The paper will revisit the history of conceptual change regarding the role of genes in development, by exploring the methodology of analyzing narrative practices in research publications. Historians of biology have analyzed the role of metaphors: “field”, “information”, “program” and other concepts have been followed through merging and diverging discourses on development. Others, who emphasized the role of material practices, have shown how conceptual developments in biology are driven by the differential reproduction of experimental systems in which new entities emerge. Historians routinely use publications reporting experimental results and their interpretation as sources. To trace the historical shifts in question, I will address such texts more explicitly as sites of mediation between experimental practices and conceptual interpretation. For this purpose, it is useful to conceive of such texts as narratives, to highlight their constructed character and their ordering functions. The research narratives of geneticists selected experimental operations and observations and transferred them into the discursive realm, thus linking emerging concepts to epistemic objects. Furthermore, they often linked these experimentally specified concepts to conceptual structures imported from embryology in the interpretation of results. The latter thus function as narrative resources. Finally, their research narratives were reproduced differentially when geneticists reproduced and varied experimental systems. This perspective offers a fresh view on the history of developmental genetics. A series of research narratives that emerged in the context of the differential reproduction of experiments pursued between the 1950s and 1970s, which involved genetic mosaics and implicated genes in developmental processes will be analyzed.
