 The “New Experimentalism” counters or complicates a traditional emphasis in philosophy of science on theories by studying what goes on in laboratories, or, more generally, the practical methods of achieving reliable results (see entries on  experiment in biology  &amp;  the structure of scientific theories).  As noted earlier  (section 2),  attention is also warranted to the ways that an area of biology, such as the study of heredity, becomes experimental in the first place. Experiments in biology may lead to the engineering of new phenomena or objects, such as knockout mice (i.e., a line with a specific gene deactivated), but, at the same time, they leave open the question of the significance of what gets de-emphasized through the control of biological material and conditions employed in the experiments. To continue the knockout example: does the effect of a gene knocked out in a highly inbred line of mice extrapolate to its effects in naturally variable populations of mice, let alone other species? In other words, the demonstration of genes in knockout lines that have defined effects could be a textbook case of something represented—the DNA sequence as gene—warranting the status real given the reliable effect of its absence. Yet antirealists could point to what has not yet been observed given the special experimental conditions of Mendelian research and subsequent molecular biology (see entry on  scientific realism).  Such an objection notwithstanding, if there is a method that is productive of results, there will be scientists who apply it even if the results do not address questions that once motivated their line of inquiry (as evident, for example, when, as noted earlier, the study of heredity came to focus on differences not similarity and development). How is any such pragmatism to be viewed?—are experiments in biology like a philosophical pragmatism concerned with truth or one concerned about achieving goals and formulating further goals that can be pursued in practice (see entry on  pragmatism).  Or is it a pragmatism highlighted more in sociology than philosophy of science, in which the researcher or the interpreter of science considers how difficult it is in practice to modify what has been established as knowledge (Latour 1987)? The last sense fits well with this entry’s attention to abstraction in the form of the material practices of control over biological materials and conditions advanced in modern experimental biology and agricultural breeding. It should be noted, however, that this form of abstraction centers on objects that are concrete, not therefore conforming to the contrast abstract versus concrete (see entry on  abstract objects).  