Split and Splice

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger is honorary professor of the history of science at the Technical University of Berlin and director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He is the author, with Staffan Müller-Wille, of The Gene: From Genetics to Postgenomics and A Cultural History of Heredity, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

• List of FiguresIntroduction  Part I Infra-Experimentality1 Traces2 Models3 Making Visible4 Grafting5 Protocols  Part II Supra-Experimentality6 Shapes of Time7 Experimental Cultures8 Knowing and Narrating9 Thinking Wild10 A Eulogy of the FragmentPostscriptAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex of Names

“Split and Slice borrows new perspectives from a broad range of scholarly fields, generating a long list of cited authors who are rarely associated in the same book. Rheinberger moves easily from phenomenology to biology and from science to art, and vice versa. . . . The book is in a way exhaustive, addressing many of the most significant issues discussed in science studies during the last decades, for instance the importance of practice and technologies, the rich source of information represented by notebooks, and in par­ticular the protocols shared by the different members of a laboratory. Only Rheinberger could write such a book, which wanders between phenomenology and sociology of science, while still remaining engaging and attractive.”