Now four Australian philosophers of science – Max Charlesworth, Lyndsay Farrall, Terry Stokes, and David Turnbull – have pursued just such a program at the celebrated Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Science in Melbourne, to learn ‘how, and to what extent, scientific knowledge is shaped or ‘constructed’, to demystify the inevitable smog. The analysts insist, however, that their aim is ‘not necessarily to debunk’.

It’s a daunting task, even for a team. The Hall Institute comprises more than three hundred people, eighty of them scientists (men mostly), fifty students, fifty technical assistants (women of course), droves of crucial support staff, and 170,000 mice. The Director, Sir Gus Nossal, is a world-famous strategist and publicist. Several of the staff are likely candidates for Nobel Prizes; indeed, the Hall was established by Nobel Laureate Macfarlane Burnet. It’s one of the world’s flagships in immunology.

This sort of study is essential if we’re ever to understand what goes on in such inaccessible bastions of medical power. And there are surprises. Research proves to be far more technique-driven than theoretical (as authorised models suppose). The close scrutiny afforded the Hall’s high-stakes malaria vaccine project particularly valuable, positioning science’s abstract teasers within their sometimes murky contexts of international rivalry for priority, doubtful salience to Third World interests (surprisingly, the benefits of potential malaria vaccination in PNG are not clear-cut), and the motives of those big funding bodies - governments, WHO, and American foundations - whose privilege it is to choose one expensive project over another.

A drawback is that none of these urban anthropologists is, um, an anthropologist. Max Charlesworth is a philosopher; the others are from what used to be called the History and Philosophy of Science. Peeved specialists have been terse on this score. A possible retort is available from within the trade. Bruce Kapferer, introducing a recent Australian collection of essays on cultural theorists, remarked: The anthropological attitude ... is a creative potential of thinkers whose intellectual and historical location is such as to spark an imaginative fire which needs no particular academic disciplinary form to artificially engender it.’’

Do Charlesworth, Farrall, Stokes and Turnbull spark much creative fire with their borrowed flint? It depends how light-adapted your eyes are. Their study is a capable summary of the constructivist standpoint, which is pretty much stipulated rather than argued (though their account of the Hall certainly doesn’t invalidate it). It’s this ‘that scientific knowledge does not follow as a matter of necessity from some special conjunction of method, experiment and theory, but could have been other than it is’.

Their scientific subjects find this pretty absurd – DNA is DNA, isn’t it? – and we are not shown any major viable alternatives to the Hall’s battle-tested results. There again, history is full of such reversals, and surely will be again.

And while one learns more about the details of a first-class research institution than a non-specialist might wish to know, there’s not a lot of what is promised: ‘its own language, its special in-words and shop talk and gossip.’

Of course, the book is not a novel Still, after several ‘hard-nosed colleagues’ asked why their interpretation was preferable to that of the scientists themselves, the analysts consoled each other with an insight from Henry James: that a refined young woman, were she a born novelist, would be able to recreate all of army life from an overheard snatch of barrack-room chat. Now this opinion strikes me as incredible anyway; what’s more, none of our investigators is a born novelist, nor is their method remotely similar to that of even a constructed novelist. It is perhaps a mark of methodological uncertainty that such wild hares are loosed.

My unease (which certainly does not vitiate the many merits of this innovative study) is felt most insistently in the team’s self-presentation, a topic worried repeatedly in asides throughout the text. For ‘a number of good stylistic reasons’, they create a composite ‘I’ who is obliged to blur into consensus the drastically divergent positions of, among others, a Catholic philosopher and a staunchly materialist relativist. When the crucial spotlight is turned reflexively to see ‘what happens when a person with a particular set of interests and attitudes (‘me’) comes into contact with, and tries to understand, a group of scientists’, the gambit tends to self-deconstruct. Since this artificial person is avowedly engaged in clear-eyed deconstruction of what real scientists do and why they do it, one wonders if the argument of this book, too, is ‘constructed’ by recently valorised discursive techniques, if its data, too, is not generated in accordance with current academic modes of production.

This is not a killing criticism, of course - all research proceeds by reference to established paradigms and interpretative methods. It does however spin the book’s claims into a dizzying loop. But then the team disarmingly concludes as much: I now see that almost all the points I have made about the scientists at the Institute would, mutatis mutandis, be made about what I am doing as an anthropologist of science.’’

The difference might be, though, that DNA is DNA, and has been building animals reliably for a billion years, while all that is solid in philosophy of science has a distracting tendency to melt into air ...