Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
nisms, “buffers” for high-speed transfers, magnetic tape storage, and
records of variable length. Such features later became commonplace in
all digital computers. As James Cortada has argued, “a quick look at
how computers were used suggests that the history of the digital com-
puter is every bit as much a business story as it is a tale of technological
evolution.”
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In the 1950s and 1960s, the computer was developed as
a tool for exercising close control over a corporation and making busi-
ness more effi cient. This preoccupation was refl ected in its design.
This history has conditioned the role that computers have come to
play in biology—that is, as a tool for speed and effi ciency. For example,
attempting to search biological databases by hand and eye was possible
in principle, but impossible in practice; computer techniques brought
speed, effi ciency, and accuracy to the process. As such, the principles
and practices of bioinformatics were always and already “industrial” in
an important sense: they were attempts to streamline information fl ow
and knowledge production in biology. Computers are tools of business,
and they demand and enforce the kinds of practices that have trans-
formed biological work over the last two decades, reorienting it toward
speed, volume, productivity, accounting, and effi ciency. As this chapter
has shown, however, it is not only the samples and sequences, but also
the laboratory itself and its workers, that are managed and accounted
as data. The computer brings changes that are at once social, technical,
spatial, and epistemic. Bioinformatics entails reorganizations of space
and people in tandem with reorganizations of practice and knowledge.
These fi ndings obviously rest heavily on observations of the Broad
Institute, but similar patterns can be discerned elsewhere. The Sanger
Institute (Hinxton, UK), the J. Craig Venter Institute (Rockville, MD),
the Genome Institute at Washington University (St. Louis, MO), the
Joint Genome Institute (Walnut Creek, CA), and the Beijing Genomics
Institute (Shenzhen, China) all have large-scale production sequencing
facilities.
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The aim of each is to produce high-volume and high-quality
product at low cost.
Rather than a biology oriented around individual investigators and
intradisciplinary work, bioinformatics is a biology performed by large,
multidisciplinary teams, oriented toward effi ciency rather then repro-
ducibility, measured by accounting and QC rather than by peer review,
and ordered by information systems. Toyota's concept of “lean produc-
tion,” as deployed at the Broad Institute, suggests a label for the ways
in which the making of “biovalue” depends on new forms of practice
as well as new regimes of circulation. A “lean biology”—a biology
stripped back to its essentials, reduced to its elements (in particular,
