Industrial methods, and industrially produced instruments, reagents and
living organisms are central to research activities today. They play a
key role in the homogenization and the diffusion of laboratory
practices, thus in their transformation into a stable and unproblematic
knowledge about the natural world. This book displays the - frequently
invisible - role of industry in the construction of fundamental
scientific knowledge through the examination of case studies taken from
the history of nineteenth and the twentieth century physics, chemistry
and biomedical sciences.