View source for The Laboratories of Our Lives: Labs, Labs Everywhere!/Laboratories: A historical perspective/Modern laboratories and their importance

===1.4 Modern laboratories and their importance===
The twentieth century saw laboratories of all kinds grow, develop, and mature, though not without their share of difficulties. In the 1920s, for example, some U.S. physicians, specialists, and dentists complained heavily of the lack of quality standards, regulations, and ethics inherent in for-profit clinical, chemical, and radiological laboratories.<ref name="TaylorAdvert1920">{{cite journal |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LbEDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA229 |journal=Texas State Journal of Medicine |title=Advertising Medical Laboratories (Encore) |author=Taylor, Holman (ed.) |volume=16 |issue=6 |date=October 1920 |pages=229–230}}</ref><ref name="SondernCommer1921">{{cite journal |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=j7hYAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA390 |journal=New York State Journal of Medicine |title=Commercial Laboratories |author=Sondern, Frederic E. (ed.) |volume=21 |issue=10 |date=October 1921 |page=390}}</ref><ref name="WhiteTheRole1922">{{cite journal |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OTMTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA755 |journal=Kentucky Medical Journal |title=The Role of the Nonmedical Graduate in the Medical Laboratory |author=White, Courtland Y. |volume=25 |issue=11 |date=August 1922 |pages=755–760}}</ref><ref name="SundelofTheBus1922">{{cite journal |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=E741AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA442 |journal=The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal |title=The Business Side of X-ray Diagnosis and Treatment |author=Sundelof, E. M. |volume=186 |issue=13 |date=30 March 1922 |pages=442–444}}</ref> Other changes took place there too, particularly after World War II, when a fundamental transition took place, shifting many perceptions of what was the "Western" world from Europe to the U.S. This post-war shift also saw focus from the philosophical and theoretical laboratorian to the experimental and practical lab researcher, according to Pestre<ref name="PestreScience13">{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZYUfAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA71 |title=Science in the Twentieth Century |chapter=Chapter 4: Science, Political Power and the State |author=Pestre, D. |editor=Krige, J.; Pestre, D. |publisher=Routledge |year=2013 |pages=61–76 |isbn=9057021722}}</ref>:

<blockquote>Fundamental theorists were still essential, and they were highly respected, but they no longer had that mythical status which was accorded to the founders of quantum mechanics. They were also in minority with those (the "phenomenologists") whose job it was to deal with the mass of experimental results produced in the laboratories. Seeking theories which were locally coherent and which could be immediately useful and produce numbers, their role was to display a practical efficiency. They thus participated in the development of a science which was increasingly integrated into its economic and political environment, and contributed to the multiplications of the sites where knowledge was produced. These were now the universities and the technical institutes, the national laboratories and the industrial laboratories (Siemens or General Electric), but also the myriad of small firms established as a result of government contracts.</blockquote>

This transition carried on to other parts of the world, where the Industrial Revolution gave way to the Scientific-Technical Revolution of the '50s and '60s, and that to the Information Age in roughly the late '70s to early '80s. Through all of these time periods to present day, we've seen the amount of information moving in and out of laboratories multiply drastically as well, particularly with the advent of data-producing analytical devices and data management tools, including genomics equipment such as DNA sequencers.<ref name="PollackDNA11">{{cite web |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/business/dna-sequencing-caught-in-deluge-of-data.html |title=DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data |author=Pollack, A. |work=The New York Times |publisher=The New York Times Company |date=30 November 2011 |accessdate=28 June 2022}}</ref>

Most importantly, however, is the transition to a time when the ubiquity of the laboratory in our way of life becomes apparent. The previous quote from Pestre is important to note when thinking about this concept; today we see labs in all the places he mentioned as well as in other unexpected locations and fields of research, including the expanding cannabis industry.<ref name="DouglasPast17">{{cite web |url=https://www.limswiki.org/index.php/LII:Past,_Present,_and_Future_of_Cannabis_Laboratory_Testing_and_Regulation_in_the_United_States |title=Past, Present, and Future of Cannabis Laboratory Testing and Regulation in the United States, Third Edition |author=Douglas, S.E. |work=LIMSwiki.org |date=March 2020 |accessdate=28 June 2022}}</ref> Like the idea of the ubiquitous transistor and how easy it is to take for granted<ref name="GaudinTheTrans07">{{cite web |url=https://www.computerworld.com/article/2538123/the-transistor--the-most-important-invention-of-the-20th-century-.html |title=The transistor: The most important invention of the 20th century? |author=Gaudin, S. |work=Computerworld |publisher=IDG Communication, Inc |date=12 December 2007 |accessdate=28 June 2022}}</ref>, the laboratory is also found everywhere, sometimes obvious (e.g., when you need to have blood drawn for a medical test) and other times not at all obvious (e.g., the U.S. Navy's Arctic Submarine Laboratory<ref name="USNArctic">{{cite web |url=https://www.sublant.usff.navy.mil/ASL/ |title=Arctic Submarine Lab |publisher=United States Navy |accessdate=28 June 2022}}</ref>). 

And these labs are important, positively impacting industry, government, and the public. Take for example the United States' Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, which claimed in 2020 to employ more than 3,400 people and have approximately $144 million total economic impact for the state.<ref name="ArgonneOurImpact">{{cite web |url=https://www.anl.gov/argonne-impacts/illinois |title=Argonne Impacts State by State: Illinois |work=Argonne National Laboratory |publisher=UChicago Argonne, LLC |accessdate=28 June 2022}}</ref> Looking to the past, we find that Bell Telephone Laboratories at its peak employed some 1,200 PhDs and was responsible for the creation of vital technologies such as solid state components, wireless telephony technology, the C programming language, and the Unix operating system (thanks to Bell researchers like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie).<ref name="GertnerTheIdea13">{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OkECDAAAQBAJ |title=The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation |author=Gertner, J. |publisher=Penguin |year=2013 |pages=422 |isbn=9780143122791}}</ref> In fact, laboratories are often at the heart of a company's R&D efforts towards bringing people new products. Vehicle<ref name="VolvoMaterials">{{cite web |url=http://www.volvogroup.com/en-en/about-us/r-d-and-innovations/materials-technology.html |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20170629222307/http://www.volvogroup.com/en-en/about-us/r-d-and-innovations/materials-technology.html |title=Materials Technology |work=Volvo Group |publisher=AB Volvo |archivedate=29 June 2017 |accessdate=28 June 2022}}</ref> and makeup<ref name="LOrealUSAResearch">{{cite web |url=http://www.lorealusa.com/group/discover-l%27or%C3%A9al-usa/l%E2%80%99or%C3%A9al-usa-research-and-innovation |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20181021232022/http://www.lorealusa.com/group/discover-l'or%C3%A9al-usa/l%E2%80%99or%C3%A9al-usa-research-and-innovation |title=L’Oréal USA Research And Innovation |publisher=L’Oréal Group |archivedate=21 October 2018 |accessdate=28 June 2022}}</ref> users alike are affected by manufacturing laboratories that research, design, test, and quality control their products. Clinical labs help keep current and future generations healthy, and [[Forensic science#The forensic laboratory|forensic labs]] help bring justice to the wronged. Of course, [[Reference laboratory|calibration laboratories]] are vital to ensuring the precise measurement and production values of any equipment those other laboratories strongly depend on. 

In a quest to further put the prevalence of laboratories into perspective, we use examples similar to above to describe 20 common industries that find laboratories vital to their activities. But before we can do that, we need to first build a framework for better visualizing and understanding how labs intersect our lives, which we do in the next section.

==Further reading==
* {{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DJKiWjpCgAkC&pg=PA4 |title=Cabinets of Experimental Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Europe |editor=Bennett, J.; Talas, S. |publisher=Brill |year=2013 |pages=296 |isbn=9789004252974}}
* {{cite journal |title=The Laboratory Challenge: Some Revisions of the Standard View of Early Modern Experimentation |journal=Isis |author=Klein, U. |volume=99 |issue=4 |pages=769-782 |year=2008 |doi=10.1086/595771}}
* {{cite web |url=http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/crossroads/knowledge-spaces/henning-schmidgen-laboratory |title=The Laboratory |work=European History Online (EGO) |author=Schmidgen, H. |publisher=Institute of European History |date=08 August 2011}}
* {{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=utc0AQAAMAAJ&pg=200 |chapter=The Evolution of Modern Scientific Laboratories |title=Papers and Addresses by William Henry Welch |author=Welch, William Henry |volume=3 |publisher=The Johns Hopkins Press |year=1920 |pages=200–211}}