traditionally been the experimental subjects, often to the detriment of womens health. In the
US there was an uproar in the media when recent studies on women showed that the health effects
of aspirin, long assumed to be the same for men and women, actually differed between the sexes.
This only transpired after for the first time women were included in clinical trails. Up to that point
men had been the standard subject for medical trails. Indeed women and their bodies being taken
into account in the design of medical trails is according to Eckman the womens issue of the 1990s.
So it would be worth theorizing in which medical contexts women versus men become the object of
scientific investigation and experiment.
 Lastly would like to have heard a bit more in Jinhees Park analysis about the women who
supported and continue to support Hwang. We do these women a disservice if we exclude their
voices from the analysis of the controversy. An important part of the methodology of studying
controversies from an S&TS perspective is to recover the voices of people who get written out of
the history, often people who are on the losing side of controversies. Clearly the women who
supported Hwang derived something from his work and his skillful recruitment of them to his cause
is a part of the story we need to know more about. As Charis Thompsons work on IVF technology
in the US shows there are many women who argue that these sorts of technologies are actually
empowering to women.

Some of the papers at this conference speak to the rise of citizen action groups and their effect
on various social policies as well as the definition of certain disease categories. For instance,
Masanori Kaji, in his paper on the case of Itai-Itai Disease in Japan, points out how citizen action
groups can be crucial in recognizing certain issues as relevant to medical authorities and can impose
new citizen initiated forms of pollution controls. With the intervention of the courts in Japan we
wondered how far Jasanoffs consideration of the statistical victim and the loss of power in legal
contexts of individual citizens apply to this case. This work could also be strengthened if it was put
in the context of recent discussions in S&TS by Collins and Evans and others of different forms of
expertise, who can get obtain expertise and under what sorts of conditions. While S&TS recognizes
that exerptise may not always match credentialed expertise, as Brian Wynne and Steve Epstein have
shown, the downside of granting too much expertise to laypeople is that it can produce what Barry
Glasner calls a culture of fear where citizen groups and other interest groups become advocates
and mobilize around, for example, new disease categories, which medical science does not
recognize. Sorting out the legitimate contours of expertise and how far ordinary citizens can acquire
expertise is one of the big issues facing current S&TS. How as Kobayashi puts it, are governments
and citizens going to learn to trust each other in matters of technoscience again?

This issue of expertise is one which is also needed to understand further the social dynamics
of consensus conferences as examined by Dung-Seng Chen and Chung-Yeh Deng. The contours of
expertise in regard to specific matters of scientific controversy are not easily mapped onto
generalizations about citizens capabilities and education again as Brian Wynne showed it is the
uncredentialed ecological expertise of sheep farmers which the scientists overlooked with such
adverse consequences in the Chernobyl nuclear fallout case.

The study of controversies in modern technoscience -- with its porous boundaries between
science, technology, politics, the media and the citizenry -- also calls for the analyst to broaden the
array of analytical tools employed. Although the fundamental insights produced by SSK remain
influential, such insights are supplemented by an increased understanding of how macro-political
structures such as the state, and the legal system, enable and constrain the outcome of scientific
controversies. Examples of this sort of work include Jasanoffs (1990) investigations of how
technical controversies are dealt with by US agencies such as the EPA and FDA; Lynch and
Jasanoff (1998) work on science in legal settings such as the use of DNA evidence in courtrooms
and Epsteins (1996) work on the AIDS controversy. In the latter case Epstein deals not not only
with the dispute about the science of AIDS causation, but also turns to social movements research
to understand how AIDS activists outside of science got sufficient influence to actually affect the
design of clinical trials by which new AIDS drugs are tested. Callon, as Tadashi Kobayashi has
pointed out in his paper, has recently distinguished how in the modern age different sorts of concerned
groups are impacted by technoscience. Concerned groups of consumers he refers to as the voicy
group, groups who align around a technology which loses out in a battle with a more dominant
technology are the orphan group, and he uses the term the hurt group to refer to people threatened
by risky foods, chemical additives, environmental pollution and so on.

The broader approach needed to examine modern technoscience is evident in the paper on
Japanese clocks by Takehiko Hashimoto. This exemplary study reveals what Sheila Jasanoff calls the
co-production of science and the nation state. By focusing on technology, institutions, policies, agents
of popularization and educational campaigns the author shows how the modern technology of clocks
and time keeping was established along with modern Japanese habits of punctuality. Also Kim Tae-Ho
in his paper on Science-Technology as an Ingredient of Nationalism expands traditional S&TS
analyses to look at the link between science politics and the state in the Hwang controversy. He traces
the origins of the Hwang scandal in terms of a historical review of Korean nationalism and how Dr
Hwang skillfully appealed to anxieties in Korea and its delayed and sometimes rough path to
modernity. In this view Dr Hwang is seen as a skillful interpreter of and responder to a kind of
Korean national psyche. We found that idea intriguing but wanted more specific examples of both
Dr Hwangs rhetoric and how ordinary Koreans responded to it.

Particularly interesting methodological issues have been raised by the study of controversies
which overtly impinge upon politics. When studying controversies within science SSK researchers
were largely able to adopt the neutral stance embodied in the symmetry principle of the Strong
Program. However, some scholars have argued that, when dealing with cases where analysis could
have a direct impact upon society, it is much harder to maintain neutrality. Researchers studying these
sorts of disputes, such as whether Vitamin C is an effective cancer cure, find they can become
"captured" by the people they are studying. This complicates the possibility of producing the sort of
neutral analysis sought after in SSK. A number of solutions have been proposed to this dilemma (see
Ashmore and Richards 1996). It may be a dilemma we face with the Hwang case. Jan Sapp is arguing
for a constructivist approach towards fraud ended up deconstructing the scientific means by which the
well-known German molecular biologist Frans Moewus was shown to be a fraud. Do we want to do
this for the Hwang case where the overwhelming consensus seems to be that he has committed fraud?
Is there a way of approaching fraud within S&TS whereby we can still derive normative conclusions
about Hwangs misconduct, or do we want to relativize misconduct? These are important issues facing
the field in dealing with this case.

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