Ordering Objects - Life Out of Sequence - page 135

The compilation of the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure
scarcely fi ts into this pattern. 27
Dayhoff's Atlas was considered by some to be nothing more than a
mere aggregation of others' work.
No doubt some of Dayhoff's problems stemmed from researchers'
reluctance to share unpublished data. At a deeper level, though, this
reluctance stemmed from a misunderstanding of Dayhoff's project. As
Edsall's attitude suggests, Dayhoff's work was understood as the un-
original work of collection and compilation, rather than as an attempt
to systematize biological knowledge. Indeed, Dayhoff complained about
the “great hostility of journal reviewers” when she tried to present her
work as a theoretical contribution to biology. 28 No doubt this had to do
with the generally marginal status of theory within biology, and with the
prevalent notion that any such theory should look like a mathematical
theory in physics, rather than a system of categorization or a database.
Ultimately, after struggling to maintain funding for her Atlas , in 1981,
Dayhoff and the NBRF failed to win the contract from the NIH to build
and maintain a national sequence database (as described in chapter 1,
the contract was awarded to Walter Goad at Los Alamos). This failure
was a harsh blow for Dayhoff, who had struggled for over a decade
to gain support and recognition for her work. The lack of adequate
funding had forced the NBRF to charge research biologists a fee for
the Atlas . This, in turn, embittered the biological community, who saw
the NBRF as taking their own work (for free) and selling it for a profi t.
The NIH's decision was based on the conclusion that Dayhoff did
not have the technical expertise to build and run a modern database. 29
It was Dayhoff, however, who had pioneered the idea of organizing
biological data into computerized databases. Although GenBank, as we
shall see in the next section, placed a far greater emphasis on using
electronic means to collect and communicate data, the notion of using a
structured digital space to order biological knowledge and create mod-
els of the biological world was Dayhoff's.
Dayhoff created a model for studying evolution. The use of sequence
data in conjunction with the PAM matrices and mathematics developed
by Dayhoff and her collaborators made it possible to apply evolution-
ary theory to make specifi c predictions about the relatedness of species
and hence about the history of life. In other words, it was a way of
making biological knowledge—without the laboratory or the fi eld—
through the structuring and ordering of data.