Visual Rhetoric and the Prion

Carol Reeves
Butler University

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     Last modified: February 15, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/15/2005 9:00 AM in ROZH 102
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Abstract
Endless Variety: Representations in Biology


Recent scholarship has demonstrated that representations in Science both shape and are shaped by the social processes within a community and members’ understanding of scientific phenomena.  In the last twenty-five years, several related fields of Biology have moved toward consensus about the validity of a once heretical hypothesis—the prion or protein-only hypothesis—that protein can replicate and infect tissue without nucleic acid.  Though the hypothesis was contested in the years after Stanley Prusiner first proposed it (Prusiner, 1982), a gradual acceptance of its reasonableness, if not its definitiveness, can be traced in the literature (see Reeves, 2002) until eventually it achieved status as the reigning theory of causation in diseases such as Mad Cow and CJD.  This presentation will examine how representations of prions, prion processess, and infection routes helped shape the scientific community’s attitudes toward the prion hypothesis and stimulated research in the area. 

Like the linguistic and terminological patterns I have found in this scientific community (see Reeves, 2002), I have also discovered representational patterns that promote the “fact-status” of the prion as an entity and the protein-only hypothesis as a viable alternative explanation of disease etiology—even during periods during which the status of the prion as an entity was contested and the prion hypothesis was vociferously debated.  I argue that these representations served the overall argumentative program to redirect the theoretical focus of the community examining the cause of TSE’s or Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies. 

Another focus of this presentation will be the representations of the prion and prion processes in general science and popular magazines such as Discover and Time magazine.  In these representations, no question is left for readers of the fact-status of the prion or the prion theory, and what could be labled “visual” hedging for scientific audiences is, for general or popular audiences, replaced with dramatic emphasis. 

Finally, I will show how some representations are “transported” from one audience and purpose to another.  For example, a representation used to explain prion infection of normal tissue in Time magazine eventually appeared in both Mother Jones and Utne Reader as evidence in arguments against eating beef.

Reeves, Carol.  “An Orthodox Heresy:  Scientific Rhetoric and the Science of Prions.”
Scientific Communication. 24, 1, September, 2002:  98-122

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
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Representing radioisotopes: experiments and instruments in the visualization of life sciences in the post-WWII era
What do we get from visual access?
Standardisation and abstraction: two ways to model Arabidopsis thaliana
Science and Representation: the case of genetic maps.
The role of two different but related graphs in the expansion of molecular biology between 1960 and 1980: the regulatory gene network and the intra-cellular signalling pathway