From: Alberto Cambrosio (CYCO@MUSICA.MCGILL.CA)
Date: Sat Sep 10 1994 - 16:38:25 EST
Dear Colleagues, We are a historian and a sociologist of contemporary biomedical research. Having completed a book on the history of the discovery and development of monoclonal antibodies (Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating, Exquisite Specificity. Aspects of the Monoclonal Antibody Revolution, Oxford U.P., forthcoming in 1995), we are now working on flow cytometry. A first article on the history of the fluorescent-activated cell sorter and T-cell subsets is due to appear shortly: Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio, "'Ours is an engineering approach': Flow Cytometry and the Constitution of Human T-Cell Subsets," Journal of the History of Biology 27 (1994), 449-479. We are presently working on a paper dealing with flow cytometric imagery (dot plots, contour plots, etc.). We reproduce below a letter that was sent to a sample of about 50 researchers. In the meantime, we have discovered the existence of this list. If anyone subscribing to the list has any information/comment concerning the questions raised in the letter, we would appreciate hearing about it. If you prefer, you can send your answer directly to Cambrosio's e-mail address (CYCO@MUSICA.MCGILL.CA). We can also be contacted at the following address: Alberto Cambrosio Department of Social Studies of Medicine McGill University McIntyre Medical Sciences Building 3655 Drummond Street Montreal, Quebec Canada H3G 1Y6 Tel.: (514) 398-4981 Fax.: (514) 398-1498 Many thanks! Alberto Cambrosio Peter Keating _________________________________________________ COPY OF THE LETTER SENT TO A SAMPLE OF RESEARCHERS: We have been working for several years on the historical and social aspects of contemporary biomedical research and our focus has been on immunology. As part of a project on the introduction and use of flow cytometry in fundamental and clinical immunology, we are presently analyzing the evolution and diffusion of flow cytometric imagery, i.e., the diagrams which, more often than not, accompany papers reporting results based on flow cytometric analysis. Our interest in this matter was prompted by a 1989 remark that: "Virtually any issue of an immunology journal will contain at least one example of how FACS analysis or sorting is used to define the characteristics of a T or B lymphocyte subpopulation, to investigate the origin of such subpopulation, or to chart the influence of disease processes or drug treatments on subpopulation representation" (Parks et al., in Fundamental Immunology, 2nd ed., W.E. Paul ed., Raven Press, p. 794). This claim is indeed warranted when one considers, for instance, that while in 1980 only 1-2% of the articles published by the Journal of Immunology contained flow cytometric imagery, by 1990 that percentage had risen to 25%. Given the extremely rapid increase in the number of flow cytometric images in biomedical journals, we thought it worthwhile to investigate how the biomedical community reacted to the appearance of what could be termed rather unconventional data representation techniques (dot plots, contour plots, etc.). One way of assessing this reaction is to analyze referee reports on articles containing flow cytometric imagery. Did the referees comment on the quality, usefulness, intelligibility, etc. of the article's figures? In what terms? We would greatly appreciate if you would be willing to help us in any of the following ways (for the confidentiality issue, see subsequent paragraph): a) By sending us copies of referee reports of your articles (with a copy or the reference of the related article) containing remarks concerning flow cytometric imagery. A sample of older and more recent reports would, of course, be most welcome. OR b) If you do not keep copies of referees reports, by sharing with us information about your experience in this domain: do you remember specific referee comments on the imagery used in your articles? OR c) If, as it is highly probable, you have yourself acted as a referee for other researchers' papers, have you ever commented on the flow cytometric imagery used in those papers? Could you send copies of those reports or summarize for us the kind of remarks you made? We understand that there are many problems related to our admittedly unusual request, chiefly among them being the problem of confidentiality. Our research project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the main public granting agency for social research in Canada. SSHRC has a strict ethical code which all its grantees are bound to obey. Only our research team will have access to the original materials and we will not use names of persons or institutions who gave us confidential information in published versions of our work. It goes without saying, that we have no links whatsoever with companies involved in the production and sale of flow cytometers and related reagents and software. Last, but not least, we would like to stress that we are not interested in assessing whether peer-review judgments are well-founded or reliable; our research project is not evaluative. Rather, we are interested in understanding the dynamics of scientific research and, in particular, the relationship between scientific and technological developments. Please do not hesitate to contact us if we would like to obtain further information on our past or present research projects. Thank you very much for your time and consideration. _________________________________________________
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