Class Of: 2024

Research location: Robert Packard Center for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Research

Lab Rat: Characterizing Invisible Communities in Scientific Laboratories

How did you come to this work?

As an undergraduate working in the Robert Packard Center for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Research, based at the Johns Hopkins campus in East Baltimore, I know that there are not only students but also fellows and technicians wrapped up in the arduous processes of scientific investigation. These include, for example, laborers that collect biohazardous waste boxes, as well as the numerous workers that deliver model organisms, chemical reagents, and messages from other laboratory groups. Their activities are critical to laboratory operations and the production of new scientific knowledge.

The existence of this ecosystem hints at power dynamics within and across laboratories, between research personnel as well as subjects and objects. The concept of the invisible technician was coined by the science and technology studies (STS) scholar Steven Shapin in 1989 and has been used by other STS scholars ever since to expand on these issues. Using the invisible technician concept, my project explores the roles unrecognized actors play in scientific laboratories through a creative lens. 

Do you plan on continuing this work? If so, in what way?

This study utilizes an ethnographic approach to analyze the dynamics within multiple laboratories in the Neurology Department at Johns Hopkins in order to render visible the invisible labor that is important to the operation of such unitary laboratories. The fieldwork serves as a starting point for a speculative fiction account of the laboratory environment, which aims to invite readers to inhabit the space for themselves rather than merely consider the experiences presented as belonging to others—allowing for more embodied consideration of the radical subversion of current laboratory norms and the invisible as tangible. Moving on to medical school after completing my undergraduate degree at Hopkins, I plan to continue thinking about what contributes to a community and the valuation of labor in other, more clinical contexts.

What resonated with you as you conducted your research? 

This research explores the fields of science and medicine through the lens of personal experience. My findings demonstrate that although people in laboratories enjoy their work and are empowered through both bottom-up and top-down channels to induce cultural shifts, there are major discrepancies between people’s responsibilities in these labs—discrepancies typically viewed as non-negotiable for reasons that loom larger than a principal investigator. Taking the laboratory as representative of a community as well as a workplace, official research output, in the forms of presentations and publications, belie poignant interpersonal conflicts that result from and mirror broader societal issues.