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Laboratory techniques and procedures are performed on patient specimens to detect biomarkers and diagnose diseases. Blood, urine, semen or tissue samples can be analysed using biochemical, microbiological and cytological methods.

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1.1 Introduction

1.1.1 prolog, 1.1.2 the history of the laboratory in chemistry education, 1.1.3 research-based ideas related to learning in and from the science laboratory: 60 years of development of goals, practice and research, chapter 1: the role of the laboratory in chemistry teaching and learning.

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Teaching and Learning in the School Chemistry Laboratory, The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2021, ch. 1, pp. 1-15.

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This chapter deals with the historical aspects of teaching and learning in the high school chemistry laboratory. Based on an intensive review of the literature, the changes in goals and objectives of the chemistry laboratory over the years are presented. In general, three periods related to students’ practice in the chemistry laboratory, namely the early 1960s to the early 1980s, the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s, and from 2000 until today are covered. These periods are discussed in detail in terms of educational characteristics, goals and effectiveness.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) in an undated declaration, describes the role of the laboratory in chemistry learning as follows:

Chemistry is a laboratory science and cannot be effectively taught without a robust laboratory experience for students at both the middle and high school levels. The identification, manipulation, and general use of laboratory equipment are integral parts of the subject. A school laboratory should have equipment to conduct meaningful demonstrations and experiments… The laboratory environment must be accessible to all students and maintained with safety in mind. Teachers should use safety measures to protect students and themselves during any investigation. With appropriate accommodations, students with limited strength or mobility can participate in the laboratory experience. Instruction that is student-centered and emphasizes the role of laboratory demonstrations and experiments is the best method to ensure students develop the essential skills of science.

Throughout this book we use the terms practical work, which is common in the UK and Germany, and laboratory work, common in the USA, interchangeably. A precise definition is difficult, as this in-school practice embraces an array of activities, but the terms generally refer to experiences in school settings in which students interact with equipment and materials or secondary sources of data to observe and understand the natural world ( Hegarty-Hazel, 1990 ). For the purpose of this book, laboratory activities are defined as contrived learning experiences in which students interact with materials and equipment to observe phenomena. This book focuses on teaching and learning in the high school chemistry laboratory. In chemistry learning, the laboratory provides opportunities to ‘learn by doing’ to make sense of the physical world. Since the 19th century, science educators have believed that laboratory instruction is essential because it provides training in observation, prompts the consideration and application of detailed and contextualized information, and cultivates students’ curiosity about science. This quote from Ira Ramsden (1846–1927), who wrote his memories as a child experiencing a chemical phenomenon, perfectly illustrates that belief:

While reading a textbook of chemistry, I came upon the statement, ‘nitric acid acts upon copper’…and I [was] determined to see what this meant. Having located some nitric acid, I had only to learn what the words ‘act upon’ meant… In the interest of knowledge, I was even willing to sacrifice one of the few copper cents then in my possession. I put one of them on the table; opened the bottle marked ‘nitric acid’ poured some of the liquid on the copper; and prepared to make an observation. But what was this wonderful thing which I beheld? The cent was already changed, and it was not a small change either. A greenish blue liquid foamed and fumed over the cent and the table. The air…became colored dark red… How could I stop this? I tried by picking up the cent and throwing it out of the window…I learned another fact; nitric acid…acts upon fingers. The pain led to another unpremeditated experiment. I drew my fingers across my trousers and discovered nitric acid acts upon trousers. I tell it even now with interest. It was revelation to me. Plainly the only way to learn about such remarkable kinds of action is to see the results, to experiment to work in the laboratory. H. Getman, “The Life of Ira, “Exocharmic Reactions” in Bassam Z. Shakhashiri, Chemical Demonstrations Remsen”; Journal of Chemical Education : Easton, Pennsylvania, 1940; pp 9–10; quoted in Richard W. Ramette: A Handbook for Teachers of action is to see the results, to experiment, to work in the laboratory.

Laboratory activities have long had a distinct and central role in the science curriculum as a means of making sense of the natural world. Since the 19th century, when schools began to teach science systematically, the laboratory has become a distinctive feature of chemistry learning. After the First World War, and with rapidly increasing scientific knowledge, the laboratory was used mainly as a means of confirming and illustrating information previously learnt in a lecture or from textbooks. With the reform in science education in the 1960s in many countries ( e.g. , CHEMStudy in the USA and Nuffield Chemistry Program in the UK), the idea of practical work was to engage students in investigations, discoveries, inquiry and problem-solving activities. In other words, the laboratory became the core of the science learning process ( Shulman and Tamir, 1973 ). Based on a thorough review of the literature, these latter authors suggested the following classification of goals for laboratory instruction in the sciences:

To arouse and maintain interest, attitude, satisfaction, open-mindedness and curiosity.

To develop creative thinking and problem-solving ability.

To promote aspects of scientific thinking and the scientific method.

To develop conceptual understanding.

To develop practical abilities (for example, designing an experiment, recording data and analyzing and interpreting results obtained from conducting an experiment).

Hofstein and Lunetta (1982) , suggested a method of organizing these goals to justify the importance of laboratory teaching and learning, under the headings: cognitive, practical and affective.

The laboratory has long played a central and distinctive role in chemistry education. It has been used to involve students with concrete experiences of concepts and objects. The role of the science laboratory, according to Romey (1968) in the years 1918–1960 is illustrated in Figure 1.1 .

The role of the science laboratory 1918–1980.

Almost 40 years ago, Hofstein and Lunetta (1982) reported that for over a century, the laboratory had been given a central and distinctive role in science education, with science educators suggesting that rich benefits in learning are accrued from using laboratory activities. However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some educators began to seriously question both the effectiveness and the role of laboratory work, and the case for the laboratory was not as self-evident as it had once seemed ( e.g. , Bates, 1978 ). The 1982 survey conducted by Hofstein and Lunetta provided a perspective on the issue of the science laboratory through a review of the history, goals and research findings regarding the laboratory as a medium for instruction in high school science teaching and learning.

Science educators ( Lunetta and Tamir, 1979 ) have expressed the view that the laboratory's uniqueness lies principally in providing students with opportunities to engage in processes of investigation and inquiry. The review conducted by Hofstein and Lunetta (1982) raised another issue regarding the definition of the goals and objectives of the laboratory in science education. The review of the literature revealed that these objectives were synonymous with those defined for science learning in general. Thus, they suggested that it is vital to isolate and define goals for which laboratory work could make a unique and significant contribution to the teaching and learning of science. They also wrote that while the laboratory provides a unique medium for teaching and learning in science, researchers had not comprehensively examined the effects of laboratory instruction on student learning and growth, in contrast to other modes of instruction and there was insufficient data to convincingly confirm or reject many of the statements that had been made about the importance and effects of laboratory teaching. In other words, the research had failed to show simple relationships between experiences in the laboratory and student learning. The 1982 review identified several methodological shortcomings in science education research that were inhibiting our ability to present a clear picture of the effectiveness of the science laboratory in promoting understanding for students. Twenty years later, Hofstein and Lunetta (2004) delineated the following series of problems and shortcomings in the research regarding the educational effectiveness of the science laboratory:

Insufficient control over procedures (including expectations delivered by the laboratory guide, the teacher, and the assessment system).

Insufficient reporting of the instructional and assessment procedures that were used.

Assessment measures of students’ learning outcomes being inconsistent with the stated goals of the teaching and the research.

Insufficient sample size in many studies, particularly in quantitative ones.

Support for these assertions had been presented by Tobin (1990) , who prepared a follow-up synthesis of the research on the effectiveness of teaching and learning in the science laboratory. He proposed a research agenda for science teachers and researchers and suggested that meaningful learning is possible in the laboratory if the students are given opportunities to manipulate equipment and materials in an environment suitable for them to construct their knowledge of phenomena and related scientific concepts. In addition, he claimed that, in general, research had failed to provide evidence that such opportunities were offered in school science.

The National Science Education Standards (NSES) (National Research Council [ NRC], 1996 ) defined such learning activities ( e.g. , inquiry) as:

The diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and propose explanations based on the evidence derived from their work. Scientific inquiry also refers to the activities through which students develop knowledge and understanding of scientific ideas, as well as an understanding of how scientists study the natural world (p. 73).

As already noted, science educators have long suggested that many benefits accrue from engaging students in science laboratory activities ( Tobin, 1990 ; Hofstein and Lunetta, 2004 ). Tobin (1990) , for example, wrote that:

Laboratory activities appeal as a way of allowing students to learn with understanding and at the same time engage in the process of constructing knowledge by doing science (p. 405).

Similarly, Nakhleh et al. (2002) wrote that:

The laboratory is often a neglected area of teaching, but the laboratory has also been a frustrating area for research. Research on learning in the laboratory has been complicated by the complex nature of the environment, the plethora of goals, and the seeming non-impact of laboratory work on the types of understanding that we test in exams (p. 71).

In the curricular-type projects developed during the 1960s, the laboratory was intended to be a place for inquiry, and the development and testing of theories, and to provide students with the opportunity to ‘practice being a scientist’. Many research studies (summarized, for example, by Bates, 1978 ; Hofstein and Lunetta, 1982 ) were conducted with the aim of exploring the effectiveness of the laboratory for attaining the many objectives (both cognitive and affective) that had been suggested over the years in the science education literature. This traditional list of objectives included:

Understanding of scientific concepts.

Interest and motivation.

Attitude toward science.

Practical scientific skills and problem-solving abilities.

Scientific habits of mind.

Understanding the nature of science (NOS).

The opportunity to do science.

Over the years, hundreds of papers and essays have been published with the goal of exploring and investigating the uniqueness of the science laboratory in general, and particularly its educational effectiveness. In addition, it was widely believed that the laboratory provides the only place in school where certain kinds of skills, abilities and understanding can be developed ( Lazarowitz and Tamir, 1994 ; Hofstein and Lunetta, 2004 ). In other words, the laboratory has been suggested to provide a unique mode of instruction, learning and assessment.

Precisely what kind of objectives and aims are to be attained in the laboratory include the teacher's goals, expectations, and subject and pedagogical content knowledge, as well as the degree of relevance to the topic, the students’ abilities and interests and many other logistical and economic considerations related to the school setting and facilities (see Figure 1.1 ).

It should be noted that some of these goals, such as ‘enhancing learning of scientific concepts’ coincide with the broad goals for science education that are not necessarily laboratory based. The teacher should be able to judge whether the laboratory is the most effective learning environment for attaining a certain objective while teaching a certain topic. Teachers should be aware that there has been a great deal of discussion and numerous research studies on which goals are, in fact, better achieved through laboratory instruction than through other instructional (pedagogical) approaches ( Hofstein and Lunetta, 1982, 2004 ; Lunetta et al. , 2007 ). Many research studies and essays that were cited in Hofstein and Lunetta's (1982) review criticized the tradition of conducting experiments without clear purposes or goals. In addition, they revealed a significant mismatch between teachers’ goals for learning in the science laboratory and those that were originally defined by curriculum developers and the science education milieu.

In summary, based on the important publication related to science laboratories entitled America's Lab Report, published by the NRC (1996) , it is suggested that:

The science learning goals of laboratory experiences include enhancing mastery of science subject matter, developing scientific reasoning abilities, increasing understanding of the complexity and ambiguity of empirical work, developing practical skills, increasing understanding of the nature of science, cultivating interest in science and science learning, and improving teamwork abilities. The research suggests that laboratory experiences will be more likely to achieve these goals if they (1) are designed with clear learning outcomes in mind, (2) are thoughtfully sequenced into the flow of classroom science instruction, (3) integrate learning of science content and process, and (4) incorporate ongoing student reflection and discussion (p. 13).

In their review of the literature regarding practical work in science teaching and learning, Hofstein and Kind (2012) identified three periods in the 60 years of developing goals, practice, and research: the 1960s to the 1980s, the 1980s to the mid-1990s and the end of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century.

1.1.3.1 The 1960s to the 1980s: Unfulfilled Ideals

This period is associated with many curriculum projects that were developed to renew and improve science education. The projects began in the late 1950s with a focus on updating and reorganizing content knowledge in the science curricula, but reformists soon turned their attention to science process as a main aim and organizing principle for science education, as expressed by Klainin (1988) in Thailand:

Many science educators and philosophers of science education ( e.g. , in the USA: Schwab, 1962 ) regarded science education as a process of thought and action, as a means of acquiring new knowledge, and a means of understanding the natural world (p. 171).

The emphasis on the processes rather than the products of science was fueled by many initiatives and satisfied different interests. Some educators wanted a return to a more student-oriented pedagogy after the early reform projects which they thought paid too much attention to subject knowledge. Others regarded science process as the solution to the rapid development of knowledge in science and technology: mastering science processes was seen as more sustainable and therefore a way of preparing students for the unknown challenges of the future. Most importantly, developments in cognitive psychology drew attention to reasoning processes and scientific thinking. Psychologists such as Bruner, Piaget and Gagne helped explain the thinking involved in the science process and inspired the idea that science teaching could help develop this type of thinking in young people.

Although this development was found in its explicit form in the USA, it was soon echoed in many other countries ( Bates, 1978 ; Hofstein and Lunetta, 1982 ). Everywhere, laboratory and practical work became the focus. Kerr (1963) , in the UK, suggested that practical work (in chemistry education) should be integrated with theoretical work in the sciences and should be used for its contribution to provide facts through investigations and, consequently, to arriving at the principles related to these facts. This became a guiding principle in the many Nuffield curriculum projects that were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Science education research interest in practical work during this period is clearly demonstrated by Lazarowitz and Tamir (1994) in their review on laboratory work. They identified 37 reviews on issues of the laboratory in the context of science education ( Shulman and Tamir, 1973 ; Hofstein and Lunetta, 1982, 2004 ; Bryce and Robertson, 1985 ). These reviews expressed a similarly strong belief regarding the potential of practical work in the curriculum, but also recognized important difficulties in obtaining convincing data (based on research) on the educational effectiveness of such teaching and learning. Not surprisingly, the only area in which laboratory work showed a real advantage (when compared to the non-practical learning modes) was the development of manipulative laboratory skills to attain practical goals ( Hofstein and Lunetta, 1982 ). However, for conceptual understanding, critical thinking and understanding the NOS, there was little or no difference. Lazarowitz and Tamir (1994) suggested that one the reason for this relates to the use of inadequate assessment and research procedures. Quantitative research methods were not adequate for the research purpose but, at the time, qualitative research methods were generally disregarded in the science education community. Hofstein and Lunetta (1982) identified several methodological shortcomings in research designs: insufficient control over laboratory procedures (including laboratory manuals, teacher behavior and assessment of students’ achievement and progress in the laboratory), inappropriate samples and the use of measures that were not sensitive or relevant to laboratory processes and procedures. Another issue was that teaching practice in the laboratory did not change as easily to an open-ended style of teaching as the curriculum projects suggested. Rather, teachers preferred a safer ‘cookbook’ approach ( Tamir and Lunetta, 1981 ). Johnstone and Wham (1982) , relating to the chemistry laboratory, claimed that educators underestimated the high cognitive demand of practical work on the learner. During practical work, the student must handle a vast amount of information pertaining to the names of equipment and materials, instructions regarding the process and the collection of data and observations, thus overloading the student's working memory. This complicates laboratory learning, rather than providing a simple and safe way to learn.

Adding to this rather ominous picture, however, are some research studies and findings during this period that came to influence later developments. One area that was researched quite extensively concerns intellectual development . Renner and Lawson (1973) and Karplus (1977) (based on Piaget, 1970 ) developed the learning cycle , which consisted of the following stages: exploration , in which the student manipulates concrete materials; concept introduction , in which the teacher introduces scientific concepts; and concept application , in which the student investigates further questions and applies the new concept to novel situations. Many interpreters of Piaget's work ( e.g. , Karplus, 1977 ) inferred that work with concrete objects (provided in practical experiences) is an essential part of the development of logical thinking, particularly at the stage prior to the development of formal operations. Another important contribution was made by Kempa and Ward (1975) , who suggested a four-phase taxonomy to describe the overall process of practical work in the context of the chemistry laboratory: (1) planning an investigation (experiment), (2) carrying out the experiment, (3) observations and (4) analysis, application and explanation. In Israel, Tamir (1974) designed an inquiry-oriented laboratory examination in which the student was assessed on the bases of manipulation, self-reliance, observation, experimental design, communication and reasoning. These could serve as an organizer of laboratory objectives that could help in the design of meaningful instruments to assess outcomes of laboratory work. In addition, these had the potential to serve as a basis for continuous assessment of students’ achievements and progress and for the implementation of practical examinations ( Tamir, 1974 ; Ben-Zvi et al. , 1976 ).

1.1.3.2 Mid-1980s to 1990s: The Constructivist Influence

From the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, practical work was challenged in two different ways. One was related to an increasing awareness among science education researchers of a failure to establish the intended pedagogy in the reform projects from the previous period. This was expressed by Hurd (1983) and Yager (1984) , who reported that laboratory work in schools tended to focus on following instructions, getting the right answer, or manipulating equipment. Students failed to achieve the intended conceptual and procedural understanding. Very often, students failed to understand the relationship between the purpose of the investigation and the design of the experiments ( Lunetta et al. , 2007 ). In addition, there was little evidence that students were provided with opportunities and time to wrestle with the NOS and its alignment with laboratory work. Students seldom noted the discrepancies between their own concepts, their peers’ concepts and the concepts of the science community ( Eylon and Linn, 1988 ; Tobin, 1990 ). In summary, practical work meant manipulating equipment and materials, but not ideas.

The other challenge involved the theoretical underpinning of laboratory work. The process approach was challenged by a new perspective on science education known as constructivism . The constructivist era started in the late 1970s with increasing criticism of Piaget's influence on science education. New voices argued that too much attention was being paid to general cognitive skills in science learning and that science educators had missed the importance of students’ conceptual development ( e.g. , Driver and Easley, 1978 ).

The effects of this criticism can be followed in the UK in the aftermath of the Nuffield curriculum reform projects, which contributed to a strong foothold for the science laboratory. Beatty and Woolnough (1982) reported that 11- to 13-year-olds typically spent over half of their science lesson time doing practical activities. This was also the period of the Assessment of Performance Unit (APU), a national assessment project within a process-led theoretical framework ( Murphy and Gott, 1984 ) that later influenced the national curriculum and its aligned assessment system. In the 1980s, researchers began to question this practice and its theoretical underpinning considering the philosophical and sociological accounts associated with constructivism ( Millar and Driver, 1987 ). The argument was that the entire science education community had been misled by a naïve empiricist view of science, referred to by Millar (1989) as the Standard Science Education (SSE) ( NRC, 1996 ) view. The SSE view presented science as a simple application of a stepwise method and further related those steps to both intellectual and practical skills. In other words, by having the right skills and by applying ‘the scientific method’, anyone could develop scientific knowledge. With the rejection of this view of science inquiry, science educators needed an alternative, but finding this took some time and required a series of developments.

Two different attempts to develop alternative theoretical platforms appeared on the UK scene in the late 1980s to early 1990s. The first attempt took its inspiration from Polanyi's (1958) concept of ‘tacit knowledge’. This approach had similarities to the process approach but rejected the possibility of identifying individual processes ( Woolnough and Allsop, 1985 ). Rather, it was claimed that science is like ‘craftsmanship’ and that investigations should be treated like a ‘holistic process’ based on understandings that cannot be explicitly expressed. The belief was that inquiry at school with a trained scientist ( i.e. , the teacher) developed this craftsmanship and made students generally better problem solvers ( Watts, 1991 ). Retrospectively, we can see this approach as avoiding the challenge of identifying what it really means to do science by rendering the process hidden and mysterious.

The other theoretical approach also continued to regard science as a problem-solving process, but avoided the mistake made in previous theories of focusing too strongly on skills. Gott and Duggan (1995) claimed that the ability to do scientific inquiry was fundamentally based on procedural knowledge ( i.e. , the required understanding in knowing how to do science). When scientists carry out their research, they have a toolkit of knowledge about community standards and what procedures to follow to satisfy them. The aim of science inquiry is partly to find new theories, but also to establish evidence of a theory being ‘trustworthy’. They therefore claimed that students should be taught procedural understanding along with conceptual understanding, and then get practice in problem solving based on these two components.

At the end of this second period, constructivism was well established in science education. The teaching of skills and procedures of scientific inquiry had lost much of its status as science educators paid more attention to conceptual learning. One influential idea was the use of Predict–Observe–Explain (POE) tasks ( Gunstone and Baird, 1988 ). In these tasks, observations in the laboratory were used to challenge students’ ideas and help them develop explanations in line with the correct scientific theories. Gunstone (1991) and White (1991) also made other statements about the constructivist message for science laboratory teaching the claim that all observations are theory laden. This means that doing practical work does not guarantee adopting the right theoretical perspective. Students need to reflect on observations and experiences considering their conceptual knowledge. Tobin (1990) wrote that: “Laboratory activities appeal as a way of allowing students to learn with understanding and, at the same time, engage in the process of constructing knowledge by doing science” (p. 405). To attain this goal, he suggested that students be provided with opportunities in the laboratory to reflect on findings, clarify understandings and misunderstandings with peers, and consult a range of resources that would include teachers, books, and other learning materials. He claimed that such opportunities rarely exist because teachers are so often preoccupied with technical and managerial activities in the laboratory. Gunstone and Baird (1988) pointed to the importance of metacognition to bring about such and similar opportunities. White (1991) also argued that the laboratory helps students build ‘episodic’ memories that can support later development of conceptual knowledge.

1.1.3.3 The 1990s to Today: A New Era of Change—New Goals for the Science Laboratory

In the last 20 years, we have seen major changes in science education. These have been due, in part, to globalization and rapid technological development, which call for educational systems with high-quality science education to be competitive at an international level and develop the knowledge and competencies needed in modern society. In the USA, we have seen developments regarding ‘standards’ for science education ( NRC, 1996, 2005 ), which provide clear support for inquiry learning as both content and higher-order learning skills that include, in the laboratory context, planning an experiment, observing, asking relevant questions, hypothesizing, and analyzing experimental results ( Bybee, 2000 ). In addition, we have observed a high frequency of curriculum reforms internationally. A central point has been to make science education better adapted to the needs of all citizens ( American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 1995 ) (for details on higher-order learning and thinking skills, see Chapter 6 in this book).

It is recognized that citizens’ needs include more than just scientific knowledge. In everyday life, science is often involved in public debate and used as evidence to support political views. Science also frequently presents findings and information that challenge existing norms and ethical standards in society. For the most part, it is cutting-edge science and not established theories that are at play. For this reason, it does not help to know textbook science; rather, it is necessary to have knowledge about science. Citizens need to understand principles of scientific inquiry and how science operates at a social level ( Millar and Osborne, 1998 ). The natural question, of course, is to what degree, and in what ways, can the science laboratory help provide students with this type of understanding?

Another area of change in the recent period has been the further development of constructivist perspectives into sociocultural views of learning and of science. The sociocultural view of science emphasizes the social construction of science knowledge. Accordingly, scientific inquiry is seen to include a process in which explanations are developed to make sense of data, and then presented to a community of peers for critique, debate, and revision ( Duschl and Osborne, 2002 ). This reconceptualization of science from the individual to social perspective has fundamentally changed the view of experiments as a way of portraying the science method. Rather than seeing the procedural steps of the experiment as the scientific method, according to Driver et al. (1996) , practical work is now valued for its role in providing evidence for knowledge claims. The term scientific method, as such, has lost much of its value ( Jenkins, 2007 ).

All these changes have obvious relevance for practical work. Rather than training science specialists, the laboratory should now help the average citizen understand about science and develop skills that will be useful in evaluating scientific claims in everyday life. Rather than promoting the scientific method, the laboratory should focus on how we know what we know and why we believe certain statements rather than competing alternatives ( Grandy and Duschl, 2007 ). The sociocultural learning perspective also provides reasons to revisit group work in the school laboratory. Most importantly, the current changes have finally produced an alternative to the science process approach and the SSE view, Millar (1989) established 50 years ago. We now find a new rationale for understanding science inquiry and how this can be linked to laboratory work in schools.

The main goal of this chapter was to argue and demonstrate that the laboratory in science education is a unique learning environment ( Hofstein, 2004 ; Lunetta et al. , 2007 ). If designed in an articulated and purposeful manner with clear goals in mind, it has the potential to enhance some of the more important learning skills, such as learning by inquiry, metacognition and argumentation ( Hofstein et al. , 2004 ; Hofstein and Kind, 2012 ).

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Clinical Research vs Lab Research: An In-depth Analysis

Clinical research , a cornerstone in advancing patient care, involves human subjects to test the safety and effectiveness of new treatments , ranging from drugs to diagnostic tools. Unlike clinical research , laboratory research focuses on the foundational science behind medicine without direct human involvement , contributing significantly to medical lab science.

The contrast between clinical research vs lab research highlights the diverse approaches in the scientific pursuit of better healthcare, where every medical advancement once relied on volunteer participation in clinical studies 1 . Bridging these two fields promises to accelerate the translation of lab discoveries into practical medical applications, underscoring the importance of collaboration in future developments in medical lab science 1 2 .

The Evolution of Clinical Research

The evolution of clinical research traces its origins back to ancient times, with the world's first recorded clinical tria l found in the "Book of Daniel" where a dietary intervention was observed to improve health after 10 days. This historical milestone was followed by significant advancements including Avicenna's rules for drug testing in his ‘ Canon of Medicine’ and Ambroise Pare's accidental trial in 1537 , which introduced a novel therapy for wounded soldiers. The modern era of clinical trials was marked by James Lind's controlled trial on scurvy in 1747 , laying the foundational principles for contemporary clinical research methodologies. The progression from these early experiments to the structured, ethical, and scientifically rigorous trials of today highlights the dynamic nature of clinical research. This evolution was further shaped by the introduction of the placebo in the early 1800s and the establishment of ethical frameworks , starting with the Hippocratic Oath and later formalized by the Nuremberg Code in 1947 . The development of clinical research has been instrumental in advancing medical science, with each phase of clinical trials meticulously designed to ensure the safety and efficacy of new treatments for the benefit of patient care.

Key Components of Laboratory Research

Clinical Research Facility Sciences, pivotal in the realm of medical lab science, leverage laboratory data and services extensively for disease diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment 2 4 . These sciences are underpinned by professionals who, after obtaining a Bachelor's degree in fields such as clinical research facility science or biomedical sciences from NAACLS-accredited programs, perform crucial laboratory tests, analyze specimens, and furnish healthcare providers with critical insights into the results' significance and validity 2 . Notably, these activities are conducted in laboratory settings without involving human subjects, emphasizing the distinction between clinical and laboratory research 2 .

The infrastructure of laboratories is meticulously designed to support the complex and sensitive nature of laboratory tests and analyses. This includes sturdy tables and ample counter space for heavy equipment, overhead and adjustable shelving for efficient space utilization, and cabinets and drawers for organized storage. Additionally, the deployment of fume hoods, customized for specific research needs, is essential for the safe handling of chemicals. Compliance with safety regulations and proper storage of flammable items underscore the operational standards necessary for high-quality testing and analysis in medical breakthroughs 6 .

The scientific process in laboratory research unfolds through several key steps: hypothesis formulation, experiment design, data collection, data analysis, and report writing. This structured approach begins with formulating a tentative explanation for a phenomenon, followed by planning and conducting experiments using appropriate methods and tools. The subsequent collection and analysis of data facilitate testing the hypothesis, culminating in the documentation of the entire process and findings in a formal report or paper 7 . This systematic methodology underscores the rigorous and methodical nature of laboratory research, contributing significantly to advancements in medical lab science.

Bridging the Gap: Collaboration between Clinical and Laboratory Research

Bridging the gap between clinical and laboratory research involves fostering collaborative environments that leverage the strengths of both fields to advance medical science. Medical scientific studies bifurcate into clinical laboratory scientists, who interpret critical data for healthcare professionals, and clinical researchers, who lay the groundwork for medical education and understanding 4 . This collaboration is pivotal for both building the future of medicine and administering its current benefits 4 . Enhanced operational efficiency is achieved through cross-departmental synergy, reducing redundancies in resource and personnel utilization, and fostering faster adoption of best practices and innovations across the lab 8 . These collaborations are exemplified by real-world success stories from renowned institutions like Mayo Clinic and Stanford Health Care, which have demonstrated the profound impact of integrated efforts on medical advancements 8 .

Key strategies for effective collaboration include regular meetings to address challenges, the integration of digital communication platforms with lab databases for swift sharing of results, and the establishment of clear guidelines for consistency in sample collection and result dissemination 8 . Unified objectives ensure that despite methodological differences, the end goals of improving patient care and advancing medical knowledge remain aligned 8 . Furthermore, the adoption of cloud-based data systems and AI technologies not only facilitates seamless data sharing but also automates routine tasks, thereby enhancing productivity and enabling the discovery of new insights 9 .

Challenges such as competition, ethics reviews, insufficient research funds, and the recruitment of project managers underscore the complexities of collaborative efforts 9 . However, the benefits, including improved reputation, publication quality, knowledge transfer, and acceleration of the research process, often outweigh the costs and risks associated with collaboration 9 . Collaborative relationships in Translational Medical Research (TMR) among clinicians highlight a strong willingness to collaborate, with preferences varying across different stages of research and between preferring independent and interdependent relationships 9 . This willingness to collaborate is crucial for bridging the gap between clinical and laboratory research, ultimately leading to groundbreaking advancements in medical science.

Future Trends in Clinical and Laboratory Research

The future of clinical and laboratory research is poised for transformative changes, driven by technological advancements and evolving healthcare needs. Notably:

Greater Efficiency through Automation : The integration of automation in research processes promises to streamline workflows, reducing manual labor and enhancing precision 13 .

Collaboration and Capacity Sharing : Partnerships between research institutions will facilitate shared resources and expertise, optimizing research outputs 13 .

Remote Sample Support and Diagnostic Data Interoperability : These advancements will enable more inclusive research and improved patient care by allowing data to flow seamlessly between different healthcare systems 13 .

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning : AI and machine learning are set to revolutionize both clinical and laboratory research by providing advanced data analysis, predictive modeling, and personalized medicine approaches 13 14 .

Staffing Solutions and Digital Workflows : Addressing staffing shortages through innovative solutions, alongside the adoption of digital workflows, will be crucial for maintaining research momentum 14 .

New Diagnostic Technologies : The development of novel diagnostic methods and technologies, including next-generation sequencing and biomarker-based screenings, will enhance disease diagnosis and treatment 14 .

Regulatory Changes and Patient-Centric Approaches : Increased FDA oversight of laboratory-developed tests and a shift towards patient-centric research models will ensure safer and more effective healthcare solutions 14 16 .

Precision Medicine and Big Data Analytics : The focus on precision medicine, supported by real-world evidence and big data analytics, will tailor treatments to individual patient needs, improving outcomes 15 .

Decentralized Clinical Trials and Digital Health Technologies : The rise of decentralized trials and digital health tools, including remote monitoring, will make research more accessible and patient-friendly 15 .

Innovation in Testing and Consumer Health : Laboratories will explore new frontiers in diagnostics, such as multi-drug-of-abuse testing and T-cell testing, while also responding to consumer health trends with at-home testing services 14 18 .

These trends underscore a dynamic shift towards more efficient, patient-centered, and technologically advanced clinical and laboratory research, setting the stage for groundbreaking discoveries and innovations in healthcare 13 14 15 16 18 .

Through this detailed exploration, we have seen the distinct yet intertwined roles that clinical and laboratory research play in the advancement of medical science and patient care. By comparing their methodologies, evolution, and collaborative potential, it becomes clear that both domains are crucial for fostering innovations that can bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical healthcare solutions. The synergy between clinical and laboratory research, as highlighted by various examples and future trend predictions, establishes an essential framework for the continual improvement of medical practices and patient outcomes.

As we look toward the future, the significance of embracing technological advancements, enhancing collaboration, and adopting patient-centric approaches cannot be overstressed. These elements are pivotal in navigating the challenges and leveraging the opportunities within clinical and laboratory research landscapes. The potential impacts of such advancements on the field of medicine and on societal health as a whole are immense, underscoring the imperative for ongoing research, dialogue, and innovation in bridging the gap between the laboratory bench and the patient's bedside.

What distinguishes clinical research from laboratory research? Clinical research involves studies that include human participants, aiming to understand health and illness and answer medical questions. Laboratory research, on the other hand, takes place in environments such as chemistry or biology labs, typically at colleges or medical schools, and does not involve human subjects. Instead, it focuses on experiments conducted on non-human samples or models.

How does a clinical laboratory differ from a research laboratory? Clinical laboratories are specialized facilities where laboratory information and services are utilized to diagnose, monitor, and treat diseases. Research laboratories, in contrast, are settings where scientific investigation is conducted to study illness and health in humans to answer medical and behavioral questions.

In what ways do clinical research and scientific research differ? Clinical research is a branch of medical research that directly applies knowledge to improve patient care, often through the study of human subjects. Scientific research, including basic science research, aims to understand the mechanisms of diseases and biological processes, which may not have immediate applications in patient care.

Can you outline the various types of medical research analysis? Medical research can be categorized into three primary types based on the study's nature: basic (experimental) research, clinical research, and epidemiological research. Clinical and epidemiological research can be further divided into interventional studies, which actively involve treating or intervening in the study subjects, and noninterventional studies, which observe outcomes without intervention.

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Laboratory Experimentation

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In laboratory experimentation the causal influence of at least one actively manipulated independent variable on at least on dependent variable is tested in a controlled envorinment.

Introduction

The main objective of the experimental approach is to causally relate changes in one or more independent variables to changes in one or more dependent variables. The condition assignment is usually randomized, and researchers aim to eliminate or control the potential effect(s) of extraneous variables on the data of interest. By analyzing the manifestation of individual differences in the data variability with elaborated methods, the advantages of an experimental approach can be combined with research methods designed to understand the individual realization of the investigated phenomena and their emergence in the corresponding experimental condition.

Experimental Method

Scientific research aims to gather information objectively and systematically such that valid conclusions can be...

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National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering (US) and Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research: Third Edition. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2009.

On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research: Third Edition.

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LABORATORY SAFETY IN RESEARCH

In addition to human participants and animal subjects in research, governmental regulations and professional guidelines cover other aspects of research, including the use of grant funds, the sharing of research results, the handling of hazardous materials, and laboratory safety.

These last two issues are sometimes overlooked in research, but no researcher or scientific discipline is immune from accidents. An estimated half million workers in the United States handle hazardous biological materials every day. A March 2006 explosion at the National Institute of Higher Learning in Chemistry in Mulhouse, France, killed a distinguished researcher and caused $130 million in damage.

Researchers should review information and procedures about safety issues at least once a year. A short checklist of subjects to cover includes:

• appropriate usage of protective equipment and clothing
• safe handling of materials in laboratories
• safe operation of equipment
• safe disposal of materials
• safety management and accountability
• hazard assessment processes
• safe transportation of materials between laboratories
• safe design of facilities
• emergency responses
• safety education of all personnel before entering the laboratory
• applicable government regulations
• Cite this Page National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering (US) and Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research: Third Edition. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2009. LABORATORY SAFETY IN RESEARCH.
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Encyclopedia of the History of Science

• Henning Schmidgen – Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

It is almost impossible to imagine science without laboratories. 1 Our concept and image of modern science is fundamentally defined by special buildings in which experts utilize vast technical resources to investigate natural phenomena and processes. An entire iconography exists, depicting the laboratory scientist in the midst of extremely complex and precise instruments examining an object in his hand or looking at a brightly illuminated screen.

However, the notion of the laboratory on which this iconography is based is being called into question by current developments in scientific practice. In particular, the massive research centres for particle physics, such as Fermilab near Chicago or CERN in Geneva, and the large scientific projects of recent biological research, such as the Human Genome Project, have contributed to the expansion of the laboratory into a network and its extension far beyond the confines of the natural sciences. Enhanced by the process of digitization these developments have led to a state of things in which the laboratory bears little resemblance to the traditional image of table-top experiments in an enclosed space. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the architecturally delimited laboratory – like the factory, the railway station or the department store – is an exemplary site of modernity. 2

During the last third of the 19th century in particular, specially designed and equipped buildings became central institutions of scientific endeavour. Being involved in this endeavor no longer meant striving for the formation of individual knowledge and personality, as was the case in the Romantic period. To the contrary, work in modern laboratories was increasingly carried out by “disenchanted” professionals who applied professional methods for creating innovations. As the workplace of the chemist, the physicist and the biologist – and subsequently also of other specialists, such as the psychologist, the linguist and the archaeologist, for example – the laboratory was transformed in this period to a space of knowledge which primarily served to establish new scientific facts.

This special form of knowledge production was increasingly subjected to an economic regime which was guided by the principles of specialization, mechanization and standardization. In the laboratory, the activities of the scientist assumed some of the characteristics of work at the conveyor belt. According to the frequently repeated expectation – and in some cases the fears of contemporaries – novel facts could now be produced “by the dozen” in the laboratory. 3

It is not surprising, therefore, that the laboratory incorporates and reflects the often contradictory tendencies of an increasingly industrialized society. Like a metropolis in miniature, the laboratory was a site where combinations and confrontations of human and machine, body and technology, organisms and instruments occurred. The effects of these multiple conjunctions and disjunctions were registered, measured and calculated, they were represented, published and publicized and demonstrated in front of large audiences.

The multifarious materials of the laboratory environment and its components constituted a counterpoint to the idealism of scientific insights, categories and values, and the increasingly divided nature of the research process contrasted with the ascription of discoveries and achievements to individuals – on the level of individual people, but also on the level of nations.

The routinization of work processes continuously conflicted with the principle of being open to the unexpected, a principle which is particularly characteristic of the activity of the modern scientist. Scientific practice became work in the sense of labor. At the same time, however, scientists had to be ever prepared to break with their routines in order to allow time and space for new and surprising developments. Thus, in the context of a society which regarded itself as progressive, the laboratory can be viewed as one of the sites where that society is “condensed.” This applies to the production of that which is new, but also with regard to the problem of its representation – in particular since the computer and similar information technologies have became key components of laboratory work. 4

It is therefore astonishing that a comprehensive history of the laboratory has not yet been produced. As a consequence, a comparative history dealing with different national and cultural traditions of laboratory research or local aspects of the “laboratory revolution” in different disciplines is nowhere in sight. Not even overviews regarding the history of the laboratory such as exist for other spaces of knowledge – like the clinic or the observatory – have been produced. 5

It is true that the interest in researching day-to-day life in laboratories from an ethnological perspective, which has primarily been awakened by recent trends in the sociology of scientific knowledge, 6 has in recent years prompted a number of science historians to focus on individual laboratories. For example, Timothy Lenoir, Sven Dierig and Daniel Todes have published detailed studies concerning the history of physiological laboratories in Leipzig, Berlin and St. Petersburg, whereas Peter Morris has authored a comprehensive account covering the emergence and evolution of chemical laboratories. 7

Relevant information about the founding and expansion of laboratories in individual national contexts has also been collected for specific disciplines, for example by David Cahan for physics in the German-speaking territories. Peter Galison has reconstructed the “material culture,” including laboratory architecture, of 20 th -century microphysics in the United States, while Robert Kohler did something similar – though less comprehensively – for the history of ecology, ethology and evolutionary biology in the US. Thus far, however, no overall picture emerges from these contributions. 8

While these studies are quite varied, they often attempt to draw analogies between the laboratory and the factory, or between the scientification and industrialization, without expressly allowing room for highlighting differences between research and labor. One of the consequences is that the aspect of production is emphasized above the aspect of representation in a way which seems not entirely justified by historical events. Viewed from a perspective of historical proximity, the laboratory has never just been a space of knowledge production ; it has also always been a place of representing, recording, and calculating. Conversely, it seems inappropriate to conceive of the laboratory as a writing space, even if or perhaps precisely because the increasing use of computer technologies suggests this notion. The modernity of the laboratory resides in the very fact that it embraces both aspects, i.e. production and representation.

The knowledge of and about laboratories has a history of its own. Before sociologists and historians of science got interested in the laboratory, the scientists themselves turned their attention to these specific institutions, followed shortly by politicians and architects. The knowledge of and about laboratories consequently continues to depend on drawings, plan and other forms of pictorial representations. For the historian, this fact continues to represent a challenge, requiring them to take into account the iconography of the laboratory and its architectural form as the activities that take place within its walls. Doing so enables the hsitory of the laboratory to be closely linked with the history of modernity itself.

Laboratories in the Early Modern Period

The Latin term laboratorium (from the Latin term labor , meaning exertion, effort or work) was already in use in the medieval period. However, it was only in the late-16th century that the term assumed the meaning which it retains – in modified form – in modern languages today. In the 14th century, the term laboratorium meant simply a task or work. Around 1450, the first usages of the term relating to workshops can be detected in the context of monasteries. The term was apparently used parallel to terms such as scriptorium (copying room for scribes in medieval monasteries) and dormitorium (dormitory). In the 16th century, laboratorium primarily denoted workshops of alchemists, apothecaries and metallurgists, and subsequently came to refer to all accommodation in which natural phenomena and processes were explored by means of tools and instruments. 9

The modern generalization of the term “laboratory,” with its focus on science, only occurred around the turn of the 20 th century. As defined in the German encylopedia Brockhaus , for example, in present-day German the term describes a “workspace for scientific and technical experiments, measurements, evaluation tasks, controls, etc., with the furnishings and equipment required for these tasks.” In a similarly general fashion, the current Oxford English Dictionary defines “laboratory” as a “building set apart for conducting practical investigations in natural science.” 10

Due to the focus on gaining knowledge by practical and material means, the history of the laboratory should be regarded as closely connected to the history of the anatomical theatre, of the cabinet of curiosities, of botanical gardens, of the observatory, and of similar spaces of knowledge. One of the first laboratories for which detailed information exists was housed in Uraniborg, the research centre which was built and equipped in the late-16th century for the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). Brahe’s castle-like building on the island of Ven in the Öresund was divided into three parts: The upper floor contained astronomical equipment and was used for observing the sky; underneath this was the mathematical laboratory with tables for maps and calculations; and the cellar contained the laboratory of the alchemist (fig. 1).

Gestures of pointing up to the sky and taking notes down on a table connect these three levels. In fact, the spatial division and arrangement of the entire laboratory reflected Brahe’s basic assumption that the microcosm and the macrocosm correspond to one another: “By looking up, I see downwards; by looking down, I see upwards.” Astronomy corresponded with alchemy and vice versa, though the particular type of alchemistic activity involved was not specified. 11

Figure 1: The wall quadrant in Uraniborg, 1909. Source: Meyers Großes Konversationslexikon , 6th edition, Leipzig 1909, vol. 2, p.111.

There are no explicit references to astronomy in the engravings and woodcuts from the 16 th century depicting laboratories. In the case of Hans Weiditz (ca. 1500–1536), for example, or Pieter Breugel the Elder (1525/1530–1569), the laboratory appears as a jumbled workspace around which numerous vessels and instruments are strewn. In the midst of like-minded colleagues, the alchemist goes to work at a fireplace with his bellows, test tube and similar devices in a manner which remains vague (fig. 2). 12 In contrast, the depiction of Brahe, and also of the chemists’ house of Andreas Libavius (1555–1616), show spacious accommodations in which the instruments are place in an orderly fashion, as though waiting to be used in a precisely controlled manner. 13

Figure 2: Hans Weiditz (ca. 1500–1536), Two alchemists in the laboratory, wood engraving, 1532. Reproduced from: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kuperstichkabinett.

An image from the same period depicts the basic components of the alchemistic laboratory which Count Wolfgang II von Hohenlohe (1546–1610) had constructed at Weickersheim Castle (fig. 3). Similar to Weiditz and Brueghel, Paul van der Doort (around 1600) depicts a fireplace with a vent in this copper engraving, but he arranges the test tubes and other vessels neatly on ledges, shelves and window-sills. Also, the alchemist is not at work handling equipment in this depiction. Instead, he is facing the books in a respectful pose. 14

Figure 3: Paul van den Doort, The laboratory of the alchemist, copperplate engraving, 1609. Reproduced from: www.gallica.bnf.fr , < http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84185150/f1 >.

Similarly arranged – though not as bright or as neat – are the paintings of David Teniers the Younger (ca. 1610–1690), who painted the motif of the “Alchemist in the Laboratory” in multiple variations during the 17th century. However, the depictions in these paintings are highly conventionalized and owe more to the genre paintings and still lifes on which they were based than to the reality of contemporary laboratories. 15

Around the end of the 17th century, the laboratory of the alchemist became the first anchor point for a new type of science. The aim of this science was to discover useful facts about nature by concrete actions and, in doing so, to contribute to a renewal of the world. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Robert Boyle (1627–1691) promoted the view that human craft should “challenge” nature, in order to “subjugate” it for the sake of truth and usefulness. Boyle in particular, who conducted experiments in chemistry and physics in his own laboratory, established a practice in which experiments were performed before a learned audience and were then published in a manner designed to be easily understandable so that others could repeat them. This new, active and experimental method of "philosophizing" was also the aim of the first scientific academies: the Academia dei Lincei in Rome (1603), the Academia Naturae Curiosorum (later Leopoldina) in Schweinfurt (1652), and the Royal Society in London (1660). 16

There was a good reason why the early iconography of the laboratory frequently displayed books along with instruments. This visual representation of a new synthesis of manual and textual knowledge defined the laboratory not only as a place of manual work, but also as a space of reading, writing and calculating. Workshops as such had existed for a long time. However, the intention to use such spaces to establish scientific facts by means of physical activity – be it by manipulating material or using instruments – as well as to record these facts and to publish them, was new, as historian Pamela Smith concluded in 2006: “This interaction between scholarly and artisanal cultures during the Renaissance is the most important source for the transformation of values that led to the legitimation of bodily labor in a specially designed space as a means of producing scientific knowledge.” 17 Indeed, one could say that it was only through this interdependency of science, handicraft and text that the term “laboratory” received its ultimate meaning: the production site of scientific knowledge.

Be that as it may, even in the late-18th century this concept of laboratory had still not gained dominance. In spite of developments in chemical science – driven in particular by Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) – the laboratory remained primarily a workshop, a place of material productions. Even in the 1770s, the perception of the laboratory focused on the aspect of an increasingly rationalized activity in the developing area of chemical production.

Thus, the laboratory is described in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771) as “the chemist's work-house,” as the place where pharmacists and pyrotechnicians do their work. 18 The Encyclopédie (1765) of Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783) defines the term in a similar way as an “enclosed and covered place, room, part of a house or shop which contains all chemical utensils included under the terms ovens , vessels and instruments , and in which chemical activities can be readily performed.” 19

However, the accompanying illustration enriched the iconography of the laboratory by adding a new aspect: the organized division of labour. As in previous depictions, the room is dominated by a fireplace and a vent hood (fig. 4). The bellows for the smiths is also reminiscent of considerably older images of alchemists by Weiditz and Brueghel, and the ledge of the chimney contains a carefully arranged row of vessels, some of which had already been used for alchemy. At the same time, the room is populated by a collective which appears as strikingly modern. Its members perform different tasks at different positions in the room: a chemist sitting at the table discusses the production of solutions with a physicist; on the left, a laboratory assistant brings coal from the cellar; and on the right, another laboratory assistant washes vessels. This is the first depiction of a laboratory which includes a principle of organisation that would subsequently become a fundamental aspect of scientific laboratories in the modern period.

Figure 4: Chemical laboratory, 1765, unknown artist. Reproduced from: Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers , Planches, Neuchatel 1765, vol. 33, “Chimie,“ Figure I.

The Laboratory Revolution of the 19th Century

In the early-19th century, there were two factors driving the development of the laboratory. Firstly, the reform of existing universities and the founding of new universities was an important stimulus. After 1800, universities were no longer only places for the collection and ordering of knowledge; they increasingly became places of scientific and technical research. Of fundamental importance in this context was the foundation of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin (1810), which quickly attained international renown. Secondly – and more importantly – the success of individual private teaching and research laboratories contributed to a dynamically expanding and widely distributed system of laboratories. Initially set up and directed by highly motivated university teachers on their own initiative, some of these private laboratories quickly became integrated into the reformed universities.

A typical example of this is again a chemical laboratory: namely the one set up by Justus Liebig (1803–1873) in the 1820s at his home university in Gießen after returning from a research trip to Paris. Liebig’s laboratory was a prime example of the endeavour to establish comprehensive instruction based on experiments, in which there was no longer a contradiction between science and handicraft. Indeed both were now complementary aspects of a single activity whose primary goal was the gaining and transmission of knowledge. A famous drawing by Wilhelm Trautschold (1815–1877) and Hugo von Ritgen (1811–1889) shows Liebig’s laboratory as it would have looked at the beginning of the 1840s. With their “Interior View of the Analytical Laboratory in Gießen,” Trautschold and von Ritgen show for the first time the laboratory as a vibrant place of teaching. They break with the static orderliness of the Encyclopédie and show a space where students and teachers from various countries work as a collective (fig. 5). 20

Figure 5: Interior View of the Analytical Laboratory in Gießen, lithograph, 1842, from a drawing by Wilhelm Trautschold (1815–1877) and Hugo von Ritgen (1811–1889). Reproduced from: J. P. Hofmann, Das chemische Laboratorium der Ludwigs-Universität zu Gießen , Tafeln, Heidelberg 1842, table VII.

Significantly, instead of Liebig himself, the laboratory assistant who, among other things, was responsible for supplying the basic chemicals and the glass and porcelain vessels, is at the centre of the drawing. The principle of the division of labour is also reaffirmed and highlighted. The laboratory does not only appear as a workshop or factory, but also as a kind of exchange or transit point of discourses, concepts and recipes, where ideas and physical materials could be confronted with each other and combined in increasingly new ways.

In addition, one of Liebig’s interior architectural innovations is shown in the drawing. In older laboratories, the experimentation tables were usually placed against the wall, with one free-standing table placed in the centre. Liebig’s contribution to the rearrangement of the laboratory was to distribute the experimentation tables throughout the entire room. This arrangement meant that more students could be accommodated and more experiments could be performed simultaneously, while the laboratory director still had a good overview and could easily move from one table to the next. 21

Building on Liebig’s groundwork, the establishment of modern chemistry in the German-speaking territories is regarded as one of the success stories of science in the 19 th century. In the 1860s, completely new institutes for chemistry came into existence in Bonn, Berlin and elsewhere. These were quickly recognized throughout Europe as being exemplary with regard to their exterior and interior architecture, as well as their technical equipment. 22

Somewhat earlier, around 1850, another teaching and research laboratory for chemistry was established in Heidelberg under the direction of Robert Bunsen (1811–1899). It led development internationally, not least because teaching there was enriched by impressive demonstrations of experiments. In addition to the rooms for work and practise, the weighing room, the stores and the library, the lecture theatre together with its preparation chamber at the back became thus an important component of laboratory buildings. In other words, the laboratory was not only longer a research site, it also became a space for teaching, a demonstration room and experimental theater.

The laboratory revolution occurred somewhat later in other disciplines. The first physics laboratory in the modern sense of the word was opened in 1833 by Wilhelm Weber (1804–1891) at Göttingen University. Previously, only physics “cabinets” had existed, that is, individual rooms in which collections of instruments were kept. In 1843, Heinrich Gustav Magnus (1802–1870) set up a physics laboratory in Berlin. Franz Neumann (1798–1895) followed suit in Königsberg in 1847. However, both were “private laboratories which were located in the living accommodation of the founders and were thus only accessible to others with the special permission of the founders.” 23

Only in 1846 was a (teaching) laboratory opened at Heidelberg University. In 1874, a newly built physics laboratory was completed in Leipzig. In subsequent years, similar teaching and research laboratories followed in Berlin (1878), Würzburg (1879) and Strasbourg (1882). The Technisch Physikalische Reichsanstalt opened in Berlin in 1887 and remained the biggest laboratory complex for engineering and physical fundamental research in the world up to the First World War.

The laboratory revolution took a similar path in another important area of science in the 19th century: the experimental life sciences, in particular physiology. The first physiological laboratory in the German-speaking territories was the institute in Breslau, which Jan Purkinje (1787–1869) officially directed starting in 1839. Inspired by the sensualistic pedagogy of Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), Purkinje practiced a form of experimentation teaching based on Anschauung (“visual perception”). However, until the 1870s, this ideal was only rarely put into practice due to a lack of appropriately equipped physiological teaching and research laboratories, as well as the cost of the appropriate instruments.

Thus, the institute of Johanns Müller (1801–1858), which produced many important physiologists of the 19th century, prescribed participation in practical experiments in physiology, but could not provide the instruments required for this purpose. Instead, the students themselves had to make or buy them, and bring them to class. Around 1850 it was not at all uncommon for physiologists such as Theodor Schwann (1810–1882), Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896) or Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) to experiment at home or in a hotel room.

Modern laboratories for physiology only came into being later: in 1869 in Leipzig, in 1872 in Utrecht, in 1877 in Budapest and Berlin, in 1885 in Strasbourg, and so on. The importance of demonstration lectures for the teaching of experimental knowledge is demonstrated by the fact that Johann N. Czermak (1828–1873), a former student of Purkinje, had a spectatorium erected at his own expense for the teaching of physiology in the early 1870s in Leipzig. This spectatorium had a large auditorium specifically designed for demonstration experiments. Subsequently, it served as an example for the building of similar ‘viewing theatres’ at university institutes. 24

It is only in the context of these developments, i.e., the emergence – particularly in the German-speaking territories – of specific laboratory cultures in chemistry, physics and physiology, that the term “laboratory” acquired the breadth of meaning which we are familiar with today. In the dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the 19 th century, “laboratory” is almost universally equated with “chemical laboratory.” This prevailing definition was only revised in 1898 when the expression was described as “generally” applying to a room “in which chemical, pharmaceutical, physical or technical work is performed.” 25

The iconography of the laboratory had also changed noticeably by that time. On the one hand, the laboratory appears as the background in paintings depicting eminent scientists, such as Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), as geniuses working largely alone, thereby harking back to earlier depictions of alchemists. On the other hand, laboratories appear as anonymous architectural plans and photographs of interior rooms which are usually empty of people. At this point, the tension between the scientific work performed by bourgeois individuals and anonymous masses becomes tangible.

From the 1870s, detailed descriptions of laboratories also appeared in scientific journals. Generally, such descriptions were produced by the directors of the institutions in question. Besides floor plans, such descriptions often presented various views, cross-sections and drawings of individual details such as experimentation tables, cupboards or darkening facilities in the lecture theatre. From the end of the 1880s, similar depictions can also be found in construction journals and architecture handbooks.

During the same period the laboratory begins to extend itself from the natural sciences to other branches of scientific work, in particular the humanities. The starting point is a disciplinary neighbor to physiology, namely psychology. As one of the firsts of its kind, the Leipzig Institute for Experimental Psychology was founded in 1874 and quickly gained international reputation. Its founding director, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), a former student of du Bois-Reymond (as well as former assistant to Helmholtz), trained entire generations of experimental psychologists from all over the world. Once returned to their countries of origin, these “new” psychologists founded their own laboratories, for example Stanley Hall (1881 in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University), James McKeen Cattell (1887 in Pennsylvania, 1890 in New York, Columbia University) or James Baldwin (1893, Princeton University). The new psychological laboratories in Paris (Beaunis, Binet) and Geneva (Flournoy) also adopted the Wundtian model, while modifying it according to their specific interests and issues. 26

Equally in the 1870s, linguistics, or the science of language, turned away from being an endeavor exclusively based on systematic and historical-comparative investigations and gradually began to redefine itself as a laboratory science. When in 1897 the Collège de France opened a Laboratory for Experimental Phonetics, its director, Michel Bréal, declared his firm expectation that the scientific study of language will make great progress by using experimental methods. 27

At about the same time, experimental aesthetics emerges as a new field of inquiry. Promoted by influential figures such as physiological psychologist Charles Henry (1859–1926), it quickly impacted on the arts, in particular the “pointillist” paintings of Georges Seurat. When in 1919, the Bauhaus was founded in Germany, this school of arts and architecture conceived of itself as an experimental site. The Bauhaus was devoted to the method of “laboratory work,” which also led to establishing an “experimental theater” ( Versuchsbühne ) and the construction of “experimental homes” ( Versuchshäuser ). 28 The expansion of the notion of laboratory from alchemical work-house to general site of technical and scientific production was effectively complete.

Laboratories and the Movement of People Between Them

Since the 1880s, knowledge of and about laboratories was increasingly disseminated by construction journals and architecture manuals. However, drawings and plans did not represent the only source of such knowledge: in particular, travel – study trips as well as research trips – served to spread it.

In fact, besides articles and books, it was primarily visits and sojourns abroad, and increasingly – from the 1910s and 1920s – international collaborations and exchange programmes, which led to communication between laboratory workers in various countries within Europe and to interactions between different laboratory cultures. As mentioned above, Liebig had travelled to Paris in the first third of the 19th century to witness the experimentation teaching of Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778–1850), Louis Jacques Thénard (1777–1857) and other chemists. In the early 1840s, however, chemistry students from France and other countries attended experimentation lessons in Liebig's laboratory in Gießen. Among those students were Victor Regnault (1810–1878), Jules Pelouze (1807–1867) and Adolphe Wurtz (1817–1884). 29

Wurtz subsequently became the director of his own laboratory for organic chemistry at the medical faculty in Paris. Having been promoted to Dean, he campaigned in the 1860s for the setting-up of appropriate teaching and research facilities for students of medicine. To this end, in the late 1860s he visited a number of laboratories at German-speaking universities which where considered as leaders in this respect. This journey was undertaken in an official capacity. The education minister Victor Duruy (1811–1894) had entrusted Wurtz on June 5th, 1868 with the task of “viewing and studying” scientific facilities at German-speaking universities, in particular those in Göttingen, Greifswald, Berlin, Leipzig, Prague, Vienna, Munich, Würzburg and Heidelberg. According to Duruy’s instructions, Wurtz was to pay particular attention to laboratories, scientific collections, clinics and institutes for physiology and pathology. The motive was not only scientific, but also explicitly political: “Please collect all the information about the scientific institutions in the neighbouring country which can be used for the benefit of our national education and teaching.” 30

The corresponding Rapport , which Wurtz published in 1870, concentrated on descriptions of laboratories. The first part was dedicated to chemical laboratories; the second part dealt with laboratories of physiology; while the third and last part contained descriptions of the institutes for anatomy and pathological anatomy. Particular importance was given to drawings: on 17 tables, Wurtz reproduced detailed floor plans of the laboratories he had visited. Additional illustrations in the text gave views and cross-sections of the respective laboratory buildings. In Wurtz's opinion, combining these illustrations with the descriptive texts (that elucidated the principles governing laboratory operation as well as the financial situation of the teaching and research institutions Wurtz had visited) was the best way of fulfilling the task entrusted to him. According to Wurtz, the Rapport presented his impressions and memories in a balanced fashion: It avoided any uncalled for enthusiasm, which might have caused him to overstate the “glorious endeavours” of a foreign nation, as much as it avoided a weakness which would have caused him not to recognize these endeavours and to remain silent about them. 31

As the eminent physiologist Claude Bernard (1813–1878) began his lectures on general physiology in Paris in the summer term of 1870, he made reference to Wurtz’s report. Bernard began with a brief overview of the history of his subject while emphasizing that not only “new discoveries and ideas” had been decisive in the development of physiology. According to Bernard, the “materials of work” and the “culture” of the discipline were also decisive factors. 32 What Bernard was referring to was the institutional context and technical equipment of physiological research. Given that three years earlier he himself had compiled an officially-commissioned report on the progress of general physiology in France, he was particularly familiar with these considerations.

Speaking only a few weeks before the outbreak of war with Prussia, Bernard contrasted in his lectures the poor state of physiology in France with the “splendid installations” available to physiologists in the neighbouring country. To demonstrate the contrast, he described the building and equipment of a top-class laboratory to his audience in the auditorium of the Jardin des Plantes . The laboratory in question was Carl Ludwig’s (1816–1895) physiological institute, which opened in 1869 in Leipzig and was the first institution of its kind to be fitted with a steam-engine as a central power source. But Bernard did not limit himself to a verbal description. He used visual aids to portray Ludwig's laboratory: “I place before you the floor plan of one of these [exemplary] laboratories, the one in Leipzig which is directed by Ludwig. [...] By this example, I want you to see the riches of these scientific installations, of which we in France have no idea.” 33

The floor plan mentioned is the one included in the Rapport by Wurtz (fig. 6). The horseshoe shape of the Leipzig laboratory building is immediately evident in the drawing. Contained within the horseshoe-shaped building were the workspaces for performing experiments in vivisection, biophysics and biochemistry, as well as rooms for spectroscopy, microscopy and work with mercury, in addition to a library. In the centre was the lecture theatre with space for an audience of around 150. The institute also contained living accommodation for the director and a mechanic, while the animals required for experimentation were kept in the garden. Rabbits, birds and frogs were kept in stalls, cages and aquariums which were erected opposite the opening of the horseshoe.

Bernard emphasized the differentiated completeness of Ludwig’s laboratory. He found the division between different types of workspaces particularly important: “It is very important for efficient experimentation,” he declared to his Paris audience, “to have separate rooms for experiments which require a particular instrument configuration. In this way, one avoids the loss of time which would result from setting up the instruments afresh and gathering the materials, which are sometimes very difficult to combine. This arrangement, which is basically only good use of time, could actually be extended to all scientific work.” 34 The laboratory not only appears as an exemplary space of knowledge but also becomes the embodiment of a particular time regime which is also a regime of scientific work. ‘Time is space’ is the seemingly paradoxical thought put forth by Bernard regarding activity in the modern laboratory.

Figure 6: Plan of the ground floor in the Leipzig Laboratory for Physiology, 1870. Reproduced from: Adolphe Wurtz, Les Hautes Études Pratiques dans les Universités Allemandes: Rapport présenté à Son Exc. M. le Ministre de l'Instruction publique , Paris 1870, table XIV.

However, the Wurtz report of 1870 did not result in the direct transfer of the model to France. The considerable array of institutions in the German-speaking territories, which increased even further after the foundation of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften in 1911, greatly outnumbered the corresponding institutions in France, which only included the laboratories of Wurtz at the Ecole de médicine and of Bernard at the Collège de France until Étienne-Jules Marey’s (1830–1904) Station physiologique and the Pasteur Institute were added in the 1880s. Visits by German physiologists to laboratories in France were accordingly rare in this period.

One of the few examples of such visits was the “scientific journey” to Paris, Lyon und Bordeaux undertaken by the physiologist Maximilian von Frey (1852–1932), who worked in Leipzig at that time. In his short report, von Frey only mentions the laboratories of Marey and Pasteur in Paris and otherwise limits his descriptions to technical details of physiological instruments, such as the respiration apparatuses of Cheveau and Jolyet and the calorimeter of d’Arsonval. 35

This further demonstrates the fact that the spread of the modern laboratory within Europe was not a uniform and one-dimensional process which can be adequately described using terms such as “rationalization,” “mechanization” or “industrialization.” 36 On the contrary, it was a multi-faceted process of transportation and transfer, of adaptations to local contexts and traditions, but which also contained individual examples of counter-transfers. Even in cases where an explicit attempt was made to follow the example of German-speaking institutions, translations occurred on the most varied of levels – the level of texts, of instruments and of experimentation procedures – and the information transferred was changed in the process. 37

The Laboratory in the 20 th century

These transfers and translations continued to constitute an important factor in the spreading of laboratories during the 20 th century. Evidence for this process is provided by the example of the Boston-based physiological chemist Francis G. Benedict (1870–1957). Between 1910 and 1930, Benedict repeatedly visited physiological laboratories all over Europe. Based on detailed reports and extended documentation, he intended to improve and enhance his own laboratory. 38 The fact that Benedict’s reports contain numerous photographs attests to the increasing importance of this form of visualization in fixing and communicating laboratory knowledge.

During the first decades of the 20 th century the modern laboratory became a global institution. In the realm of the experimental life sciences, this is illustrated, around 1930, by the Institute for Physiology at the University of Conception in Chile, the Science Laboratories of the Faculty of Arts and Science at Chulalankarana University in Bangkok or the Department of Physiology at Peking Union Medical College (fig. 7). While the exteriors of these laboratories were often adapted to their respective national contexts, their interior often consisted of things, e.g. instruments, imported from industrial countries and of persons, i.e. scholars, who either were from or had received their academic training in European or North American universities.

Figure 7: The Department of Physiology at Peking Union Medical College ca. 1925. Reproduced from: Ernest W. H. Cruickshank, „Peking Union Medical College, Department of Physiology“, Methods and Problems of Medical Education 5 (1926): 65–75.

At the turn of the 20th century, a further result of these processes of transfer and translation can be seen. Besides scientific laboratories, a large number of “industrial laboratories” emerged. In the European context, this development was linked to the rapid growth of the dye industry, which in turn must be viewed in the context of the history of modern chemistry. Heinrich Caro (1834–1910), who in 1868 assumed a leading position at the recently founded Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik (BASF), and Eugen Lucius (1834–1903), a co-founder of the company which was subsequently known as Hoechst, had both trained as chemists. Lucius had even been a student of Bunsen. In the 1870s and 1880s, companies such as Hoechst , Agfa and Bayer began to employ chemists in large numbers, in some cases in laboratories specially built by the companies.

Similar developments occurred in the USA at the same time, albeit in other branches of industry. In 1875, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company set up its own research laboratory, followed by Eastman Kodak in 1886 and General Electric in 1900, the latter after one of its founding directors, Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), had run similar laboratories in Menlo Park (1876) and West Orange (1886).

As in Europe, the goal of these laboratories was to produce useful knowledge which could be employed for commercial advantage. Instead of publishing articles in scientific journals, the researchers in these laboratories were interested in getting patents recognized so as to have commercial control of the processes and products involved in their research. To a degree, they resembled the alchemists in their laboratories: They produced results in a very deliberate fashion, and the means by which these results were obtained was only shared with other “initiates.” 39

Another result of the processes of transfer and translation which the laboratory experienced at the turn of the 20th century was the emergence of large-scale laboratories, usually in military complexes. Typical of this development was the restructuring of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin by Fritz Haber (1868–1934) during the First World War. At the end of 1918, this institute had 1,450 employees. Most of them were engaged in the development of gas weapons and the means of protecting against gas weapons.

The research institutions which emerged during the Second World War were even larger. One of the most famous was the Los Alamos National Laboratory founded by the USA in 1943, in which the atomic weapons programme of the United States was initiated as part of the Manhattan Project ( See the related article “Manhattan Project” ). Employing at one time more than 120,000 people, this project marked the irreversible entry into the era of “Big Science,” in which the growth of science is no longer exclusively measured by the number of publications or patents, growth in scientific personnel and the level of state funding devoted to research, but also by the exponential increase in the energy usage of particle accelerators. 40

The second half of the 20th century saw the intensification of the founding of industrial laboratories and the emergence of large-scale laboratories, which increased the worldwide competition affecting private and public laboratories of all types and sizes. (See the related article “Materials Science”) Against this background one can observe the emergence of a new type of large laboratories. This new type was meant to foster rationalized, quasi-industrial forms of research while also providing latitude for innovative forms of interdisciplinary cooperation. The corresponding buildings were no longer molded on single disciplines. They constituted centers and envisioned overarching “programs” or “areas of research” with shifting horizons of time. On the level of architecture, these new laboratories featured large structures with variable layouts that could be adapted to the specific needs and interests of dynamic research groups. At the same time, they provided meeting places such as “streets” or “plazas” that serve as trading zones for international scientists from different disciplines or mixed groups of scientists, engineers, and computer experts. 41

Within the life sciences, the spectecular example for this new kind of laboratory is the Salk Instiute for Biological Research built by reknowned architect Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974) in 1965 for the leading physician and immunologist Jonas Salk (1914–1995). In the early 1960s, Kahn had risen to prominence with his futuristic new main building for the Yale University Art Gallery, but above all with his plans for the Richards Medical Research Laboratories building at the University of Pennsylvania. This design featured three towers containing laboratories connected with a central service tower; the laboratories used by people, the “served spaces,” were separated from the “servant spaces,” which contained mechanical systems, lifts, animal quarters, etc. Designed originally for each floor to be one large room, partitions could be employed to accommodate the changing needs of the scientists. Salk had similarly open structures in mind for the biological research center he was planning. 42

The basic structure of the laboratory building, situated near San Diego directly on the cliffs of the Pacific Ocean, is characterized by two symmetrical building structures facing each other lengthways; they are separated from and connected to each other by a grand courtyard that gives onto the ocean like the stage of an open air theater—an impression reinforced by a stream of water that flows down the middle of the courtyard in the direction of the ocean (fig. 8). The deep embedding of the building complex into the landscape is further emphasized by the fact that from the courtyard the laboratories are hardly visible. The actual rooms where research is done are beneath the courtyard and in the rear sections of the two symmetrical buildings. At the front are the scientists’ studies, which look out onto both the courtyard and the ocean.

Kahn’s client referred to these studies as “monk’s cells,” which points to scientists’ need for concentrated study and also indicates that Salk saw his institute in some measure as a spiritual place. In fact, with the clean lines of its design and its durable, basic, and low-maintenance materials (concrete, wood, glass, and steel) it is not difficult to see this institute as a modern monastery—or as a high-tech version of the Grand Canyon, where the simultaneity of silent depths and openness has a similarly awe-inspiring effect on the beholder.

Figure 8: The courtyard of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, San Diego. Reproduced from: Wikipedia, By Codera23 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81787561.

Completed in 1965, the buildings were soon in use. It did not take Salk very long to attract a group of eminent medical scientists and biologists to his institute: Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974), Leslie Orgel (1927–2007), and the later Nobel laureates Robert Holley (1922–1993) and Roger Guillemin (1924–), as well as luminaries like Francis Crick (1916–2004), Jacques Monod (1910–1976), and Warren Weaver (1894–1978) as nonresident fellows. Besides immunology, endocrinology, and neurology, molecular and cellular biology constituted crucial areas of research.

The Salk Institute also functioned as a site for international exchange between the life sciences and the humanities. Linguists such as Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) as well as writers such as Michael Crichton (1942–2008) were fellows of the Institute in the late 1960s. From France, sociologists such as Edgar Morin (1921–) were invited as research guests as well as philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour (1947–). From Winter 1975 to summer 1977, Latour would gather in one of the laboratories at the Salk Institute the raw data for what, in later years, would be considered as a path-breaking contribution to the emerging field of “laboratory studies.”

Laboratory Life, which Latour wrote and published together with Steve Woolgar, a British sociologist of science, attracted the interest of historians of science immediately after its publication in 1979. Today it is recognized as a “modern classic” and, because of its programmatic significance, sometimes compared with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 43 At the center of the book, however, is not the laboratory of Gullimemin that Latour had studied but the process of “tradition,” in which a group of scientists -- via discourse and words, writing and paper, hands and inscription devices -- act in such a way that, according to Latour, can scarcely be comprehended by a modern, secularized notion of history.

In the anthropologically oriented chapters of Laboratory Life mention is made of the rotary evaporators, centrifuges, mixers, and other “machines” by the aid of which the laboratory staff of the Guillemin laboratory cut, grind, shake, and so forth the organic material they work with. 44 However, the main theme of these anthropological parts is the writing desks upon which very different types of literature—published journal articles, computer printouts with columns of figures, diagrams, tables, manuscripts, and so on—are collected before being transformed into scientific publications. In other words, Latour and Woolgar make sure that from an anthropological point of view scientific work in the laboratory should be understood as “literary inscription.” 45

Though it stimulated a great deal of scholarship on the institution of the laboratory, Laboratory Life makes it somewhat difficult to situate the laboratory in the history of modernity. According to Latour, “we have never been modern,” 46 and correspondingly the laboratory appears in his studies as an exegetical institution, an institution primarily concerned with the generation and interpretation of written signs. In other words, the aspect of production is largely neglected, whereas the aspect of representation moves to center stage. In Latour, the laboratory tends to become again a scriptorium .

Viewed from today’s perspective, this notion of the laboratory could have been based in a broader notion of the modern emphasis on technologies, machines and infrastructures which make possible and shape the process of writing and the production of laboratory inscriptions. In Latour’s acount, however, the computer and similar information technologies hardly play a role. Even if, in later years, he describes the laboratory as a “center of calculation,” he remains committed to considering to the world of scientific practice predominantly as a “paper world.” 47

Nearly a half-century later, however, it is the extension of laboratory architectures into the virtual space of databases, models, and simulations that confirms the dominant model of the laboratory while also contributing to its dispersion into new forms. Particularly striking in this respect is the fact that the dominant information and communication technology of today, the World Wide Web (WWW), emerged from the work conducted in the rather vast laboratory of CERN. The main purpose of this work was to facilitate the international exchange between laboratory scientists and give them better access to the existing knowledge of their respective fields. In the late 1980s, the CERN physicist and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee (1955–) developed “Hypertext Markup Language” (HTML) which remains the basis for the public use of the Internet. 48

At this point the iconography of the laboratory as an isolated, self-contained structure in which equally isolated scientists sit in front of a microscope, point to a curve on a chart or stand next to a DNA model is factually outdated – even though it might continue to play an important role in popularizing science. Today’s “laboratory” is a globally networked knowledge infrastructure tied together by digital technologies. Using “Big Data” and developing “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), this infrastructure allows for performing innovative experiments in real and virtual space, for example distributed experiments in ecology. 49 Within this network, single laboratories continue to constitute crucial nodes where combinations and confrontations of human and machine, body and technology, organisms and instruments continue to occur in order to produce similarly innovative results.

Laboratories are exemplary sites of modernity. However, they do not only function as passive reflections of an increasingly gobalized and digitalized society, but also as active examples, as forces for change whose influence is by no means limited to the natural sciences and the humanities. Besides new knowledge and technologies, laboratories produce new types of people. They train scientists and researchers, who learn to strive as both individuals and as part of a collective, and who enter into a performance-related competition supposedly governed by transparent rules and fair behavior but simultaneously marked by fierce competition with respect to material as well as immaterial resources.

In this and other regards, historical analogies bewteen the laboratory and the factory fail to provide an adequate picture. As a site of education and practice, comparisons between the laboratory and, for example, the gymnastics hall or the sports field are just as valid. In fact, this parallel is drawn explicitly in many universities in order to demonstrate the principle of the unity of research and teaching.

It is not just the university that becomes “a laboratory where everyone is busy, and where enthusiasm in study is the predominant characteristic,” as Daniel Coit Gilman (1831–1908), the founder of the Johns Hopkins University, put it in 1883. In the programmatic view of Gilman, the entire world is “a great laboratory, in which human society is busy experimenting.” 50 This view of an ‘experimentation society,’ or of modernity itself as subjected to the mode of experiment, is another aspect of the development of the laboratory. This process has fundamentally transformed – and will continue to transform – the meaning of science and society.

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Galison, Peter. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ( Link to IsisCB )

Galison, Peter and Caroline A. Jones. “Factory, Laboratory, Studio. Dispersing Sites of Production.” In The Architecture of Science , edited by Peter Galison and Emily Thompson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999. ( Link to IsisCB )

Gessinger, Joachim. Auge & Ohr: Studien zur Erforschung der Sprache am Menschen, 1700–1850. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994.

Gieryn, Thomas. “Laboratory Design for Post-Fordist Science.” Isis 99 (2008): 796–802.

Gooday, Graeme. “Placing or Replacing the Laboratory in the History of Science?” Isis 99 (2008): 783–795. ( Link to IsisCB )

Hannaway, Owen. “Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science: Andreas Libavius versus Tycho Brahe.” Isis 7 7 (1986): 585-610. ( Link to IsisCB )

Hill, C. R. “The Iconography of the Laboratory.” Ambix 22/2 (1975): 102–110. ( Link to IsisCB )

James, Frank A. J. L., editor. The Development of the Laboratory: Essays on the Place of Experiment in Industrial Civilisation . New York: Macmillan, 1989.

Klein, Ursula. “Die technowissenschaftlichen Laboratorien der Frühen Neuzeit.” NTM 16 (2008): 5-38. ( Link to IsisCB )

Klein, Ursula. Experiments, Models, Paper Tools: Cultures of Organic Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century , Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. ( Link to IsisCB )

Klein, Ursula. “The Laboratory Challenge: Some Revisions of the Standard View of Early Modern Experimentation.” Isis 99 (2008): 769–782. ( Link to IsisCB )

Knorr-Cetina, Karin. “Das naturwissenschaftliche Labor als Ort der ‘Verdichtung’ von Gesellschaft.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 17/2 (1988): 85–101.

Kohler, Robert E. “Lab History: Reflections.” Isis 99 (2008): 761–768. ( Link to IsisCB )

Kohler, Robert E. Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ( Link to IsisCB )

Latour, Bruno. “Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World.” In Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, edited by Karin D. Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay. London: Sage Publications, 1983 . ( Link to IsisCB )

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ( Link to IsisCB )

Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts . Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979. ( Link to IsisCB )

Legault, Réjean. “Louis Kahn und das Eigenleben des Materials.” In Louis Kahn – the Power of Architecture , edited by Matea Kries, Jochen Eisenbrand and Stanislaus Moos, 219-234. Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2012.

Lenoir, Timothy. Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. ( Link to IsisCB )

Michener, William K. “Ecological Data Sharing.” Ecological Informatics 19/1 (2015): 33–44.

Moholy-Nagy, László. Von Material zu Architektur . Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1929.

Morris, Peter J. T. The Matter Factory: A History of the Chemistry Laboratory . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. ( Link to IsisCB )

Naess, Arne. Erkenntnis und wissenschaftliches Verhalten . Oslo: Norske Videnskaps-Akademi, 1936.

Neswald, Elizabeth. “Strategies of International Community-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Metabolism Research: The Foreign Laboratory Visits of Francis Gano Benedict.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 43/1 (2013): 1–40.

Owens, Larry. “Pure and Sound Government: Laboratories, Playing Fields, and Gymnasia in the Nineteenth-Century Search for Order.” Isis 76 (1985): 182–194. ( Link to IsisCB )

Paul, Harry W. The Sorcerer's Apprentice: The French Scientist's Image of German Science, 1840-1919 . Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1972. ( Link to IsisCB )

Perry, Stewart E. The Human Nature of Science: Researchers at Work in Psychiatry . New York: Macmillan, 1966.

Price, Derek J. de Solla. Little Science, Big Science . New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.

Rabinow, Paul. Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ( Link to IsisCB )

Rip, Arie. “Citation for Bruno Latour, 1992 Bernal Prize Recipient.” Science, Technology, and Human Values 18/3 (1993): 379-383.

Rocke, Alan J. Nationalizing Science: Adolphe Wurtz and the Battle for French Chemistry . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. ( Link to IsisCB )

Schmidgen, Henning. “1900 – The Spectatorium: On Biology’s Audio-Visual Archive.” Grey Room 43 (2011): 42–65.

Schmidgen, Henning. Hirn und Zeit: Die Geschichte eines Experiments, 1800–1950. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2014. ( Link to IsisCB )

Schmidgen, Henning. “Pictures, Preparations, and Living Processes: The Production of Immediate Visual Perception ( Anschauung ) in late-19th-Century Physiology.” Journal of the History of Biology 37 (2004): 477–513. ( Link to IsisCB )

Shapin, Steven. “Following Scientists Around.” Social Studies of Science 18/3 (1988): 533–550.

Shapin, Steven. “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England.” Isis 79/3 (1988): 373–404. ( Link to IsisCB )

Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Life. A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. ( Link to IsisCB )

Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. ( Link to IsisCB )

Simpson, J. A. and E. S. C. Weiner. The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 8: Interval-Looie . 2 nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Smith, Pamela H. “Laboratories.” In The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science , edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, 290-305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ( Link to IsisCB )

Todes, Daniel P. Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ( Link to IsisCB )

Trischler, Helmuth. “Wolfgang Gentner und die Großforschung im bundesdeutschen und europäischen Raum.” In Wolfgang Gentner: Festschrift zum 100. Geburtstag , edited by Dieter Hoffmann and Ulrich Schmidt-Rohr, 95-120. Berlin: Springer, 2006.

Von Frey, Max. “Kurzer Bericht über eine wissenschaftliche Reise nach Frankreich.” Archiv für Physiologie , Suppl. Vol. (1886): 186–190.

Weber, Max. “Wissenschaft als Beruf.” In Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I: Schriften und Reden, Bd. 17: Wissenschaft als Beruf (1917/1919) / Politik als Beruf (1919) , edited by W. J. Mommsen and W. Schluchter. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992.

Westrum, Ron. Review of Laboratory Life, by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, and The Human Nature of Science , by Stewart E. Perry. Science Communication 3 (1982): 437–440.

Wurtz, Adolphe. Les Hautes Études Pratiques dans les Universités Allemandes: Rapport présenté…par M. Adolphe Wurtz . Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1870.

This article is a revised, updated and expanded version of my contribution to “ EGO – European History Online .” I thank Hartmut Trischler, Lisa Landes, and Niall Williams for her help in establishing this earlier version. I thank Christopher Phillips for his insistence and assistance in preparing the present article. ↩

Galison and Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio,” 497–540. ↩

See Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” as well as more recently Paul Rabinow, Making PCR , and Steven Shapin , The Scientific Life . ↩

Knorr-Cetina, “Das naturwissenschaftliche Labor,” as well as Bruno Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World.” ↩

See, for example, Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic , and Donnelly, A Short History of Observatories . ↩

The key reference in this connection is obviously Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life . Already in 1936 the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess had suggested that the actions of scientists, both verbal and nonverbal, could be described using the methods of behavioral science; that is, they should be observed as though by a “researcher from a different galaxy.” See Naess, Erkenntnis und wissenschaftliches , 9. However, only the work of the sociologist Stewart E. Perry, who in the 1960s observed the scientific practices of medical practitioners in a psychiatric clinic, and the studies on From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences published by the French-American ethnologist and psychoanalyst Georges Devereux in 1967 actually went in this direction. See Perry, The Human Nature of Science , and Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences . On the parallels between Perry and Latour see Westrum, Review of Laboratory Life and The Human Nature of Science . ↩

Lenoir, Instituting Science ; Dierig, Wissenschaft in der Maschinenstadt ; Todes, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory ; and Morris, The Matter Factory . ↩

Cahan, Meister der Messung ; Galison, Image and Logic ; and Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes . See also James (ed.), The Development of the Laboratory . For an overview concerning historical studies of laboratories see Kohler, “Lab History: Reflections,” as well as the subsequent contributions in that issue by Klein, Gooday and Gieryn. ↩

Hannaway, “Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science,” 585. On the historical terminological see also Klein, “Die technowissenschaftlichen Laboratorien.” ↩

See Brockhaus Enzyklopädie., Bd. 12 , 670, and Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 8 , 558. ↩

Hannaway, “Laboratory Design,” 598–609. ↩

Hill, “The Iconography of the Laboratory.” ↩

On Libavius, see Hannaway, “Laboratory Design,” 593. ↩

On this point, see Smith, “Laboratories,” 290–293. ↩

Hill, “The Iconography of the Laboratory.” On Teniers, see Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England,” 379. ↩

On Boyle, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump . ↩

Smith, “Laboratories,” 296. ↩

Encyclopaedia Britannica , 857. ↩

Encyclopédie , 145 (italics in the original). ↩

On this point see also Klein, Experiments, Models, Paper Tools , 41–85. On Liebig, see Brock, Justus von Liebig . ↩

Forgan, “The Architecture of Science,” 424. ↩

Forgan, “The Architecture of Science,” 422. ↩

Cahan, Meister der Messung , 6. ↩

See Cunningham and Williams (eds.), The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine , and, with respect to the Spectatorium, Schmidgen, “Pictures, Preparations, and Living Processes,” as well as Schmidgen, “1900 – The Spectatorium.” ↩

Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon Bd. 10 , 1989. ↩

As an overview, see Schmidgen, Hirn und Zeit . ↩

Gessinger, Auge & Ohr , and Brain, “Semiotics and Semiotics.” ↩

With respect to the Bauhaus, see Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur , 130. More generally, see Allesch, Geschichte der psychologischen Ästhetik , and Brain, The Pulse of Modernism . ↩

Rocke, Nationalizing Science . ↩

Wurtz, Les Hautes Études Pratiques , II. ↩

Wurtz, Les Hautes Études Pratiques , III. ↩

Bernard, Leçons . ↩

Bernard, Leçons , 15. ↩

Von Frey, “Kurzer Bericht.” ↩

Carroy and Schmidgen, “Reaktionsversuche in Leipzig, Paris und Würzburg.” ↩

The literature on the general history of German-French relations in the 19th century is obviously vast. On the area of science see Paul, The Sorcerer's Apprentice ; Charle, La république des universitaires ; and Bonah, Instruire, guérir, servir . ↩

On Benedict, see Neswald, “Strategies of International Community-Building.” ↩

Bowker, “Manufacturing Truth,” 588. ↩

Price, Little Science, Big Science . On large-scale research in Europe, see, for example, Trischler, “Wolfgang Gentner.” ↩

For “trading zones” in laboratories, see Galison, Image and Logic , 803–844. ↩

On Kahn and Salk, see Legault, “Louis Kahn und das Eigenleben des Materials.” ↩

Rip, “Citation for Bruno Latour,” 379. ↩

Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life , 67. ↩

Ibid., 47. ↩

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern . ↩

Shapin, “Following Scientists Around.” ↩

Berners-Lee and Fischetti, Weaving the Web . ↩

See, for example, Borer, Harpole, Adler, Lind, Orrock, Seabloom and Smith, “Finding Generality in Ecology,” and Michener, “Ecological Data Sharing,” as well as, more generally, Coleman, Big Ecology . ↩

Owens, “Pure and Sound Government,” 184. ↩

• spaces of science

Henning Schmidgen, "Laboratory," Encyclopedia of the History of Science (April 2021), accessed 4 May 2024. https://doi.org/10.34758/sz06-t975 .

Citation Information and Article Archives

• Research Matters — to the Science Teacher

The Role of Laboratory in Science Teaching

Introduction.

Science educators have believed that the laboratory is an important means of instruction in science since late in the 19th century. Laboratory activities were used in high school chemistry in the 1880s (Fay, 1931). In 1886, Harvard University published a list of physics experiments that were to be included in high school physics classes for students who wished to enroll at Harvard (Moyer, 1976). Laboratory instruction was considered essential because it provided training in observation, supplied detailed information, and aroused pupils' interest. These same reasons are still accepted almost 100 years later.

Shulman and Tamir, in the  Second Handbook of Research on Teaching  (Travers, ed., 1973), listed five groups of objectives that may be achieved through the use of the laboratory in science classes:

• skills - manipulative, inquiry, investigative, organizational, communicative
• concepts - for example, hypothesis, theoretical model, taxonomic category
• cognitive abilities - critical thinking, problem solving, application, analysis, synthesis
• understanding the nature of science - scientific enterprise, scientists and how they work, existence of a multiplicity of scientific methods, interrelationships between science and technology and among the various disciplines of science
• attitudes - for example, curiosity, interest, risk taking, objectivity, precision,confidence, perseverance, satisfaction, responsibility, consensus, collaboration, and liking science (1973, p.1119).

Writing about laboratory teaching at the college level, McKeachie said:

Laboratory teaching assumes that first-hand experience in observation and manipulation of the materials of science is superior to other methods of developing understanding and appreciation. Laboratory training is also frequently used to develop skills necessary for more advanced study or research. From the standpoint of theory, the activity of the student, the sensorimotor nature of the experience, and the individualization of laboratory instruction should contribute positively to learning. Information cannot usually be obtained, however, by direct experience as rapidly as it can from abstractions presented orally or in print... Thus, one would not expect laboratory teaching to have an advantage over other teaching methods in the amount of information retention, in ability to apply learning, or in actual skill in observation or manipulation of materials... (in Gage, 1962, p.1144-1145).

Another writer, Pickering (1980), identified two misconceptions about the use of the laboratory in college science. One is that laboratories somehow "illustrate" lecture courses - a function that (in Pickering's opinion) is not possible in a simple, one-afternoon exercise. Pickering contended that most scientific theories are based on a large number of very sophisticated experiments. He suggested that, if lecture topics are to be illustrated, this should be done through the use of audio-visual aids or demonstrations. The second misconception is that laboratories exist to teach manipulative skills. Pickering argued that the majority of students in science laboratory classes do not have a career goal of becoming a professional scientist. Further, many of the skills students learn in laboratories are obsolete in science careers. If these skills are worth teaching, it is as tools to be mastered for basic scientific inquiry and not as ends in themselves (1980, p. 80).

Research Findings

Science educators frequently turn to the research literature for support of their requests for funds for supplies and equipment for laboratory activities. Science education researcher have examined the role of the laboratory on many variables, including achievement, attitudes, critical thinking, cognitive style, understanding science, the development of science process skills, manipulative skills, interests, retention in science courses, and the ability to do independent work.

Many of these studies contain the finding of "no significant differences" between groups. In 1978 the National Science Teachers Association produced the first volume of its series  What Research Says to the Science Teacher.  One of the chapters in this volume was on the role of the laboratory in secondary school science programs. Gary C. Bates reviewed 82 studies and concluded that "...the answer has not yet been conclusively found..." to the question: What does the laboratory accomplish that could not be accomplished as well by less expensive and less time consuming alternatives? (in Rowe, ed., 1978, p. 75).

A number of possible explanations exist for this discouraging conclusion. Much of the research comes from doctoral studies which are usually first attempts at research. Very few studies include a follow-up of the subjects involved to see if there were ant changes other than those tested for at the end of the study. Many of the investigations are of the comparative variety`(approach X vs. a "lab" approach). Often these instructional approaches are not described in sufficient detail for the reader to be able to judge the value of the study.

As McKeachie pointed out, laboratory teaching may not be the best method to choose if one's objective is to have students retain information. However, the need for "educational accountability" has been translated into the need to increase test scores. Some of the outcomes of a "lab approach" are difficult to test in a multiple-choice test.

Some-Positive Findings

Positive research findings on the role of the laboratory in science teaching do exist. Laboratory activities appear to be helpful for students rated as medium to low in achievement on pretest measures (Boghai, 1979; Grozier, 1969). Godomsky (1971) reported that laboratory instruction increased students' problem-solving ability in physical chemistry and that the laboratory could be a valuable instructional technique in chemistry if experiments were genuine problems without explicit directions. Working with older, disadvantaged students in a laboratory setting, researchers (McKinnon, 1976; McDermott et al., 1980) used activities designed to create disequilibrium in order to encourage cognitive development.

Some Final Comments

No space has been allocated in this discussion of the role of the laboratory to the approach involved: inquiry vs. verification. It has been assumed that proponents of laboratory activities are interested in having students inquire and in having them work with concrete objects. Comber and Keeves (1973) found, when studying science education in 19 countries, that in six countries where 10-year-old students made observations and did experiments in their schools, the level of achievement in science was higher than in schools where students did not perform these activities.

A modern research technique is meta-analysis - in which a group of studies is analyzed for similarities and differences in findings related to their common thrust. A meta-analysis on the effects of various instructional techniques (Wise and Okey, 1983) was focused on 12 teaching strategies. Two of these 12 were related to the laboratory approach: inquiry-discovery and manipulative. Although these two strategies did not exhibit as large an effect as did the strategies of focusing and questioning, there was some positive support for inquiry teaching. An effective science classroom was characterized as one in which students had opportunities to physically interact with instructional materials and engage in varied kinds of activities (1983, p. 434). Lott (1983) reported on a meta-analysis of the effect of inquiry (inductive) teaching and advance organizers in science education. Lott wrote that the inductive approach appeared to be more useful (than the deductive) in those situations where high levels of thought, learning experiences, and outcomes demands were placed upon subjects (1983, p. 445).

Science educators at all levels need to continue to study the role of the laboratory in science teaching. However, perhaps the question we should be asking is not "What is the laboratory better than?" but "For what purposes should the laboratory be used, under what conditions, and with what students?"

by Patricia E. Blosser, Professor of Science Education, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

Blosser, Patricia E. (1980).  A Critical Review of the Role of the Laboratory in Science Teaching.  Columbus, OH: ERIC Clearinghouse for Science, Mathematics, and Environmental Education. Boghai, Davar M. (April 1979). A Comparison of the Effects of Laboratory and Discussion Sequences on Learning College Chemistry.  Dissertation Abstracts, 39 (10), 6045A. Comber, L. C. & J. P. Keeves. (1978).  Science Education in Nineteen Countries, International Studies in Evaluation I.  New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Fay, Paul J. (August 1931). The History of Chemistry Teaching in American High Schools.  Journal of Chemical Education, 8 (8),1533-1562. Gage, N. L., et al. (1963).  Handbook of Research on Teaching.  Chicago: Rand McNally & Co. Godomsky, Stephen F., Jr. (1971). Programmed Instruction, Computer-Assisted Performance Problems, Open Ended Experiments and Student Attitude and Problem Solving Ability in Physical Chemistry Laboratory.  Dissertation Abstracts, 31 (11), 5873A. Grozier, Joseph E. Jr. (1969). The Role of the Laboratory in Developing Positive Attitudes Toward Science in a College General Education Science Course for Nonscientists.  Dissertation Abstracts, 31 (11), 2394A. Lott, Gerald W. (1983). The Effect of Inquiry Teaching and Advance Organizers Upon Student Outcomes in Science Education.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 20 (5), 437-451. McDermott, Lillian et al. March (1980). Helping Minority Students Succeed in Science, II. Implementation of a Curriculum in Physics and Biology.  Journal of College Science Teaching, 9 , 201-205. McKinnon, Joe W. (April 1976). Encouraging Logical Thinking in Pre-Engineering Students.  Engineering Education, 66 (7), 740-744. Moyer, Albert E. (February 1976). Edwin Hall and the Emergence of the Laboratory in Teaching Physics.  The Physics Teacher, 14 (2), 96-103. Pickering, Miles. (February 19, 1980). Are Lab Courses a Waste of Time?  The Chronicle of Higher Education,  p. 80. Rowe, Mary B., Ed. (1978).  What Research Says to the Science Teacher, I,  Washington, DC: National Science Teachers Association. Travers, Robert M. Ed. (1973).  Second Handbook of Research on Teaching.  Chicago: Rand McNally & Co. Wise, Kevin C. & Okey, Kames R. (1983). A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Various Science Teaching Strategies on Achievement.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 20 (5), 419-435.

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Research Laboratory  

by Daniel Watch and Deepa Tolat Perkins + Will

Within This Page

Building attributes, emerging issues, relevant codes and standards, additional resources.

Research Laboratories are workplaces for the conduct of scientific research. This WBDG Building Type page will summarize the key architectural, engineering, operational, safety, and sustainability considerations for the design of Research Laboratories.

The authors recognize that in the 21st century clients are pushing project design teams to create research laboratories that are responsive to current and future needs, that encourage interaction among scientists from various disciplines, that help recruit and retain qualified scientists, and that facilitates partnerships and development. As such, a separate WBDG Resource Page on Trends in Lab Design has been developed to elaborate on this emerging model of laboratory design.

A. Architectural Considerations

Over the past 30 years, architects, engineers, facility managers, and researchers have refined the design of typical wet and dry labs to a very high level. The following identifies the best solutions in designing a typical lab.

Lab Planning Module

The laboratory module is the key unit in any lab facility. When designed correctly, a lab module will fully coordinate all the architectural and engineering systems. A well-designed modular plan will provide the following benefits:

Flexibility —The lab module, as Jonas Salk explained, should "encourage change" within the building. Research is changing all the time, and buildings must allow for reasonable change. Many private research companies make physical changes to an average of 25% of their labs each year. Most academic institutions annually change the layout of 5 to 10% of their labs. See also WBDG Productive—Design for the Changing Workplace .

• Expansion —The use of lab planning modules allows the building to adapt easily to needed expansions or contractions without sacrificing facility functionality.

A common laboratory module has a width of approximately 10 ft. 6 in. but will vary in depth from 20–30 ft. The depth is based on the size necessary for the lab and the cost-effectiveness of the structural system. The 10 ft. 6 in. dimension is based on two rows of casework and equipment (each row 2 ft. 6 in. deep) on each wall, a 5 ft. aisle, and 6 in. for the wall thickness that separates one lab from another. The 5 ft. aisle width should be considered a minimum because of the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) .

Two-Directional Lab Module —Another level of flexibility can be achieved by designing a lab module that works in both directions. This allows the casework to be organized in either direction. This concept is more flexible than the basic lab module concept but may require more space. The use of a two-directional grid is beneficial to accommodate different lengths of run for casework. The casework may have to be moved to create a different type or size of workstation.

Three-Dimensional Lab Module —The three-dimensional lab module planning concept combines the basic lab module or a two-directional lab module with any lab corridor arrangement for each floor of a building. This means that a three-dimensional lab module can have a single-corridor arrangement on one floor, a two-corridor layout on another, and so on. To create a three-dimensional lab module:

• A basic or two-directional lab module must be defined.
• All vertical risers must be fully coordinated. (Vertical risers include fire stairs, elevators, restrooms, and shafts for utilities.)
• The mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems must be coordinated in the ceiling to work with the multiple corridor arrangements.

Lab Planning Concepts

The relationship of the labs, offices, and corridor will have a significant impact on the image and operations of the building. See also WBDG Functional—Account for Functional Needs .

Do the end users want a view from their labs to the exterior, or will the labs be located on the interior, with wall space used for casework and equipment?

Some researchers do not want or cannot have natural light in their research spaces. Special instruments and equipment, such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) apparatus, electron microscopes, and lasers cannot function properly in natural light. Natural daylight is not desired in vivarium facilities or in some support spaces, so these are located in the interior of the building.

Zoning the building between lab and non-lab spaces will reduce costs. Labs require 100% outside air while non-lab spaces can be designed with re-circulated air, like an office building .

Adjacencies with corridors can be organized with a single, two corridor (racetrack), or a three corridor scheme. There are number of variations to organize each type. Illustrated below are three ways to organize a single corridor scheme:

Single corridor lab design with labs and office adjacent to each other.

Single corridor lab design with offices clustered together at the end and in the middle.

Single corridor lab design with office clusters accessing main labs directly.

• Open labs vs. closed labs. An increasing number of research institutions are creating "open" labs to support team-based work. The open lab concept is significantly different from that of the "closed" lab of the past, which was based on accommodating the individual principle investigator. In open labs, researchers share not only the space itself but also equipment, bench space, and support staff. The open lab format facilitates communication between scientists and makes the lab more easily adaptable for future needs. A wide variety of labs—from wet biology and chemistry labs, to engineering labs, to dry computer science facilities—are now being designed as open labs.

Flexibility

In today's lab, the ability to expand, reconfigure, and permit multiple uses has become a key concern. The following should be considered to achieve this:

Flexible Lab Interiors

Equipment zones—These should be created in the initial design to accommodate equipment, fixed, or movable casework at a later date.

Generic labs

Mobile casework—This can be comprised of mobile tables and mobile base cabinets. It allows researchers to configure and fit out the lab based on their needs as opposed to adjusting to pre-determined fixed casework.

Mobile casework

Mobile base cabinet Photo Credit: Kewaunee Scientific Corp.

Flexible partitions—These can be taken down and put back up in another location, allowing lab spaces to be configured in a variety of sizes.

Overhead service carriers—These are hung from the ceiling. They can have utilities like piping, electric, data, light fixtures, and snorkel exhausts. They afford maximum flexibility as services are lifted off the floor, allowing free floor space to be configured as needed.

Flexible Engineering Systems

Lab designed with overhead connects and disconnects allow for flexibility and fast hook up of equipment.

Labs should have easy connects/disconnects at walls and ceilings to allow for fast and affordable hook up of equipment. See also WBDG Productive—Integrate Technological Tools .

The Engineering systems should be designed such that fume hoods can be added or removed.

Space should be allowed in the utility corridors, ceilings, and vertical chases for future HVAC, plumbing, and electric needs.

Building Systems Distribution Concepts

Interstitial space.

An interstitial space is a separate floor located above each lab floor. All services and utilities are located here where they drop down to service the lab below. This system has a high initial cost but it allows the building to accommodate change very easily without interrupting the labs.

Conventional design vs. interstitial design Image Credit: Zimmer, Gunsul, Frasca Partnership

Service Corridor

Lab spaces adjoin a centrally located corridor where all utility services are located. Maintenance personnel are afforded constant access to main ducts, shutoff valves, and electric panel boxes without having to enter the lab. This service corridor can be doubled up as an equipment/utility corridor where common lab equipment like autoclaves, freezer rooms, etc. can be located.

B. Engineering Considerations

Typically, more than 50% of the construction cost of a laboratory building is attributed to engineering systems. Hence, the close coordination of these ensures a flexible and successfully operating lab facility. The following engineering issues are discussed here: structural systems, mechanical systems, electrical systems, and piping systems. See also WBDG Functional—Ensure Appropriate Product/Systems Integration .

Structural Systems

Once the basic lab module is determined, the structural grid should be evaluated. In most cases, the structural grid equals 2 basic lab modules. If the typical module is 10 ft. 6 in. x 30 ft., the structural grid would be 21 ft. x 30 ft. A good rule of thumb is to add the two dimensions of the structural grid; if the sum equals a number in the low 50's, then the structural grid would be efficient and cost-effective.

Typical lab structural grid.

Key design issues to consider in evaluating a structural system include:

• Framing depth and effect on floor-to-floor height;
• Ability to coordinate framing with lab modules;
• Ability to create penetrations for lab services in the initial design as well as over the life of the building;
• Potential for vertical or horizontal expansion;
• Vibration criteria; and

Mechanical Systems

The location of main vertical supply/exhaust shafts as well as horizontal ductwork is very crucial in designing a flexible lab. Key issues to consider include: efficiency and flexibility, modular design, initial costs , long-term operational costs , building height and massing , and design image .

The various design options for the mechanical systems are illustrated below:

Shafts in the middle of the building

Shafts at the end of the building

Exhaust at end and supply in the middle

Multiple internal shafts

Shafts on the exterior

See also WBDG High Performance HVAC .

Electrical Systems

Three types of power are generally used for most laboratory projects:

Normal power circuits are connected to the utility supply only, without any backup system. Loads that are typically on normal power include some HVAC equipment, general lighting, and most lab equipment.

Emergency power is created with generators that will back up equipment such as refrigerators, freezers, fume hoods, biological safety cabinets, emergency lighting, exhaust fans, animal facilities, and environmental rooms. Examples of safe and efficient emergency power equipment include distributed energy resources (DER) , microturbines , and fuel cells .

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is used for data recording, certain computers, microprocessor-controlled equipment, and possibly the vivarium area. The UPS can be either a central unit or a portable system, such as distributed energy resources (DER) , microturbines , fuel cells , and building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) .

See also WBDG Productive—Assure Reliable Systems and Spaces .

The following should be considered:

• Load estimation
• Site distribution
• Power quality
• Management of electrical cable trays/panel boxes
• User expectations
• Illumination levels
• Lighting distribution-indirect, direct, combination
• Luminaire location and orientation-lighting parallel to casework and lighting perpendicular to casework
• Telephone and data systems

Piping Systems

There are several key design goals to strive for in designing laboratory piping systems:

• Provide a flexible design that allows for easy renovation and modifications.
• Provide appropriate plumbing systems for each laboratory based on the lab programming.
• Provide systems that minimize energy usage .
• Provide equipment arrangements that minimize downtime in the event of a failure.
• Locate shutoff valves where they are accessible and easily understood.
• Accomplish all of the preceding goals within the construction budget.

C. Operations and Maintenance

Cost savings.

The following cost saving items can be considered without compromising quality and flexibility:

• Separate lab and non-lab zones.
• Try to design with standard building components instead of customized components. See also WBDG Functional—Ensure Appropriate Product/Systems Integration .
• Identify at least three manufacturers of each material or piece of equipment specified to ensure competitive bidding for the work.
• Locate fume hoods on upper floors to minimize ductwork and the cost of moving air through the building.
• Evaluate whether process piping should be handled centrally or locally. In many cases it is more cost-effective to locate gases, in cylinders, at the source in the lab instead of centrally.
• Create equipment zones to minimize the amount of casework necessary in the initial construction.
• Provide space for equipment (e.g., ice machine) that also can be shared with other labs in the entry alcove to the lab. Shared amenities can be more efficient and cost-effective.
• Consider designating instrument rooms as cross-corridors, saving space as well as encouraging researchers to share equipment.
• Design easy-to-maintain, energy-efficient building systems. Expose mechanical, plumbing, and electrical systems for easy maintenance access from the lab.
• Locate all mechanical equipment centrally, either on a lower level of the building or on the penthouse level.
• Stack vertical elements above each other without requiring transfers from floor to floor. Such elements include columns, stairs, mechanical closets, and restrooms.

D. Lab and Personnel Safety and Security

Protecting human health and life is paramount, and safety must always be the first concern in laboratory building design. Security-protecting a facility from unauthorized access-is also of critical importance. Today, research facility designers must work within the dense regulatory environment in order to create safe and productive lab spaces. The WBDG Resource Page on Security and Safety in Laboratories addresses all these related concerns, including:

• Laboratory classifications: dependent on the amount and type of chemicals in the lab;
• Containment devices: fume hoods and bio-safety cabinets;
• Levels of bio-safety containment as a design principle;
• Radiation safety;
• Employee safety: showers, eyewashes, other protective measures; and
• Emergency power.

See also WBDG Secure / Safe Branch , Threat/Vulnerability Assessments and Risk Analysis , Balancing Security/Safety and Sustainability Objectives , Air Decontamination , and Electrical Safety .

E. Sustainability Considerations

The typical laboratory uses far more energy and water per square foot than the typical office building due to intensive ventilation requirements and other health and safety concerns. Therefore, designers should strive to create sustainable , high performance, and low-energy laboratories that will:

• Minimize overall environmental impacts;
• Protect occupant safety ; and
• Optimize whole building efficiency on a life-cycle basis.

For more specific guidance, see WBDG Sustainable Laboratory Design ; EPA and DOE's Laboratories for the 21st Century (Labs21) , a voluntary program dedicated to improving the environmental performance of U.S. laboratories; WBDG Sustainable Branch and Balancing Security/Safety and Sustainability Objectives .

F. Three Laboratory Sectors

There are three research laboratory sectors. They are academic laboratories, government laboratories, and private sector laboratories.

• Academic labs are primarily teaching facilities but also include some research labs that engage in public interest or profit generating research.
• Government labs include those run by federal agencies and those operated by state government do research in the public interest.
• Design of labs for the private sector , run by corporations, is usually driven by the need to enhance the research operation's profit making potential.

G. Example Design and Construction Criteria

For GSA, the unit costs for this building type are based on the construction quality and design features in the following table   . This information is based on GSA's benchmark interpretation and could be different for other owners.

LEED® Application Guide for Laboratory Facilities (LEED-AGL)—Because research facilities present a unique challenge for energy efficiency and sustainable design, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has formed the LEED-AGL Committee to develop a guide that helps project teams apply LEED credits in the design and construction of laboratory facilities. See also the WBDG Resource Page Using LEED on Laboratory Projects .

The following agencies and organizations have developed codes and standards affecting the design of research laboratories. Note that the codes and standards are minimum requirements. Architects, engineers, and consultants should consider exceeding the applicable requirements whenever possible.

• 29 CFR 1910.1450: OSHA "Occupational Exposures to Hazardous Chemicals in Laboratories"
• ANSI/ASSE/AIHA Z9.5 Laboratory Ventilation
• ANSI/ISEA Z358.1 Emergency Eyewash and Shower Equipment
• Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC) Standards
• Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories (BMBL) 5th Edition , Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health.
• GSA PBS-P100 Facilities Standards for the Public Buildings Service
• Guidelines for the Laboratory Use of Chemical Carcinogens , Pub. No. 81-2385. National Institutes of Health
• NIH Design Requirements Manual , National Institutes of Health
• NFPA 30 Flammable and Combustible Liquids Code
• NFPA 45 Fire Protection for Laboratories using Chemical
• Unified Facilities Guide Specifications (UFGS) —organized by MasterFormat™ divisions, are for use in specifying construction for the military services. Several UFGS exist for safety-related topics.

Publications

• Building Type Basics for Research Laboratories , 2nd Edition by Daniel Watch. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2008. ISBN# 978-0-470-16333-7.
• CRC Handbook of Laboratory Safety , 5th ed. by A. Keith Furr. CRC Press, 2000.
• Design and Planning of Research and Clinical Laboratory Facilities by Leonard Mayer. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1995.
• Design for Research: Principals of Laboratory Architecture by Susan Braybrooke. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1993.
• Guidelines for Laboratory Design: Health and Safety Considerations , 4th Edition by Louis J. DiBerardinis, et al. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013.
• Guidelines for Planning and Design of Biomedical Research Laboratory Facilities by The American Institute of Architects, Center for Advanced Technology Facilities Design. Washington, DC: The American Institute of Architects, 1999.
• Handbook of Facilities Planning, Vol. 1: Laboratory Facilities by T. Ruys. New York, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990.
• Laboratories, A Briefing and Design Guide by Walter Hain. London, UK: E & FN Spon, 1995.
• Laboratory by Earl Walls Associates, May 2000.
• Laboratory Design from the Editors of R&D Magazine.
• Laboratory Design, Construction, and Renovation: Participants, Process, and Product by National Research Council, Committee on Design, Construction, and Renovation of Laboratory Facilities. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000.
• Planning Academic Research Facilities: A Guidebook by National Science Foundation. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1992.
• Research and Development in Industry: 1995-96 by National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Studies. Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 1998.
• Science and Engineering Research Facilities at Colleges and Universities by National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Studies. Arlington, VA, 1998.
• Laboratories for the 21st Century (Labs21) —Sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy, Labs21 is a voluntary program dedicated to improving the environmental performance of U.S. laboratories.

WBDG Participating Agencies

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Science communication competition brings research into the real world

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Laurence Willemet remembers countless family dinners where curious faces turned to her with shades of the same question: “What is it, exactly, that you do with robots?”

It’s a familiar scenario for MIT students exploring topics outside of their family’s scope of knowledge — distilling complex concepts without slides or jargon, plumbing the depths with nothing but lay terms. “It was during these moments,” Willemet says, “that I realized the importance of clear communication and the power of storytelling.”

Participating in the MIT Research Slam, then, felt like one of her family dinners.

The finalists in the 2024 MIT Research Slam competition met head-to-head on Wednesday, April 17 at a live, in-person showcase event. Four PhD candidates and four postdoc finalists demonstrated their topic mastery and storytelling skills by conveying complex ideas in only 180 seconds to an educated audience unfamiliar with the field or project at hand.

The Research Slam follows the format of the 3-Minute Thesis competition, which takes place annually at over 200 universities around the world. Both an exciting competition and a rigorous professional development training opportunity, the event serves an opportunity to learn for everyone involved.

One of this year’s competitors, Bhavish Dinakar, explains it this way: “Participating in the Research Slam was a fantastic opportunity to bring my research from the lab into the real world. In addition to being a helpful exercise in public speaking and communication, the three-minute time limit forces us to learn the art of distilling years of detailed experiments into a digestible story that non-experts can understand.”

Leading up to the event, participants joined training workshops on pitch content and delivery, and had the opportunity to work one-on-one with educators from the Writing and Communication Center, English Language Studies, Career Advising and Professional Development, and the Engineering Communication Labs, all of which co-sponsored and co-produced the event. This interdepartmental team offered support for the full arc of the competition, from early story development to one-on-one practice sessions.

The showcase was jovially emceed by Eric Grunwald, director of English language learning. He shared his thoughts on the night: “I was thrilled with the enthusiasm and skill shown by all the presenters in sharing their work in this context. I was also delighted by the crowd’s enthusiasm and their many insightful questions. All in all, another very successful slam.”

A panel of accomplished judges with distinct perspectives on research communication gave feedback after each of the talks: Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT; Denzil Streete, senior associate dean and director of graduate education; and Emma Yee, scientific editor at the journal Cell .

Deborah Blum aptly summed up her experience: “It was a pleasure as a science journalist to be a judge and to listen to this smart group of MIT grad students and postdocs explain their research with such style, humor, and intelligence. It was a reminder of the importance the university places on the value of scientists who communicate. And this matters. We need more scientists who can explain their work clearly, explain science to the public, and help us build a science-literate world.”

After all the talks, the judges provided constructive and substantive feedback for the contestants. It was a close competition, but in the end, Bhavish Dinakar was the judges’ choice for first place, and the audience agreed, awarding him the Audience Choice award. Omar Rutledge’s strong performance earned him the runner-up position. Among the postdoc competitors, Laurence Willemet won first place and Audience Choice, with Most Kaniz Moriam earning the runner-up award.

Postdoc Kaniz Mariam noted that she felt privileged to participate in the showcase. “This experience has enhanced my ability to communicate research effectively and boosted my confidence in sharing my work with a broader audience. I am eager to apply the lessons learned from this enriching experience to future endeavors and continue contributing to MIT's dynamic research community. The MIT Research Slam Showcase wasn't just about winning; it was about the thrill of sharing knowledge and inspiring others. Special thanks to Chris Featherman and Elena Kallestinova from the MIT Communication Lab for their guidance in practical communication skills. ”

Double winner Laurence Willemet related the competition to experiences in her daily life. Her interest in the Research Slam was rooted in countless family dinners filled with curiosity. “‘What is it exactly that you do with robots?’ they would ask, prompting me to unravel the complexities of my research in layman’s terms. Each time, I found myself grappling with the task of distilling intricate concepts into digestible nuggets of information, relying solely on words to convey the depth of my work. It was during these moments, stripped of slides and scientific jargon, that I realized the importance of clear communication and the power of storytelling. And so, when the opportunity arose to participate in the Research Slam, it felt akin to one of those family dinners for me.”

The first place finishers received a $600 cash prize, while the runners-up and audience choice winners each received $300.

Last year’s winner in the PhD category, Neha Bokil, candidate in biology working on her dissertation in the lab of David Page, is set to represent MIT at the Three Minute Thesis Northeast Regional Competition later this month, which is organized by the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools.

A full list of slam finalists and the titles of their talks is below.

  PhD Contestants: 

• Pradeep Natarajan, Chemical Engineering (ChemE), “What can coffee-brewing teach us about brain disease?”
• Omar Rutledge, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, “Investigating the effects of cannabidiol (CBD) on social anxiety disorder”
• Bhavish Dinakar, ChemE, “A boost from batteries: making chemical reactions faster”
• Sydney Dolan, Aeronautics and Astronautics, “Creating traffic signals for space”

  Postdocs: 

• Augusto Gandia, Architecture and Planning, “Cyber modeling — computational morphogenesis via ‘smart’ models”
• Laurence Willemet, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, “Remote touch for teleoperation”
• Most Kaniz Moriam, Mechanical Engineering, “Improving recyclability of cellulose-based textile wastes”
• Mohammed Aatif Shahab, ChemE, “Eye-based human engineering for enhanced industrial safety” 

Research Slam organizers included Diana Chien, director of MIT School of Engineering Communication Lab ; Elena Kallestinova, director of MIT Writing and Communication Center ; Alexis Boyer, assistant director, Graduate Career Services, Career Advising and Professional Development (CAPD); Amanda Cornwall, associate director, Graduate Student Professional Development, CAPD; and Eric Grunwald, director of English Language Studies. This event was sponsored by the Office of Graduate Education, the Office of Postdoctoral Services, the Writing and Communication Center, MIT Career Advising and Professional Development , English Language Studies, and the MIT School of Engineering Communication Labs.

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• MIT Research Slam
• Research Slam YouTube channel
• MIT Career Advising and Professional Development (CAPD)
• Graduate Student Professional Development
• Writing and Communication Center
• MIT School of Engineering Communication Lab
• MIT English Language Studies

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Related Articles

Third annual MIT Research Slam showcase highlights PhD and postdoc communication skills

MIT Research Slam showcases postdoc and PhD communication skills

Third annual Science Slam becomes first virtual Research Slam

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Former MIT biologist David Sabatini, forced out after sexual harassment accusations, to lead new Boston team

Former MIT and Whitehead Institute star biologist David Sabatini, who lost his lofty positions after being accused of violating sexual harassment policies in 2021, is rejoining the Boston scientific community as head of a research group at a new laboratory under the umbrella of a Czech-based scientific institute.

Sabatini, who has denied harassing anyone and filed litigation over the allegations,has been working since last October in a senior research position at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague, investigating scientific questions in the areas of cell growth and metabolism, similar to his past research at Whitehead.

The Czech institute, known as IOCB Prague, is realizing a long-held ambition to expand into the Boston biotech hub, confirmed the institute’s director, Jan Konvalinka.

“I feel adventurous about it,” Konvalinka said in a telephone interview from Prague. “My experience is that it is very important to be present where the best brains are, and where the very best universities are. It’s important to be where the decisions are being made.”

Sabatini, who will split time between Boston and Prague, will lead a research group of up to 15 people at IOCB Boston. The local branch of the Prague institute is scheduled to open late this summer, Konvalinka said. He imagines the Boston location eventually growing to two or three research groups.

Part of the funding for IOCB Boston is coming from high-profile donations pledged last year toward helping Sabatini get back into science.

For 24 years, Sabatini ran a famously intense research lab at Whitehead, overseeing up to 40 people and a $5 million annual budget. His career there ended abruptly in the summer of 2021, after a Whitehead investigation found that he had a past sexual relationship with a colleague, Kristin Knouse, over whom he had a career-influencing role, in violation of Whitehead’s policies on workplace relationships. Investigators and several former lab members also alleged the Sabatini lab had elements of a toxic environment, though other former lab members rejected those characterizations and praised the lab’s culture and Sabatini’s mentorship.

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Sabatini in late 2021 filed suit against Knouse and Whitehead, alleging defamation among other claims. Knouse countersued Sabatini, accusing him, among other allegations, of sexual harassment and retaliation.

The litigation is ongoing.

A spokesperson for Whitehead declined to comment on Sabatini’s new position.

Lawyers for Knouse did not respond Monday to a request for comment.

Sabatini’s work once generated Nobel Prize buzz. The implosion of his career — the subject of a two-part Boston Globe Spotlight series published in January 2023 — divided the world of science. Some thought Sabatini was over-punished; others argued that he got the reckoning he deserved.

Days after the Globe Spotlight stories were published, New York hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman and an anonymous donor pledged $25 million over five years toward helping Sabatini get back into science. Since that time, Ackman has become an outspoken and controversial national figure leading the pushback against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in higher education. He was a prominent critic of former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s handling of accusations of antisemitism on campus after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

“I’m excited there are kind and generous people who have faith in my capacity to do science and have enabled me to do this,” Sabatini said in a Globe interview.

Konvalinka declined to explain in detail how the Ackman-led donations are being used at IOCB Boston. A spokesperson for Ackman declined to comment.

Sabatini said he is not ready to name precisely where the branch institute will be located, though he and Konvalinka say they have identified the roughly 9,000 square feet of Boston-area lab space required.

Several veterans of Sabatini’s former lab at Whitehead have agreed to join his team in Boston, Sabatini said.

One of them, Doug Wheeler, worked in Sabatini’s Whitehead lab from 2003 to 2005 and 2007 to 2009. He said he is joining IOCB Boston as “head of metabolomics,” and will run a small research team in his field, related to metabolism.

“Starting from scratch with philanthropic funding but zero momentum is a really interesting challenge,” Wheeler said. “To me this is an exciting experiment to sign on for.”

IOCB Prague was founded in 1953, according to the institute. It is known for developments related to antivirals, including anti-HIV compounds that are used in drugs to treat AIDS patients.

Sabatini developed a relationship with IOCB Prague after his career imploded, and the institute invited him to Prague to deliver a scientific lecture. In hiring Sabatini last fall , the institute said, “We believe that he has been punished enough for his previous actions and that the research community will be served best” if he got back to work.

Sabatini continues to develop his lab in Prague, and intends to run the Boston and Prague locations as one lab, he said. The Boston location may operate with more senior scientists, and with a greater focus on drug discovery. “We’re buying equipment,” he said. “We’re hiring some people to be ready to go.”

Robert Langer, a prolific inventor, entrepreneur, and MIT chemical engineer, said he is unaware of another foreign scientific institution running a standalone outpost in Boston. “Most institutions are usually associated with a local university,” he said by email. The key to producing substantial science at a new institute, he said, will largely come down to “attracting great people” to do the work, which can depend on elements such as space and funding.

David Lucchino, former chairman and current board member of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, agrees that nothing like IOCB Boston has been done here before, to his knowledge. “But I think it is a good thing,” he said. “It continues to reinforce why this area is so important to the global health care system and the solutions that we drive.”

Mark Arsenault can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him @bostonglobemark .