Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
gether into a collective whole—it is the computerized monitoring and
management that integrates a person's work into that of the team. In
other words, it is through the computer that individual labor becomes
“productive.”
What are the consequences of this borrowing from business? What
difference does it make that the Broad is organized more like Toyota
than the Pasteur Institute? First, it has changed the notion of valuable
work in biology. The work accorded value at the Broad Sequencing Cen-
ter is not the highly individualistic, highly innovative work of the tradi-
tional bench scientist. What is valued instead is teamwork, attention to
detail, precision, and effi ciency. Second, work at the Broad is based on
a new accounting of biological work: the lab is funded not according to
how many papers it publishes or how promising its research seems, but
on the basis of dollars per base. The National Human Genome Research
Institute (NHGRI, from which a large proportion of the money comes)
favors the Broad because it can offer its product (sequence) at a cheaper
rate than its competitors.
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This accountability is passed down through
the hierarchy of the organization to the bench worker, who must also be
held to account for his or her own productions.
Third, what constitutes “progress” in advancing biological knowl-
edge has changed: progress can be understood as the accumulation of
more and more sequencing data at an ever-decreasing cost. The immedi-
ate goals of day-to-day work are discoveries that will increase output by
decreasing variability, rather than making fundamental breakthroughs
or shifting work in a qualitatively new direction. Fourth, the culture of
the Broad Sequencing Center suggests a shift in what sorts of people are
doing biological work as well as changes in the distribution of labor.
Whereas before, biology was performed almost exclusively by PhD sci-
entists (and their graduate students and postdocs), biology at the Broad
demands a workforce that is not trained only in biology and whose
skills might be transferable to a range of industries. While these work-
ers are busy with the laboratory/manufacturing work of sequencing, the
PhD biologists are engaged in a distinct set of tasks, often physically
and intellectually removed from the lab bench. Finally, this new kind
of biological lab has become a space of surveillance to an extent previ-
ously unusual in the sciences. Through information, people, objects, and
spaces are constantly monitored; every pipette tip wasted or moment
spent chatting with a colleague leaves a discernible informatic trace.
Everything must be accounted for. Here, biology has become a sort of
informatic Panopticon; Natalie told me that she liked her job because
the 30,000-foot view of the Broad's work provided an appealing sense
