Give me a Laboratory, and I will raise the … Laboratory

Jean-Paul Gaudilli ere's Inventer la biomeÂdicine provides a welcome and timely synthesis of his extensive and very detailed investigations into the history of that strange creature that is``biomedicine''. Much of this work, which has focused not just on France, but on the United States, Britain and Germany as well, has previously appeared in disparate articles and chapters of edited collections, including The invisible industrialist (1998) and Heredity and infection (2001), both co-edited by Gaudilli ere and his long-standing intellectual interlocutor, Ilana Lo Èwy. Here, all this work is finally brought together, to speak of the development of a new``biopolitical'' order, whereinthèìaboratory'' figures as a pivotal institution in the articulation of a ``molecular'' understanding of biological phenomena, normal and pathological, and the health of the nation. In other words, we are now entering the age of``biomedicine'', wherein molecules such as``RU-486'', the result of esoteric research into hormonal synthesis and metabolism, mediate between our most intimate, private relationships and the institutional politics of reproduction. The exact relationship between thè`molecular'' understanding of biological phenomena and the organization of``medicine'' is quite unclear, however. Gaudilli ere thus opens his concluding, ``general summary'' by asking very pointedly: ``What is scientific medicine?'' (p. 369). Focusing on thè`clinic'' rather than thèìaboratory'', Gaudilli ere's preferred, and more obviously relevant institution, I have sometimes argued that the answers that he and a number of other historians of thè`biomedical sciences'' have provided to this most difficult question, difficult for both historical actors and their historians, is less than persuasive. Inventer la biomeÂdicine helps to clarify misunderstandings, sharpen points of difference on writing the history of contemporary biopolitics, and raises questions of more general historiographical interest. In Inventer la biomeÂdicine, Gaudilli ere examines the emergence and consolidation of a ``molecular'' approach tò`medical'' problems among French microbiologists, biochemists and physiologists. This process famously reached its culmination in 1965, the closing date of Gaudilli ere's avowedly``archaeological'' excursus. That year, Franc Ëois Jacob and Jacques Monod were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for their work on thèìac operon'', which brilliantly explained the molecular mechanisms regulating the production of proteins. French biologists thus became important actors in the shaping of``molecular biology''. Moreover, during the years leading up to this so important date, Monod, the former Communist member of the Forces Franc Ëaises de l'Inte Ârieur, the 1 Bruno Latour, `The force and the reason of experiment', in H E Le Grand (ed.