Scientific research is bound to particular locations, times and practices. So what happens when its usual arsenal of instruments, books and technical equipment is disbanded? Friedrich Cain takes the case of Polish researchers working undercover during the German occupation of 1939-1945 to answer this question. Picking up on the socioscientific gaze that focussed itself on war-time conditions for Warsaw's inhabitants and society, he analyses the experimental systems of typhus fever research in Lemberg and a secret study on hunger in the Warsaw Ghetto, before describing attempts to organise research in physics. Thus revealed by the author is how practices and processes in the 'laboratory situation of war' were either replaced, reconfigured or energised, as well as the extent to which ideas of scientific neutrality were politicized.