Citation for H. M. Collins

It is a great pleasure for me that the Society for Social Studies of Science has awarded the John Desmond Bernal Award to Professor H. M. Collins for his outstanding achievements in the study of science and particularly the sociology of scientific knowledge. Harry Collins, as we all know, has been first and foremost among those who have taken the content of natural scientific work seriously, and by doing so, have turned the sociology of science around and refocused it on SSK, or the sociology of scientific knowledge. Though I may have had one or another bone to pick with Harry Collins in the past, I have also genuinely admired him for some of his intriguing accomplishments. Not only has he always put his finger on epistemic issues such as the problems of replication and consensus formation in natural science-opening up for empirical study questions that no sociologists would have touched in the past-but he has also articulated and developed along the way a number of important concepts without which today we could not go about the business of studying science. These concepts often summarize not only his but also others' work in the field, thus offering the field a measure of conceptual coherence and integration-I am thinking of concepts such as that of experimenter's regress, interpretative flexibility, core group, or recently, in his work on artificial experts, behavior specific acts. Harry Collins also always gave me the impression of being a master in applying what we learned in SSK in his own work and career. If he made the study of controversy in science one of his major strengths, he also unloosed a fair number of controversies himself-and undoubtedly he was also the one who most enjoyed fighting them out and winning the point. Come to think

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