Nicole C. Nelson. Model Behavior

Nicole Nelson’s Model Behavior is an eminently readable ethnography, which historians of medicine and biology will find useful and illuminating. Focused on a set of animal behavior geneticists in the Department of Neuroscience at a university on the West Coast of the United States (pseudonymized as “Coast University”), Nelson traces their efforts to develop experimental mouse models for alcoholism, placing her analysis of their work within the contexts of the earlier history of animal behavior genetics and existing science studies scholarship on animal roles and bodies in the laboratory. Her analysis of the group’s methods, ontological commitments, and rhetorical moves creates a high-resolution portrait of science in practice, while addressing deeper questions about the construction of animal models. Most striking is her interrogation of complexity and uncertainty, concepts that manifest themselves in multiple ways in the processes and products of Coast researchers. Classic science and technology studies (STS) scholarship leads us to anticipate that scientists will strive to eliminate uncertainty, in an effort to establish authority, treating slippery concepts as “stable entities” and seeking unambiguous causes for phenomena (p.41). By contrast, Nelson finds that her researchers emphasize uncertainty and “cultivate complexity talk,” which they use “to promote specific styles of experimenting and claiming” (p.9) that are far removed from the deterministic and reductionistic “gene-for” mindset of the Human Genome Project era.

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