Since the US launched its National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2000, the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), an instrument that measures and manipulates atoms, has been portrayed as the "eyes" and "fingers" of a research frontier advocating atomic-level precision as the new paradigm for twenty-first-century manufacturing. The Clinton Administration, which launched this billion-dollar enterprise, probably never imagined that such an iconic instrument, leveraged to legitimate long-term budget support, could be produced from "junk." Pankaj Sekhsaria's Instrumental Lives: An Intimate Biography of an Indian Laboratory captures this fascinating story. The book traces the development of a purely Indian version of the STM at the Department of Physics at the Savitribai Phule University in Pune. Sekhsaria develops an ethnographic study, focusing on the laboratory run by Professor C. V. Dharmadhikari, a pioneering surface scientist who spent his entire career building local STM systems. In setting out how scientists' lab practices and career paths became entwined with the construction, operation, and eventual demise of this locally produced STM system, the book provides an exemplar of India's indigenous innovation as a contrast to the typical image of nanotechnology, which seems only to occur in high-end laboratories and well-controlled experimental settings. Being an STS researcher with training in the operation of STM, reading this lab ethnography was a joy, not just because of the vivid stories that document the intimate relationships between people and instruments, between the researcher and the researched, but also because of the broader issues raised in this slim volume regarding the essence and practice of innovation in the postcolonial context.
