Portrait of a Biologist as Wild Capitalist

Portrait of a Biologist as Wild Capitalist

Bruno Latour

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Pierre Kernowicz is 40 years old at the time of our meeting, French with a Polish background, a biochemist, a professor at a university on the West. Coast of the United States, often said to be "brilliant." Certain of his friends even whisper that he is "Nobel material." On the stock exchange of the Science Citation Index, he is worth some 300 citations per year. In the course of the three hours of interview, he tells, in a dry manner, how he arrived where he now is.

The earliest choices : from the local market to the world market

From the outset, Kernowicz plays research against teaching, then foreign countries against France. From the very beginning, he gambles on an enormous difference of potential between America and France that one finds again and again throughout the interview. His father, an engineer, as well as his older brother, had him read English biology textbooks beginning in the fifth form :

I had a fairly good idea of what modern biology represented and not just zoology and physiology.

At that time the "French" sciences were, according to him, "chemistry, zoology, and botany," there was no hint of biochemistry  :

Biochemistry did not exist, nor did molecular biology... until after 1964, when Monod was appointed professor.

This explains his decision to complete in a single year the four years of antiquated French science necessary for the degree. "One had only to be able to read English to extricate oneself from that mess." This choice, of English over French, of modern biology over traditional biology, is itself linked to a more fundamental choice  : the world market over local markets. After earning his degree, Pierre does not trust to chance in selecting a professor, but rather mobilizes an uncle, a university professor. "I asked him to find out who was doing good things in France in a context that was not French but let's say international."

One's investment in one's first laboratory can be decisive  :

I knew there was no advantage to entering a laboratory where the heart-lung machine had been designed in 1930 and nothing had been produced since (...), I wanted a fully productive laboratory.

With information in hand, the uncle suggests the name of Jost. Pierre Kernowicz then does his third-cycle doctorate in a French laboratory that seems to be known internationally.

So far, neither Kernowicz nor I have entered into any precise scientific content. Decisions are made only as a function of very classical and vague sociological criteria  : the desire to travel, access to the English and American market and to modern biology, the mobilization of family relations to evaluate the best investments ; Kernowicz, by completing his bachelor's degree in one year, simply proved he was brilliant and motivated. In Jost's laboratory begins his contact with research.

The master's degree is "a catastrophe," as Pierre admits. For two reasons  : Jost makes his students do a lot of manual work ; Pierre is very clumsy and balks at the hierarchy of functions in the laboratory  : "In his view of things, you had to start by washing the dishes before you could do research." But most importantly, Pierre does not believe in Jost's physiological approach  :

I was already seeing things on a cellular level and I did not see the advantage of removing a hypophysis [pituitary body], one can easily pay a technician to do that.

In this remark there is a two-fold opposition, psychological and scientific, to Jost's research program, whose physiology

consisted of describing phenomena that were extremely interesting but at the same time vague, which one couldn't get a qrasp on ; many causes could have provoked them and that made them excessively complex and unattractlve.

The interest of the questions comes at the cost of the complexity of the operations and the enormous mass of manual dexterity demanded by the experiments. This dexterity is the result of an initiation from bottom to top of the ladder, which puts the young researcher below a good technician by assigning him to repetitive tasks. Pierre's calculation is immediately clear  :

What happened was that I found I had an interest in the molecular part of what they were teaching, and that was the steroid secreted by the adrenal qland.

The person teaching this course is Professor Beaulieu. Pierre immediately moves. He goes "where it interests him," as one says without thinking about it. Pierre leaves Jost and joins Beaulieu. He leaves "French" physiology for Anglo-Saxon molecular biology, he leaves the manual labor of technicians for an intellectual work in which technicians, reduced to performing repetitive tasks, leave it to the young wolves to solve the problems.

There are many metaphors associated with economics behind the little phrase, "resolving a problem" so beloved of scholars. Let us hear how Kernowicz summarizes his strategy  :

Steroids were known molecules (...) that did something well defined, it was a subject about which I had the impression I could do a relatively clean and neat thesis, or one that could at least provide me with a negative or positive response to a certain quantity of work that was limited whereas in the case of other sublects I had the impression I could have worked for twenty years and would have found myself at the same point... So I chose steroids.

There are research subjects, we often say, there are theses, there are laboratories, there are concepts, there are careers – these things do not get mixed up. But Pierre Kernowicz mixes them rather happily. Not only does he mix them, he connects them in a cycle whose overall profitability he calculates  : Jost is not advantageous ; Beaulieu is advantageous ; biology is more profitable. The "subject" is, in Pierre's cycle, what coal and the atom are to the electric company. Coal or atom ? Physiology or cellular biology ? The French market or the international market ? Once in Beaulieu's laboratory, Pierre continues his acceleration, which he depicts retrospectively as a strategy. Instead of doing a third cycle and then a Thèse d'Etat, he embarks immediately on the Thèse d'Etat. He has, he says, the good fortune to meet a thesis director who give him an "interesting" subject. What does this innocent little word mean in the mouth of a disinterested scholar ? According to Pierre, it is a subject that "gave results very quickly," as opposed, therefore, to the very slow cycle of production of Jost's physiology which he has just left.

It's a subject in keeping with Beaulieu's overall strategy. Hormones were known ; it was a matter of finding out what was going on inside the cells, why, in this case, testicles blocked spermatogenesis at 38° and not at 32° .

What is involved here is also a subject whose experimental apparatus is very simple, as opposed, therefore, to the manual dexterity of the other laboratory  : water baths, fragments of testicles, entirey known hormones. The first result of this operation is, Pierre says, to ''remove his inhibitions." Not to have inhibitions is certainly an intellectual virtue ; it is also, for Pierre, an aptitude for moving about, for playinq, as Nietzsche say's, "the Don Juan of knowledge." At this staqe, Pierre has proved himself  : he has found out why testicles secrete different hormones at different temperatures ; he proves himself, he is capable ; he has what it takes. He sums up his results in a sentence that telescopes everything people like to regard as separate in the enchanted realms of epistemology :

This gave me three articles that gave me more or less the equivalent of a thesis and Beaulieu sent me directly to the United States because he thought it would be good for me !

I do not know how thinqs ought to happen according to the rules of scientific method, but in the "economy of truth," according to Foucault's expression, testicles heated in a water bath change into a series of figures that change into articles, that are exchanged for a title of doctor, which, along with the recommendation of a mentor, change into a departure for one of the best laboratories in the United States, that of Pincus.

Kernowicz proves himself and makes a name for himself

Kernowicz is not a researcher yet : he is simply a doctor of science. He has paid his entrance fees, he has not really staked anything yet and has not yet won anything except enough esteem so that he is lent a few chips, a little space on a laboratory bench, a few hours of technicians, some rats. Until now, he has not lost his chips, he has recovered his losses, by stakinq small sums on precise subjects about which everything is known except for a few factors. Yet when he reflects on his past, Pierre considers that everything was risked during this period  : he could have earned his bachelor's degree in four years, believed in France and done botany or lost twenty years skilfully dissecting testicles in Jost's laboratory and learned nothing about thrilling subjects. I am mixing metaphors on purpose because Pierre does the same, passing from war to gambling, or from the latter to market economy.

With Pincus, inventor of the contraceptive pill, Pierre finds himself in at once the best and the most danqerous position. The best, since, for someone who wants to confront the international market, it is a little like a bank having an office on Wall Street. The most dangerous, because Pierre must become an independent producer in the very spot where the rivalry is the most intense and where the most powerful ''firms'' are trying to absorb him.

We sometimes believe there exist individual researchers. However, that unit of analysis is not a primary given. Pierre shows us, on the contrary, how one has to struggle to cut out of the social cloth a notion such as that of "autonomous researcher." When he arrives at Pincus's laboratory, he is the object of the covetousness of a certain number of researchers, who want to have him work for them  :

I had very quickly understood that if one works for someone else, he has all the benefit and you have none ; it's better to be all alone (...) ; he will take everything that's good and will leave all the shit for you, so there's no advantage.

Pierre finds himself confronted with another choice, "to work with someone or for someone" : "If you work for someone, it's the person heading the qroup who develops." If Pierre gives in, he becomes someone's arm and loses even the right to say "I"  : he becomes part of a group, the shadow of a boss, technician of a brain that is situated in another body. His signature on articles, mixed in with those of many others, will never be able to emerge from anonymity.

Knowing Kernowicz, we are sure he will do everything he can to resist the forty or fifty-year-old doctors of science who ''pounce on passing Indians, Germans, Frenchmen'' in order to integrate them into a group. But he has to be able to do this. Pierre is able to, according to him, for the following reasons  :

The first reason is that at the time, around 1962-1966, there was an enormous amount of money (...). Pincus could allow himself to have people who took risks. The second reason was that Jost was a good friend of Pincus ; and since I had expressed the desire to work on a subject that seemed to Pincus to have a chance, he had said to his associates  : "Leave him completely alone for six months and if in six months he makes a mess of things, we'll take care of him."

It is at this point that the sociologist, the economist, or the psychologist of sciences too often hesitates to continue, because one ought to enter into what is wrongly called the "content" or the "technical details" of a discipline. Wrongly because there is no break between the exterior of a discipline and its interior. If Pincus has so much money, it is because the search for a contraceptive pill is the major stake of the sixties. And if Pincus takes an interest in Pierre, it is because the latter's subject can advance his interests. Pierre matters, now, because of his capacity to invest in his subject. In order to follow the researcher, we must therefore begin following a science.

Kernowicz's subject is the ovary, but his way of investing it is very particular and attracts Pincus's attention. Let us look, through Pierre's eyes, at what appears at first to be a simple scientific content. As we learn from the dictionary, the ovary is made up of three tissues, the follicle, the yellow body, and the interstitial tissue ; the follicle itself is formed of two different types of cells with complementary action, those of the external theca and those of the granulosa. How do the ovaries accomplish the synthesis of the steroids already identified ? It is Pincus's group that assigns this general question to him. Pierre, faithful to his strategy, shifts the question and proposes another : what is the reaction of each of these tissues separately ? Whereas his colleagues "are cutting the ovary into little pieces", he separates the different tissues, takes the ovaries of female rabbits arrested in the follicular phase and isolates each type of cell. What ensues is a new organization of work and of time. His colleagues are slowly obtaining complex answers to a composite phenomenon made up of at least five different signals. Kernowicz is rapidly obtaining simple answers to terribly simplified phenomena.

This is still the same strategy that had made him leave Jost for Beaulieu, France for America, and physiology for molecular biology. In the realm of ideas, this strategy is called "reductionism." However, reductionism is common to all biologists ; why, then, would Kernowicz gain on this precise point an advantage that justifies the confidence that Pincus has placed in him ? Pierre's response to this question reveals to us another trait that explains the fast pace of his career  :

In the United States, people were working on the entire ovary ; I'm convinced that lots of people thought it was necessary to work on the constitutive elements of the ovary but they thought they had time, and the moment hadn't come yet, they hadn't yet completely exhausted the metabolic paths of the entire ovary.

The tortoise beat the hare. Kernowicz seizes the opportunity, somewhat upsets the logical and chronological order of the research programs and without a great deal of effort makes a clean sweep of a subject that everyone had already dealt with, but in a sketchy manner.

The cycle of scientific credibility

Pierre does not claim to have made a great discovery. The profitability of the operation is not yet to be found in the advancement of endocrinology, but only in that of his career.

This doesn't mean it was revolutionary. They told me it was of value in the sense that it was competitive with what was being done by the best groups in the United States (...). Only, people wanted to know if the idea was valuable enough to justify a person working on it all alone or whether he was wasting his time and they would force him to work with other people ; that's all.

In order to understand all these evaluations, Pierre roughly sketches a complete cycle of credibility  : a researcher is not interested in information as such, but only in new information. If he redoes something that has already been discovered, the value of his work equals zero. Worse, it is negative because he has consumed as pure loss time, work, energy, animals, equipment, space. For there to be no loss, it is necessary that the credit of the operation be at least equal to – or, better, slightly higher than – the debit. Ever since Marx, capital is defined as that which circulates in the form of a cycle that has no other goal but the renewal or expansion of that cycle. In science it is as though certain researchers were investing capital in such a way that the goal of the operation was an increase of that capital. That capital of credibility is not reserved for the recognition (symbolic) that the researchers may have for one another (Pincus for Kernowicz, Jost for Pincus), but for the whole of the cycle – including data, facts, concepts, and articles.

Pincus lends Pierre a certain initial capital in the form of space and instruments and networks of information, and Pierre spends this capital on a subject  : the ovary. He could swallow it up with a loss. Let us remember that he has only six months to "prove himself." Let us also remember that the three tissues of the ovary each have different responses as a function of time, which makes the responses of the entire ovary chaotic and analogous to a background noise. Pierre mobilizes a technique (micro-dissection), an experimental equipment (the female rabbit blocked in the follicular phase), and chooses to inject each tissue separately with gonadotropins ; he invests six months of his own work. This work "yields" clear data that one can easily distinguish from the background noise. He converts these data into an argument during a conference at Pincus's Foundation. His colleagues find that "it is well presented."

Kernowicz continues and converts his arguments into articles, which, because of Pincus's reputation, can be placed in good journals, where they are therefore widely read. Since Pierre has upset the chronological succession and grasped a certain approach at an unseasonable moment, he is read with '"interest" by those who were going to do the same thing but believed, wrongly, that time was on their side. Because these readers, in turn, are interested not in information but in new information, it is of no use to them to redo what Pierre has already done, especially since Pincus's credit is enough to guarantee that Pierre's results do not need to be repeated. The readers of Pierre's article must therefore start from his data. Since Pierre has from the beginning fought to be independent and appears to be the first author, his readers are obliged to direct their citations and the acknowledgments that go with them to his own name. Finally, since Pierre is with Pincus and is publishing in a good journal, one cannot allow oneself to use his work without citing it, as his readers could have done if the author had been a Frenchman from France or a Japanese from Japan. For all these reasons, Pierre finds himself with a capital of credibility distinctly superior to that which he had been lent when he came in. The ensemble formed by Pierre and his ideas is "of value" and produces a yield to anyone who invests in him.

The title of this chapter now becomes clearer  : Pierre is a capitalist – in capital of credibility – , and he is undoubtedly wild because he is prepared to shift the ensemble of his values at any moment in order to reinvest them wherever one seems to intuit that their profitability is highest. The better known he becomes, the more mobile he is.

Pierre converts three times

From steroids to polypeptides

Scarcely has he earned the beginnings of a reputation with his ovaries than he reevaluates the whole of the branch, I mean the discipline  :

I had a good training in steroids but I realized that the era of steroids was going to end fairly soon, and as they say "the cow was beginning to dry up," and that I would do just as well to take an interest in polypeptides.

A rumor was going around the stock market of values ; steroids were finished, down to 3% at the most. Warning to mobile people. Pierre is ready to change his field for two reasons. First of all, he wants to go to California and the two best chemists working with peptides are respectively in San Francisco and Los Angeles. But also, steroids are not pure, they are large molecules whose exact chemical structures are not known at the time, whereas peptides – smaller molecules composed uniquely of amino acids – are on the eve of being purified. Kernowicz likes purity, let us remember, not out of a religious belief but out of a spirit of economy ; with an absolutely pure peptide, you give unequivocal answers and you rapidly produce nice articles that cannot easily be challenged by your dear colleagues ; with half-purified steroids, you have confused answers which only slowly yield articles easily challenged by others. Kernowicz prepares to pack his bags and leave for California and for peptides, whose era seems to be opening.

But once he is with the chemist C.H. Li in California, funds begin to diminish for all types of research. Because of this, there is no longer any question of Pierre's having his own projects, especially since in this new field he is only a beginner  : "I had to work on a lab subject," he confesses, annoyed. What is more, the isolation and characterization of a peptide requires a largescale enterprise, intensive in capital, and a strong division of labor. For two and a half years, Pierre learns the job and familiarizes himself with this new field  : he works well but without renown ; the only real capitalist in this laboratory is C.H. Li, who profits, as his group's trade name, from the collective work of the researchers associated with him. They work, he capitalizes.

From California to France

Pierre's return to France to do his military service provides a fairly good example of credit conversion. Pierre goes to see his old professor Jost. In the course of this meeting, they evaluate each other. Jost dismisses all Pierre's articles on polypeptides by saying  :

That's small potatoes, it doesn't interest me, now you're going to do some interesting work, you're going to work with me.

But he is evaluating Pierre only on the level of an assistant. "I was 'pissed off', four years in the United States and I come back and find myself at the same level as when I left !" Then Pierre takes from his pocket a very flattering letter of recommendation written by C.H. Li. Master trump card. However, Jost's scorn for this sort of science – a scorn which is the inverse of Pierre's scorn for Jost's science, let us not forget – is stronger than the letter of recommendation. Pierre's value is as an assistant, no more. From one country to the other, from one field to the other, the definitions of what is "small potatoes" and what is "interesting" are incommensurable.

Pierre, at this point in his career, thinks of himself neither as an assistant nor as a small free capitalist. He goes from one boss to the other to sell his work force, negotiate his degrees, but most of all to obtain, through the articles he has published, a position as functionary in the university hierarchy. The reason for this is simple. In order to become truly independent and to create around oneself one's own laboratory, the condition for any somewhat sizable capitalization, a Certain level in the hierarchy is necessary, at least in France. His future mobilization – and thus his chance of capitalizing important discoveries – now depends on the position in the hierarchy he can occupy by cashing in on credit earned in the United States. For Jost, Kernowicz has the value of an assistant because his science resembles "small potatoes." He must therefore move, within France itself, from one branch to another, to find a group that will have high enough esteem for his science to give him a position that can guarantee his future independence.

Pierre, as we have see, has a gift for playing off the differences of potential that exist between one branch of science and another, between one country and another, between one subject and another. With Jost, he is worth nothing ; no problem, he goes to see Jacques Monod, who is in fact looking for an endocrinologist who is also a biochemist  :

And he said to me, see, look here, the bacterium is finished, it would be good to become interested in more important phenomena, you've come along at just the right moment because it would be good to become interested in hormones.

From assistant to assistant in charge of research

Monod does not value Kernowicz because he is a friend of C.H. Li or of Pincus ; he does not necessarily recognized his stronger merits. Quite simply, he needs him. One can understand why when one considers the very nature of the events that had occurred. Let us not forget that neither Monod, Pierre, Pincus, nor Jost are interested in information as such  : only new information interests them because it alone permits one to judge how profitable the cycle of credits may be  : if, after running through the entire cycle, I find myself back with the facts already known to everyone, I have wasted my time and I am probably bankrupt. If, on the other hand, I have obtained a set of arguments the least bit new, my cycle becomes profitable and the difference between the initial capital and the final capital may immediately be reinvested in a new subject. The new information – let's go ahead and use the word – is the "surplus value" of this capital. To take this a step further, it is neither the information nor the surplus value of information that interests the researcher, it is the "accelerated and enlarged reproduction" of the cycle as a whole, unless he leaves the field and goes off to cash in on his capital of credibility for something else (teaching, management, administration, journalism, etc.).

It is clear that Pierre is not interested in ovaries in themselves. Pierre is also not interested in rediscovering by himself and for his own pleasure what is already known about ovaries ; the proof of this is that he leaves the field of steroids as soon as "the cow begins to dry up." One could view this move as an indication of a love of facts – and perhaps that is the case – , but then the same would have to be said about a speculator who abandons sugar for coffee, leaving his colleagues to waste their time on a collapsing market while he makes big money on another. I am not saying anything psychological here, or anything that might cast aspersions on the dignity of scientists. It hardly matters here how a researcher expresses his interests, or rather what part of the cycle he chooses to designate as the end and goal of his activity. Depending on his tastes, his culture, or his situation, he might say he is working to heal people, to play, to manipulate animals, to win, to discover, to earn recognition, to earn a living, for the love of his country. Whatever section of the cycle he chooses to designate, he will still have to make his way through the whole of it. Those who wish to learn for the sake of learning, learn in order to earn money, learn in order to save humanity, all find themselves equally subject to the iron laws of the cycle of credibility. In this interview, for reasons which it is not useful to discuss, Pierre likes to describe the whole of the cycle with a youthful cynicism, and takes pleasure in its entire movement.

Let us return to Monod. If he begins by reinventing endocrinology, he is going to lose ten years and fall into bankruptcy, for the financial backers at the Institut Pasteur want something for their money. If, on the other hand, someone allows him to be competitive in endocrinology, he will be able to reap the benefits he hopes to obtain by applying to this new field the methods developed in the old. Every scientific investment thus creates a demand. Kernowicz's competence will allow Monod to respond to that demand. Epistemologists have wanted to see this phenomenon as a great mystery and have invented, to explain it, systematic norms or rules. Yet, for Pierre, it is a market neither easier nor more difficult to understand than any other market. Every group that seeks to become credible creates a demand ; since there are other groups, the demand of one may be the offer of another  : a market is created, as a good liberal doctrine, by this encounter of desires alone. When Pierre did his experiments on the separate tissues of the ovary, his colleagues read about what he had done, not out of politeness, not out of disinterestedness, but out of interest. On the one hand, perhaps they resented him for having made a clean sweep of the very subject on which they were about to begin work, but on the other hand, they immediately found themselves relieved of this subject, which was now without interest, and capable of using the results elsewhere in order to produce new information on other points, thus accelerating the circulation of their own cycle. Kernowicz distinctly feels the variations of this offer and this demand on his own career since "with Jost" he was worth no more than a position as assistant whereas "with Monod" he is worth a position as chargé de recherche [assistant professor$$] at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique.

Pierre flees France

Now, you will say, our Kernowicz is settled forever in France, assured of a career in one of the foremost groups in the world whose strictly molecular approach would be bound to attract him. However, Pierre, who left Jost because the latter posed questions that were too complex, must soon leave Monod because he poses questions that are too simplistic :

It was a difficult subject, broached in a naive manner because of an "over-confidence" [said in Enqlish] in the results they had obtained with bacteria, and because Monod at that time proclaimed to all comers that a bacterium and an elephant amounted to the same thing.

The idea was to obtain cellular differentiations in vitro :

Monod's idea was to put some myoblast in with an endometrial cell and the next day one would have a complete uterus.

Here again, the economy of time does not suit Pierre ; not, as with Jost, because one was losing too much, but because one was trying, this time, to go too fast  :

[Monod said] '"you don't have to worry, this will be resolved in six months, we just have to want to do it." [$$$have the desire, the guts, the energy for it?] To give you an idea, this business started in 1966, today [in 1976], they still haven't progressed an inch.

Pierre wants to get ahead, and fast. If the subject is too complex or too simplistic, one is wastinq one's time, one is exhausting oneself. Cells divided in vitro when one added estradiol, but never ln vivo  :

There was no logical explanation for the fact that they could not replicate the results in vivo ; well, they did not want to see this incoherence, because they thought time would take care of it.

Pierre is a wild man who moves with time, he does not wait for time to arrange his affairs for him. "The more time passes, the worse it gets, there are now enormous groups working on it ; (...) it hasn't moved an inch, the cells still don't divide in vitro" Pierre isolates himself, breaks with Monod, ceases to respond to a demand impossible to satisfy. The others, according to him, are going hankrupt and their cycle is slowing down. Pierre is continuing his subject  : the biosynthesis of polypeptides. He wants to create around this theme his own unit of production. But for this, he would have to rise in the hierarchy of the CNRS. Since Pierre is working on the same subject as the president of the board, he continues to be, still according to him, ranked 23rd out of 23 in the list for promotion to maître de recherche [$$$]. Feeling blocked, he moves again. Why ? The answer to that question is simple in Pierre's mind  : in France, there is a feudal economy, in the United States, there is wild capitalism, true scientific competition !

In France, I would have obtained the same thing [as in the United States] if I had persuaded people that they were valuable ; and I wouldn't have persuaded people that I was valuable except as a function of the fact that they would have thought I had thouqht that they were valuable too, which I absolutely did not think.

This myth of an America where a pure scientific capitalism reigns, compared to a France with a feudal economy, is often shared by expatriates of that period. Kernowicz resents France for living only on a symbolic economy of positions and distinction. To this he contrasts the American system in which the true value of the young wolves counts, and not only their positions. Despite this "French ailment" he would in fact have stayed, he confesses, if he had been sure of becoming one of the powers himself. Alas, May 1968 sweeps away even that possibility. To the pressure of the mandarins is now added the "triumph of mediocrity," "the downward levelling." Having been blocked by the oligarchy, now Pierre is blocked by anarchy. "So I took the easiest way out and returned to the United States." He does not simply leave, he flees.

Pierre carves out a field for himself

Pierre returns to the United States in 1969 and wants to settle only in California. He follows the usual network  : Monod at the Institut Pasteur allows him to slip effortlessly as though along a cablecar wire from Paris to the Salk Institute in San Diego, one of whose scientific advisors Monod is. Once there, Pierre changes his strategy. He is now 34 years old ; he feels stronger, he prepares a great coup. That is, he will invest an entire year of work, thanks to a small salary advanced by the Salk Institute, in writing requests for grants. In this way, he will be able for the first time to possess in his own name all the means of production of credibility. Until then, a laboratory bench was lent to him, equipment was advanced, but he received in his own right only his salary. Because of this, no enlarging of the subject, no mobilization of equipment on another theme, no acceleration of the cycle was possible without a long negotiation with boss or colleagues. Pierre wants to become his own boss in order to be able to move more quickly on the subjects he has chosen. At the same time, he wants to be able to tackle difficult subjects and be believed. Now, the more difficult a subject is, the heavier the investments must be in order to produce convincing results. The material form of these investments is well known, it is called a laboratory.

How does Pierre choose subjects that will yield sufficient sums for the formation of his laboratory,

- As a function of the credit this may bring you ?

- Not so much, really, that's the third consideration... First of all the money... No, first of all, I admit, simplicity, that's equally important : simply because if you ask for money for a subject, you have to do it, or you have to justify the money. Because if you ask for money and the subject is too complex and you get fouled up in it, the people who have you the money aren't going to be very happy.

I recall that what is involved here is a choice of subjects in a "fundamental" discipline, as they say, absolutely removed from industry and without any immediate practical application.

The ultimate criterion is a simple question with a simple system on which no one is working, to which I can produce a simple answer in such a way that my funding will be renewed, that's really the first... Now, the interest people may take in it – that's a factor but it's really secondary.

The cycle above all else, its renewal, and, if possible, its enlargement. Simplicity, an old epistemological virtue dating back to Descartes, is quite simply a virtue of economy  : a question that is too complex or too simplistic will lead to bankruptcy.

Pierre obtains his money, a great deal of money, quickly invests it, and – need it be said ? – is lucky. But chance only favors the capitalist who is prepared to move quickly (as Pasteur did not say). Seeking to purify a hormone that would favor cellular development, Pierre and a colleague with whom he was collaborating fail. The ovarian line that his friend had developed proliferated only in response to impure preparations of the hormone. The more he purified it, the less the line developed. "Thus the conclusion was that there was a contaminant in the preparation that induced this effect of proliferation." Immediately Pierre changes the course of all his operations : he no longer seeks the hormone but the factor that, in the dregs, triggers this effect. He mobilizes all the techniques he learned during his four years with C.H. Li and applies them to hunting down the contaminant. As though with a succession of filters, he separates a new substance from the others, the growth factor.

What is the value of his discovery? Value is a function of information, that is, of the distance between the expectation of his colleagues and what he can propose. Many people were working on cellular proliferation, but they were looking for specific hormones. The idea of starting, not from hormones, but from contaminants of impure preparations, goes against habit and for this reason constitutes an important piece of information, at least for the small world in which Pierre is manoeuvering. The fact that that value is the momentary effect of a position, of a piece of information, and of a movement, is clearly shown to us by Pierre, who immediately uses his substance, FGF, to push his advantage, in what he sees as a veritable blitzkrieg.

We made three wagers, the first was that this "Growth Factor" [$$$in English] is not specific for a given line of cells ; the second bet was that we thought it was the same thing as the "Neurotropic Factor" [$$$in English] that everyone was looking for for so long but that no one could find, and the third point, which was the most important, was not to do studies of "binding [$$$in English], like everyone else at the time.

Three wagers, three dissociations from what others were thinking, three new types of information. A new position within a field is thus triangulated. Let us begin with the last wager. It consists of a decision not to perform certain experiments.

We decided to do "dirty and sloppy" [$$$in English] experiments first and not to do neat work ; we simply decided we would take what seemed most interesting to us, and everything that was details or what was "follow-up" [in english], we wouldn't do.

Pierre is always afraid of staying in one place, and this fear is a sign of his desire to see himself impose a certain division of tasks. His will be the work of the pioneer who collects the maximum of information as quickly as possible, others will do the "clean and neat" work whose profitability quickly declines. When I call him a wild capitalist, I am not joking, it is he who employs the most mythical image of the conquest of the West  :

The principle was not to leave a single "pothole" [$$$in English] for others [laughter]; that is the analogy I used... the guy who has discovered a ''claim'' [$$$English] as during the time of the Gold Rush ; either you swoop down with little wooden pegs and then [gesture of tapping very quickly], so, here you have the principle ; either you go ahead vertically, you dig ; or you say to yourself "hey, let's not kid around !" and you go staking your claims as quickly as possible and go as quickly as possible in order to know what's intere tinq and what isn't interesting.

How often do disinterested people talk about interests ? Pierre is true to himself in rejecting binding experiments ; they are very costly, very exact, very slow, and in addition rely on a theory of the receptor (at the time perhaps mythical) that makes the data very difficult to interpret. For exactitude too, our capitalist makes calculations ; not only in order to calculate the data, but also to evaluate the interest of doing one or another calculation  :

There is another way of obtaining the same information that is less neat but that gives the same thing, and you are covered since you have already published ; now, it doesn t interest me to know that there is microgram of it or a nanogram ; that can wait.

It is only in the realm of the epistemologists that a factor of 1000 in exactitude is always progress. For Pierre, that factor of 1000 is negligible, for the time spent in obtaining it is a treasure of cheap discoveries one will have lost. Leave to others the diminishing returns  : everywhere they arrive with their big machines, they will find a sign saying  : "Kernowicz has already published"; they will be obliged to cite him and their figure, a thousand times more precise, will go unnoticed.

Pierre is seeking to occupy as much of the terrain as possible. His first solution  : staking claims. His second solution  : showing, in what others think they have discovered, the effect, hidden until then, of what Pierre has just revealed. Philosophers are very fond of what they call unifying theories. They do not realize the brutal appropriation this represents  : dozens of different phenomena, on which honest researchers were building their careers, are swept away in a single stroke by Kernowicz's factor, unique and simple. One can view this as a fine intellectual battle for the greater glory of theories, but in fact it is the careers and the livelihoods of others that are at stake in what involues much more than an intellectual game. Pierre explains how he discovered that the growth factor sought by one of his esteemed colleagues could he identified with his own growth factor  :

They say that their factor, which they call TAF, is produced uniquely by hormonal cells and that it induces the proliferations of capillaries only ; if I can prove that TAF is the same thing as my FGF, all the money goes to FGF.

And he adds something that, despite his laughter, is not a joke  : "If they want to work on FGF, I'm the one who collects, that's simply the way it's done." In fact, pure FGF is a rare and costly commodity over the buying and selling of which Pierre has a quasi-monopoly. One cannot produce any article on the question without having several micrograms of this substance to inject into cultures or animals. When he gives it, even gratis, it is in exchange for a debt of honor. Pierre dominates the field with his unifying factor.

The first of the three wagers is as important as the two others. Here is a question that has all the appearances of epistemology ; should one take the names of the factors discovered for the essences of the phenomena they designate ? Pierre mentions the example of somatostatine, discovered by Roger Guillemin's group, also at the Salk Institute. Those who found it had isolated it on the basis of its capacity to block the triggering of the growth hormone, whence its name [Wade, 1981 ; Latour and Woolgar, 1988]

They didn't try to find out what its real function. was (...) ; if they had done "dirty and sloppy" work, they would have observed what others, who did not have that inhibition, observed, somatostatine was discovered everywhere, it has no cellular specificity and no specificity of function.

Why go look for a brain hormone in an intestine ? Why try the effect on insulin of a factor that blocks growth? Guillemin s group, according to Kernowicz, was not able to ask itself these questions because it had concentrated all its efforts on the "thing" whose "name" meant  : "blocks the control of the growth hormone." Pierre himself has no inhibitions, as we have seen. He decides at the outset that his factor is not specific ; a nominalist out of self-interest, he decides that the name of his substance is a result of chance and that he will try it everywhere. An intellectual boldness exactly similar to that of an ambitious industrialist who from the outset does not deny himself any market for his lucky finds. I am employing this image not in order to ridicule Pierre or to claim that he is not a good researcher, but to convey the hypocrisy of the double system of values that we use. That Pierre quickly abandon the idea of specificity in relation to his factor is for us a proof of his scientific spirit, openness of mind, intellectual agility ; that an industrialist be prepared to delocalize all his factories from one end of the planet to the other at the slightest shift in the general economic situation is to us the very epitome of greed. Why should one have two different laws depending on whether the entrepreneur is capitalizing credibility or money ?

Through these three wagers, Pierre gives his new factor a very great value. What does it consist of ? Before, one could go from one subject to another without going by way of Pierre and his FGF. Now that Pierre has connected his factor to many other subjects and reduced many subjects to his factor, there are scarcely any problems left in his discipline that one can discuss without going by way of him. Pierre thus occupies a position that he has created – an obligatory transition point – by modifying the form of the scientific field to his advantage. He occupies it all the more effectively since he is the only one to possess the precious samples of the substance. People turn to him, they write to him, they go by way of him, they offer him collaboration and each time they find new applications for FGF his domain is extended. The value of his discovery becomes the sum of all the passages and all the requests of the other researchers.

Locally, Pierre has carved out an empire – a collection of holdings [$$$guichets?] – that allows him to capitalize on a large scale. The position he occupies is indissolubly "social" and "intellectual," to use old-fashioned terms.

I have the factor they don't have ; I am two years ahead, it s like a game of chess, you put yourself in the best position, you have credit, above all ; (...) unless there's some guy that thinks what I've found is an artefact, automatically the money goes into his pocket.

The three wagers he made, added to these three little decisive advantages, triangulate Pierre's position in a marvellous way. To hold onto a position despite the movements of the other players says something about persuasion too. The players claim that other statements are as credible as his ; Pierre resists ; he shows that his statement is more credible than the others. He maintains an asymmetry. The players want to reduce the difference (the originality, the information)  : Pierre stands fast and forces them to confess that he is right to such an extent that they have no other recourse now than to go by way of him in order to continue their own careers. The information content of his discovery is the sum of all the efforts of his colleagues to diminish differences and reduce the statement to something trivial, flat. Pierre creates differences – peaks, gradients, valleys, mountains – , in short, a field of positions all of which he occupies. The others endeavor to reduce him, to flatten him, to integrate him, in order not to have to go by way of his mountain range. In the end (always local and provisional), Pierre wins. Images of war, game-playing, economics, must be mixed here. He uses them not only to provoke, but out of that good old shamelessness that allows him to deal with science without other privileges than those that are truly due to him.

Pierre becomes a small boss

Our Pierre Kernowicz is no longer that young hope to whom one lent a laboratory bench to see if he could discover something in his own name ; he is no longer a small artisan working with a few technicians on high-risk subjects. He has launched on the market the equivalent of a small businessmen's association. Three or four people work for him. He is a strange hybrid of a researcher, for depending on the period of his career he will assume the guise of worker, overseer, small boss, large capitalist, and once again artisan. He seems to be thwarting the rules of economy – at least this is what he flatters himself he is doing–, whereas he is obeying perhaps rigorously those of capitalism. We have seen how Pierre had fought to refuse to be anyone's technician, then how, once he became a small boss, he had twice refused to be bought back by others. The principle is very simple  : only the one who controls the whole cycle can hope to amass a large amount. The ideal is also to control that part of the cycle in which the money is distributed.

At this point, however, one must generally stop working at the bench and become a full-time capitalist. What does this work involve ? One must see to it that the different conversions from one form of credit to another take place at the highest possible rate on the market. A considerable labor  : one must take care that one's requests for subsidies relate to the most interesting subjects, and that the important dossiers reach the best ears, negotiate the largest possible sum of money for each of these subsidies, make sure the money is actually invested in the best instruments, recruit the best technicians and the best young degree-candidates. One must impel all these people to work, force them to keep converting their talents into arguments, and their arguments into articles  : one must keep an eye on the way in which they write their articles, how they write a criticism, at what point they may be going too far. One must push the articles into the most visible journals, then make an intense effort at promotion so that these articles are read and commented upon. One must enter into all sorts of negotiations with the groups that want to collaborate by using the statements produced in the articles ; one must then see to it that the group's articles are cited and that the young producers are invited to conferences, officially recognized, and fully visible in the field. Lastly, and clearly most importantly, one must immediately reinvest the whole of the capital in a new cycle, write new requests for subsidies, discover new subjects, new markets. What an immense job must be done by a capitalist of proofs ! And all of this forms only a part of the job of the laboratory boss. There are many other tasks preliminary to each of the proceedings capable of bringing about a conversion of credit  : creating the journals in which to publish articles, popularizing the discipline so that the money will come flooding in; arousing interest on the part of industries, improving teaching and training, taking part in political debates, etc.

Pierre is not a "large capitalist" like Guillemin, but a small businessmen's association boss. He controls the whole cycle, certainly, but none of the proceedings that sustain this cycle. A small boss, he still works at the bench himself and accumulates a portion of his credibility with his own hands. He has technicians, but he does not like their role  :

It's the most dubious job that exists on earth. Basically, when you are a technician, what do you get but the boss's bad temper and anger when things aren't going well when things go well, he rushes off to give lectures, you don't see him anymore !

The technician is very clearly exploited like any other employee – he sells his work for a salary. Because he has no degree, he cannot move into the cycle of capital. After twenty years of scientific work, he will always be at the same point (unless he is capable of earning his degree), even if Pierre has established in his laboratory the scientific equivalent of Gaullian profit-sharing  : technicians names are always put on articles ("it makes them do better work") and they are paid ~like the PhD s.' Thus, at least in theory, a part of the group's credibility is returned to them in their own names. In fact, of course, they cannot obtain a grant for themselves or even a scholarship ; they are simply dependable ("reliable," says Pierre in English, mixing up arguments and persons), and are exchanged from laboratory to laboratory like very good skilled workers.

Quite different is the case of the several degree-holders whom Pierre has hired with his own funds. The latter work for him, even though they could, in theory, request a subsidy in order to set themselves up on their own account. Unlike the technicians, whom he respects, Pierre keeps them very restricted in order to accumulate the credibility in his name and not in theirs  :

If they want to be independent, they can be, but they have to supply their own money ; but if they work with my funds, they must do what I tell them to do.

The rivalry between bosses and researchers is well known ; equal as far as their degrees go, the first have the money and the control over the cycle, the others do not have it, but can, depending on the circumstances, become bosses. Pierre has some contempt for researchers who have not wanted, like him, to work alone from the beginning ; he favors the technicians – who can never compete with him – and exploits – in the most classical sense of the word – the degree-holders.

To be a small businessmen's association type of boss implies responsibilities  : the first is to circulate [$$$tourner], and we know very well that the law of capital is an iron law. As soon as one has a market, one must find another, especially in the case of Pierre, who for the last fifteen years has adopted an "aggressive" strategy of differentiation. New subsidies have been requested to orient the little group in three new directions. We know that out of principle he abandons all subjects whose profitability is low and whose capital is intensive. He thus yields to others the problem of cellular regeneration : "It no longer excites me very much... It's good enough like this, if there are others who want to pursue it we'll give them the substance." On the other hand, he pushes his growth factor toward the three subjects whose political and social stakes are considerable. Science is played like a game of Scrabble  : the same word can yield two or three times as much depending on whether one can put it down on a white, pink, or red square. Requests for subsidies allow one to play this game. Thus, Pierre is able to connect his work first to cancer, an almost inexhaustible source of money, by way of the vascularization of tumors, which his foctor accelerates; then to arteriosclerosis – primary cause of death in the United States – since his factor, which possessses the immense advantage of being "non-specific," can accelerate "the maintenance of the arterial endothelium." Along with these two subjects, in whch it is easy to interest investors, Pierre can propose a third  :

I would like to get into it, but I would need capable people, it's the "intercellular control" [$$$in English] of proliferation... We know the external signals, but what are the internal signals [of the cell] ?

According to Pierre, his choices are no longer dictated, as they were six years ago, by a desire to make a great coup. "The fact is we work, in large part, in order to have money renewed, that's the primary goal, I think." Pierre is aiming explicitly or the cycle itself, its renewal. Above all, one must not stop working, one must sustain one's activities even in times of crisis. During twenty long minutes of interview time, Pierre explains that "the importance that people attribute to the subject is rarely a matter for consideration," and the main question investors ask themselves is the following :

Is the boy productive ? He works llke a dog but roughly speaking what he has found has been more or less reproduced by numerous groups, therefore we'll see what he is going to do with this thing ; benefit of the doubt in a favorable sense if You have good credit.

Here Pierre is not talking about the practical usefulness of his discoveries, but simply about the fact that everyone is interested in only one thing  : the reproduction of the cycle itself.

Capital, Book I, Chapter 3, according to Kernowicz

I have shown several times what Pierre saw as the overall form of the cycle of credibility. It involves a capital, that is, a collection of values whose accumulation has no other end but the accumulation itself. But this capital produces information, that is, a statement whose value is measured by a difference relative to a collection of equally probable statements. Pierre invites us to sum all this up in one sentence : information has no value of use, it has only an exchange value. One has only to superimpose the interview with Pierre on Chapter 3 of Capital to understand in what way Pierre Kernowicz is truly – and not metaphorically – a capitalist. The Merchandise-Money-Merchandise cycle, which has to end in an equality of value (M-A-M), is replaced, says Marx, by a Money-Merchandise-Money cycle, sterile unless it is unequal (A-M-A+). This is the actual definition of surplus value.

For Pierre, it is as though it were possible to practice the same conversion with statements. Formerly, statements (S) served as intermediaries between real situations (R), just as money used to allow for the mobilization of merchandise which alone had a value of use. One talked in order to have an effect on situations and no one was interested in the exchance value of those words, which served only to facilitate the transition from one real situation to the other (R-S-R). But supposing the statement becomes the beginning and the end of the cycle, and one sets about capitalizing statements. This capitalization becomes as sterile as that of money, as long as the cycle remains balanced. It can only become fertile if the cycle ends in an inequality, and if, instead of a statement, I find, at the end of a cycle, a new statement, a surplus value af information, that is, in the strict sense, an information (S-R-S+). Here, very simply, is engendered that "new information" that interests our friend Pierre Kernowicz so exclusively that from the beginning of the interview he has made it the object of all his choices.

What happens to the real situations (R) in this new capitalist economy of reality ? They become intermediaries, simple intermediaries without more value of use than merchandise. What is the equivalent, for Pierre, of industry – that industry of which Marx said that it fabricated merchandise exclusively in order to obtain surplus value ? The laboratory, an artificial situation created exclusively for the production of new information. But we knew that. We understood that in Pierre's eyes, rats, testicles, ovaries, doe rabbits, growth factors, do not count, or rather count only as means of accumulating knowledge. We say it quite innocently when we wish to defend the sciences against the attacks of which they are sometimes the object by invoking, on these occasions, the right to knowledge "for the sake of knowledge." We believe we are innocently contrasting scientific research to the greed of the industrialists, yet we are simply saying the same thing as the purest capitalists  : research is a cycle of capital, and statements, like situations, have no value in themselves, the only thing that counts is the reproduction and the extension of the cycle. Didn't I say that Pierre was a wild capitalist !

His hypothesis has the merit of being simpler than the enormous mass of Galilean revolutions, changes of mentalities, epistemological ruptures, miracles that the philosophers of science have chosen,to invent to explain why science appeared once upon a time and why it is always accumulating more. Imagine what Marx could write about scientific capital !

"Where the statement becomes the end and the beginning of the cycle, all forms of wisdom, all proverbs, all myths, all charades, all counsels, become false. They had a value as intermediary between two situations and a value in themselves – the pleasure of memorizing, the taste of the words on the tongue–, but if they no longer have any other function than to permit a new statement to be produced, these statements become unuseable and without value. All the complex and varied links that united them to circumstances are pitilessly broken, leaving, between one statement and the next, only the cold interest, the harsh exigencies, of the surplus value of information. All the holy shivers of religious ecstasy, of magic, of myth have been drowned in the icy waters of selfish calculation. In place of freedom of belief, it has substituted the single and merciless freedom of knowledge for the sake of knowledge !" (check english canonical translation$$)

The difference between belief and science is no longer mysterious. There is no use searching very far or very high – in Plato, in the "scientific spirit," in the rules of method – for the origin of this difference. One has only to look at the way in which statements circulate. Pierre Kernowicz is interested neither in ovaries nor in testicles, nor in cellular proliferation, but in only one thing  : can he obtain, through them, more information ? Because this new information is important in itself ? No, only because it allows one to obtain another piece of information and to accelerate the circulation as the extension of the whole cycle. Pierre's explanation goes deeper than all those which one had sought in order to understand the progress of science and its cumulative nature ! One had only to look at a banker. He has, in fact, all the virtues of the scientific spirit and even of the new scientific spirit. Inversely, if we wanted to understand magic, religion, belief, we would now have to analyze how precapitalist economies of the real operate. It would be necessary to follow into his field the Ivory Coast farmer who obstinately "persists" in planting yams for his subsistence instead of coffee, which alone circulates on the world market, and who "persists" in believing in masks despite the pressures of the world market of knowledge. There exists a subsistence economy of truth, and it is to this that one must compare Kernowicz's work, as well as his movements from place to place.

Let us listen to him talk about his chances of having more to work on in the future  :

First of all we are diversified, so the risk is relatively small, a little like Guillemin, who was working on both [LRF] and somatoststine ; secondly, we are productive and then what we do is useful to other people, therefore there is no reason to cut our funds.

He does not merely indicate that scientific capital "resembles" monetary capital ; nor that the development of capitalism "has an influence" on science or that the scientific spirit has inspired or has been inspired by the spirit of capitalism. No, it's the same capital, whether one studies Pierre Kernowicz or the Lazard brothers. There are not two capitalisms, an industrial capitalism – with its industrial revolution – and a scientific capitalism – with its scientific revolution –, but a single capital and, if one likes, a single revolution.

At the conclusion of the interview, Pierre deduces one general lesson : "You can't be inhibited, you must free yourself of the psychological obstacle that consists in being tied to something." Oh no, our friend Pierre is not inhibited ; look how for the past twenty years he has jumped from subject to subject, from boss to boss, from country to country, bringing into action all the differences of potential, seizing polypeptides, selling them off as soon as they begin declining, betting on Monod and then dropping him as soon as he gets bogged down; and here he is, ready to pack his bags again for the West Coast, the title of professor, and a new laboratory. What thing is he accumulating ? Nothing in particular, except perhaps the absence of inhibition, a sort of free energy prepared to invest itself anywhere. Yes, this is certainly he, the Don Juan of knowledge. One will speak of "intellectual curiosity," a "thirst for truth," but the absence of inhibition in fact designates something else  : a capital of elements without use value, which can assume any value at all, provided the cycle closes back on itself while always expanding further. Pierre Kernowicz capitalizes the jokers of knowledge.