In Touch with Life

Chapter 5 explores microliter technologies that have profoundly transformed laboratory culture and describes how the micropipette and its counterpart, the microcentrifuge tube, became key players in the molecularization of life. The chapter elaborates on the use of manually operated precision tools in life sciences research with a discussion of Don Ihde's and Shaun Gallagher's influential studies of body-instrument relations and incorporation processes. Ihde's concepts of instrumental and experiential transparency and Gallagher's body schema and body precept are critically examined. The chapter argues that these embodiment philosophies are deficient in accounting for the peculiar hands-on/hands-off dynamic of sterile regimes that are practiced in technoscientific spaces and sites of life science research today.