I read this courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic. It’s out in September.

I have said this before and I say it again: I love the Object Lesson series. Sometimes the Object in question seems relatively simple – a skateboard! – but sometimes it’s a bit more abstract: like The Laboratory. (One of those words where you can hear an Aussie / Brit vs US accent difference.)

As is so often the case, York uses her own experience – of sort of working in a lab, and sort of not; being science-adjacent – to illuminate all sorts of interesting aspects of the lab, and along the way varying reactions to science as a discipline. She looks at labs in science fiction – in film, in particular, since that informs so much of what non-scientists think of as “a lab” (ask me how I feel about the lab in Fringe).

I enjoyed the expansive view of “the lab” that York brought in this book, and how passionate she clearly is about communicating the realities of scientific research to a broad audience – that it’s piecemeal, that it involves many, many contributors, that it’s usually safe! She has a good section on the development of scientific rigour, and laws around things like animal experimentation – and, of course, given it’s Now, touches on some of the issues around Covid and its genesis.

This is a really great intro to the idea of “the lab” for the non-scientist, but I suspect it might also be a nice thought-provoker for those who work in science to think about how the rest of the world views their work, and their world.