Disciplining environmentalism: Opportunity structures, scientist activism, and the rise of genetic toxicology, 1941--1976

This dissertation builds on and extends existing research in social movements and in the history and sociology of science to examine the formation of an interdisciplinary science. Using data from archives, scientists' personal files, published sources, and in-depth interviews, I analyze the rise of genetic toxicology during the period 1941–1976.;Genetic toxicology is an environmental health science concerned with the causes, effects, and long-term consequences of “environmental mutagenesis”—the chemically-induced genetic and chromosomal changes in living organisms that trigger cancer and heritable genetic disease. It is a moderately institutionalized scientific field with disciplinary, institutional, and cultural boundaries that are highly permeable along numerous dimensions. As such it defies standard theories of discipline formation. How and why did a heterogeneous collection of laboratories, people, theories, materials, and practices coalesce into something called genetic toxicology?;I argue that genetic toxicology was constructed during the period 1968–1976 by a scientists' social movement. To motivate this thesis, I borrow concepts and a general framework from research on social movements and collective action to unpack the organizational components and social processes implicated in the movement to create genetic toxicology. I examine the structural constraints and openings that conditioned the movement's initial emergence. I also consider recruitment and mobilization tactics, various forms of scientist-activism, the framing of scientist collective action, and the organizational strategies adopted for reconfiguring research production systems.;Emerging from this analysis is evidence of a “grassroots” approach to discipline building. Scientist-activists built genetic toxicology from the ground up by creating their own organizational mechanisms for recruiting and training scientists, coordinating research, standardizing tools and practices, and participating in public service and education. The permeable boundaries that came to mark genetic toxicology as a social form and as a mode of research are the result of scientist-activists' collective attempts to regulate the mix of science and politics flowing into and through the emergent field. In this case, building a science centered on the study of environmental mutagenesis and organizing a social movement of scientists committed to preventing further increases in the frequency of genetic disease were intertwined and mutually constitutive processes.