Content area
Full Text
The author thanks Koen Vermeir and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments, and acknowledges the support of the US National Science Foundation Grant No. 0083414 and the Institute for the Social Sciences, Cornell University.
In recent years, historical and social studies of science have increasingly challenged traditional conceptualizations that imagine science to be naturally open, regard secrecy as inherently marginal to scientific activity, or place moral virtue securely and uniformly on one side of an open/closed divide.1Related questions about the selective circulation of knowledge and the production of ignorance have also gained new salience.2To extend these lines of inquiry, this paper focuses on information control in interaction, considering how actors seek to control the flow of scientific knowledge as they interact with others, either in face-to-face encounters or in modes of communication involving circulating documents, data, materials and other entities containing knowledge. The paper takes a symmetrical approach to phenomena as different as secrecy and publication in scientific journals, treating both as members of the same overarching category, namely practices that aim to effect control over which knowledge becomes available to whom, when, under what terms and conditions, and with what residual encumbrances.3Secrecy, for example, is not framed as an isolated, sui generis phenomenon, nor as one side of a secrecy/openness dichotomy, nor even as a pole on a secrecy/openness continuum.4Instead, the paper explores how actors manage a dialectic of revelation and concealment through which knowledge is selectively made available and unavailable to others, often in the same act. The emphasis on selective revelation highlights partial transfers of knowledge, targeted distribution, matters of timing, and the rights and encumbrances that attach to knowledge at different points in its transit.
The paper develops this perspective in the context of genome research. The traditional conception of science as open and technology as secret, while arguably unduly simplistic in any context, is particularly inapplicable to such fields as genomics, in which the distinction between science and technology is often empirically elusive.5The struggle between the publicly funded International Human Genome Consortium and Celera Genomics is clearly the most famous example in the field of a contest prominently involving data access, ownership and control. Celera, a private company, was founded...