Abstract
Perhaps no other instrument has symbolized the techno-myth of an avant-garde science, so widespread in the expanding community of molecular biology and radio-medicine in the 1960s and 1970s, more powerfully than the liquid scintillation counter. It was an apparatus that effectively came to represent three key technologies of this century: mechanical automation, electronics, and radioactive tracing. Yet in contrast to other instruments and techniques characteristic of the rising new biology and medicine such as electrophoresis, ultracentrifugation, electron microscopy, NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), and PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) (Elzen 1986; Kay 1988; Lenoir 1997: chapt. 9 [in collaboration with Christope Lécuyer]; Rabinow 1996; Rasmussen 1997) liquid scintillation counting has so far received no attention from historians of science and technology. This paper intends to exemplify the coming into being and the trajectory of a research enabling instrument. As I will show below, within twenty years liquid scintillation counting (LSC) developed from a clumsy technology for special purposes of radiation measurement into a generic technology that became ubiquitous in molecular biology and medicine laboratories in the 1970s. Among a few other early models, it was particularly Packard’s Tri-Carb® Liquid Scintillation Spectrometer that made its way into university institutes, national laboratories, hospitals, and research departments of companies. A Packard Tri-Carb with its calculator data output connected to an IBM typewriter-printer became a signpost of an up-to-date modern biomedical laboratory in the 1960s and 1970s (Figure 8.1).
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Rheinberger, HJ. (2001). Putting Isotopes to Work: Liquid Scintillation Counters, 1950–1970. In: Joerges, B., Shinn, T. (eds) Instrumentation Between Science, State and Industry. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9032-2_8
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