Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Conclusions
One of the key differences that computers have made to science is that
they have enabled a new way of seeing.
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Like the microscope or the
telescope or almost any other scientifi c instrument, the computer can
be understood as a visual aid. The visual realm—pictures of proteins
and sequences—provides a way of mediating between the material and
the virtual.
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In the most obvious sense, computers are unable to work
directly with biological materials—they can only manipulate numerical
or digital distillations of macromolecules or cells. Conversely, numbers
or digital codes do not have inherent meaning—they must be reinter-
preted into the language of biology. Visualizations mediate between
the digital and the bio-logic and thus play a crucial enabling role in
bioinformatics.
The ability of images to have meanings (even if such meanings are
not identical) for both biologists and computer scientists is no doubt
part of the explanation for their ubiquity. Biological ways of knowing
the world and digital ways of knowing the world are brought into dia-
logue, not through common training or common language, but through
the image. Images constitute new ways of making biological knowledge
that draw biological entities into new relationships with one another—
out of sequence—to reveal hidden patterns. Sequences are constituted
not only as ordered, linear text, but also as reordered, multidimensional
grids and maps. Image making is not only about motion and fl uidity,
but also about moving things around in order to identify durable and
robust relationships between objects; images help to stabilize knowl-
edge claims.
The creation of images using computers also constitutes a new mode
of biological practice. One of the features of bioinformatics is its abil-
ity to move biology away from the laboratory bench into a statistical,
mathematical, or even theoretical space that is dominated not by cells
and chromosomes, but by chips and codes. An “experiment” can be run
without even leaving one's desk, or without ever having to touch a cell
or a pipette. One of the ways in which such experiments take place is by
making and viewing images. Much of the work that has addressed the
role of computers in biology has described the computers themselves,
their software, and their histories.
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Less has been said about what bi-
ologists actually
do
when they are doing biology in front of a computer
screen. This chapter has provided some examples: they are browsing
around genomes, they are building and examining heat maps, they are
