Laboratory life. The social construction of scientific facts

supported by facts, he believed in the good of the inductive method in all walks of life. He put this to work in studies such as the influences of environment on parameters of behaviour of mice and men. He eventually succeeded in building up a Fondation Francaise pour l'Etude des Problmes Humains in occupied Paris from 1941 to 1944, for which he was much maligned after the liberation. Carrel's views on the ideal conditions for successful research, which arose from the very different situations he had found in France and in the U.S.A., and which Dr. Malinin judiciously extends to our times, make equally useful reading. Except in this chapter and in the section on Carrel's "immortal" strain of fibroblasts in tissue culture, where the conclusion is, however, at variance with that of J. A. Witkowski ('Dr. Carrel's immortal cells', Med. Hist., 1980, 24: 129-142), the author hardly pushes his analysis further than did the shorter biography in English by W. S. and P. D. Edwards (1974) (which is not mentioned in the "Selected References"). Thus it may perhaps be regretted that Carrel's relationship to the views on science expressed simultaneously by his countrymen, Charles Robert Richet (winner of a medical Nobel Prize in 1914) and Lecomte du Noiy (of the Pasteur Institute) are omitted or only cursorily mentioned in the present volume. Lecomte du Nouy in fact claimed in the Introduction to owe his writing of Le temps et la vie (1936) to Carrel's stimulus. Neither is the reader introduced to, for example, Carrel's posthumously published Reflexions sur la conduite de la vie (1950). Scholars will miss more the absence of footnotes than the lack of biographical references to a number of persons introduced in this book. The easily understandable descriptions of complex technical aspects involved in Carrel's experimentation will, however, be appreciated. The book is nevertheless well worth reading by both active scientists and historians as a reminder of a man whose ideas were sometimes termed "visionary" and as a stimulant for future research into a captivating group of modern medical investigators. Ulrich Troehler Medico-Historical Library University of Basle