WORK
Laboratory Life
Latour and Woolgar's 1979 ethnographic study of the Salk Institute — the book that launched science studies by tracing how scientific facts are constructed through the concrete work of laboratories, instruments, and publications rather than merely discovered.
Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (with Steve Woolgar, Princeton University Press, 1979; second edition 1986) is Latour's first major book and the founding document of modern science studies. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at Roger Guillemin's neuroendocrinology laboratory at the Salk Institute, the book traced how scientific facts about biological entities (specifically, the hormone TRF/TRH) were produced through the concrete daily work of the laboratory — pipetting, purifying, measuring, writing, and publishing. The book argued that the fact that won Guillemin a Nobel Prize was not simply 'discovered in nature' but assembled through heterogeneous networks of instruments, protocols, texts, and institutional arrangements. For AI, the book is foundational because it establishes the methodological approach — patient tracing of actual practice — that the subsequent analysis of AI networks must also employ.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book emerged from Latour's unusual intellectual trajectory. Trained in philosophy and theology in France,