Abstract
How are samples of lice-tissues, collected from RNAi experiments, endowed with biological meanings through work downstream in the experimental pipeline? This chapter tracks the representational and material cascades initiated in the previous chapter. It examines the making of meaningful measurements of gene expression in lice tissues, focusing on a widely used technology known as real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction. By ethnographically tracing the work and situatedness of one researcher within the cultural-cognitive ecosystem of the laboratory, I show how everyday operations on the benchtop depend on “ecological assemblies”; small-scale cultural practices that orchestrate arrays of resources in the agent’s immediate environment to house and extend cognitive processes that span beyond the boundaries of the individual. An important property of these functional systems is their role as material anchors for conceptual blends. I show how the cultural artifacts, which litter the lab, afford scientists a suite of external resources with remarkable computational properties. Together, these representational cascades shift the experimental system’s epistemic states, as part of an extended cognitive process of thinking through things.
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Solberg, M. (2021). Making Meaning and Measurement in Gene Expression Analysis. In: A Cognitive Ethnography of Knowledge and Material Culture. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72511-2_6
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