Representations as Thinking tools: satellite-DNA and laboratory practices

Edna Suárez
Evolutionary Biology, UNAM

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     Last modified: June 14, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/15/2005 9:00 AM in ROZH 102
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Abstract
The paper presents a story of how satellite-DNA was represented in its early history, in order to bring new arguments in favor of the idea that representation is a kind of activity, a tracing game, in the words of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, that is scarcely related to the classical idea of a relation between representation and a referent. I want to explore the transition from the representing practices which constitute the daily workings of technological arrangements in experimental systems, to the final elaboration of tables, curves and pictures constituting the models of scientists. In particular, I will focus a special type of representation, which I call thinking tools. Presenting the evolution of such representations tell us a lot about the practices involved in the origins of satellite DNA (an experimental anomaly detected in studies of molecular evolution), and its final stabilization as an important phenomenon of eukaryotic cells. Also, this history will show us the diverse representative strategies deployed by scientists, as well as the changing functions of representation in the various moments of knowledge production.

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
Visual Rhetoric and the Prion
Representing radioisotopes: experiments and instruments in the visualization of life sciences in the post-WWII era
What do we get from visual access?
Standardisation and abstraction: two ways to model Arabidopsis thaliana
Science and Representation: the case of genetic maps.
The role of two different but related graphs in the expansion of molecular biology between 1960 and 1980: the regulatory gene network and the intra-cellular signalling pathway