This project is a qualitative, empirical study of the work practices of scientists in the emerging, interdisciplinary field of tissue engineering. Studying tissue engineering offers an opportunity to examine knowledge production in a scientific field in its embryonic state. The field involves new collaborations and institutional arrangements, and brings together engineers, materials scientists, and life scientists from a variety of disciplinary traditions, sources of expertise, priorities, and styles of problem-solving. The project is timely, as the field is in early stages and new social arrangements are under construction. Studying the new concepts and approaches to research that may result also entails studying the conditions in which the production and circulation of knowledge takes place, including the broader cultural and political-economic values that affect and are affected by new technoscientific endeavors. In particular, the study will examine how notions of risk and control over uncertainty, beliefs about perfectibility and enhancement, and understandings of human biology and the body come into play. The project is a multi-sited ethnography, taking place in research laboratories, professional conferences and other educational settings where tissue engineering is being taught, and public hearings for regulatory and policy purposes. It will include in-depth interviews with scientists, and representatives of relevant professional organizations, policy and other public groups. A literature review will include scientific and professional publications, government documents, and industry analyses, and a content analysis will provide data on the way tissue engineering as a field is represented, as well as the engagement of engineering and life sciences with each other, and with public domains. A search of internet sources and their links will demonstrate not only topics of relevance to tissue engineers, but demonstrate linkages between researchers in various disciplines, and connections of organizations and types of expertise, documenting the circulation of specific types of knowledge. The products will include publications and resources for the social studies of science, technology and medicine, as well as innovative educational tools to be used for both social scientists and tissue engineering scientists. In this way, the project will contribute to the study of a variety of emerging and changing scientific fields, as well as providing empirical data on work practices that will contribute to the growing body of works in the anthropology of science, technology and medicine.
