The relationship between science and technology is one of the most controversial problems confronting historians and philosophers interested in technology and its history. As John Staudenmaier has pointed out, they have argued ceaselessly over competing interpretations of the relationship.' Some of them-notably, the philosopher Mario Bunge-have maintained that successful technological practice depends on the systematic application of scientific knowledge.2 Others take the opposite position. They have expanded Donald Cardwell's thesis to argue that the growth of science owes a great deal to technological practice because it has often disclosed new areas for scientific inquiry and because technological artifacts have provided equally often the techniques necessary for exploring these new areas.' In more recent years an increasing number of historians, dissatisfied with these first two positions, have taken up Edwin Layton's more radical one that science and technology are separate and distinct bodies of knowledge and practices.4 They argue that, even though scientific and technological discourses have focused on a common object-the natural world-the aims of each are so different that accounts of the same object will be radically different. These historians of technology claim therefore that neither science nor technology DR PALLADINO is a research fellow of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester. He wishes to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (grant WB 07250007) and the Wellcome Trust for supporting the research for this article. Thanks also to Deborah Fitzgerald, Jonathan Harwood, Barbara Kimmelman, and Robert Olby for their helpful criticism of earlier drafts. 'John M. Staudenmaier, Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cam
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Paolo Palladino (1993) studied this question.