Norbert W. Paul - The End of Scientific Revolutions?

Since decades, scientific change has been interpreted in the light of the concepts of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions. Only recently, the marble of the Kuhnian interpretation of scientific change got numerous cracks caused by the infiltration of non-disciplinary thinking in both, science and studies on science. Are we witnessing the end of scientific revolutions? This question will be explored by looking at life cycles of experimental research in biomedicine and the life sciences.
Systematically, research in biomedicine and the life sciences can be characterized by four major phases of their life cycle: First, a new object of research is generated by fitting empirical findings into a new experimental context. The second phase is characterized by a hypothesis-driven move towards the construction of novel explanatory tools and models. This is often inseparable meshing with the third phase in which a technology-driven, self-supporting and sometimes self-referential refinement of methods and technologies comes along with an extension into other fields (CLARKE and FUJIMURA 1992). During the second and the third phase, the new and emerging disciplines also tend to expand their explanatory reach into the social sphere, creating what has been characterized as “exceptionalism” (e.g. genetic exceptionalism or neuro-exceptionalism). Finally, recent biomedicine and life-sciences reach a level in which experimental work becomes more and more data-driven because the technologically constructed experimental systems generate a plethora of findings (data) which at some point start to blur the original hypotheses (HAMLETT 2003; SASSOWER 1995). It is needless to say that all these phases of what has been labelled “techno-science” are closely related to their local societal and cultural contexts and co-constructed by it in a reflexive manner (GIBBONS, LIMOGES et al. 1994; NOWOTNY, SCOTT et al. 2001).
Retrospectively, the raise of experimental systems in medical and biological re-search enabled scientists to move from the observation to the reproduction of, and sub-sequently to the participation in biological processes. Reducing biological complexity to key-features of interest and standardizing the objects of research by methodologically controlled and technologically reproducible laboratory environments paved the road to new fields of experimentation. From the 20th century on, however, we can make out how biomedical research not only became more technology-driven but how experimental systems were increasingly facilitating the design of novel biological entities and processes which would not have come to live without scientists. At the same time, informational science moved from its former role of being a handmaiden of biological research to its central dogma. Biology and the life science became information science.
This paper explores in which ways object-driven and hypotheses-driven experimental life-sciences transformed into domains of experimental research evolving in a technologically constructed, data-driven environment in which they are subjected to constant morphing rather than to paradigmatic change. The question whether the new dynamics of scientific evolution will necessarily put an end to scientific revolutions or not, will play a key role in the critical discussion of epistemological shifts in modern life sciences.