The fieldwork leading up to French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory focused on a multidimensional crisis revolving around a proposal for commercial collaboration between an American biotechnology start-up company and the French laboratory that led the genome sequencing effort in France, the CEPH. As opposed to his earlier book, French Modern, French DNA is not a history of the present but an initial case study in the anthropology of the contemporary. Rabinow accepted the challenge from the Center’s scientific director to be a 'philosophic observer.’ His task was to identify the formation of constellations of value judgments around new forms of scientific knowledge, and to make that process available for further debate and modification, not to adjudicate disputes. The text is in part a meditation on committed ‘disinterestedness:’ “a certain vocational integrity, an asceticism in Weber and Foucault's senses, a certain rigor and patience that could, lead us somewhere beyond what we already believe and know.” This work still emphasizes the observation in “participant-observation” and can be contrasted to latter work at SynBERC in which both poles are put into play.