Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
ate a biology that remains focused on sequence, but on sequence “out
of sequence”—that is, one that pays less attention to the static, linear
genome and more to the patterns of multiple, dynamic, rearrangeable,
lively interplay of its parts.
Next-generation sequencing may be “bioinformatic” not just be-
cause it produces huge amounts of data, and not just because it brings
material and virtual biology closer together, but also because it helps to
generate just the kinds of new relationships and patterns that we have
seen in bioinformatic software, databases, and visualizations. In par-
ticular, next-generation sequencing reminds us that biology is increas-
ingly driven by the exigencies of data. It is not just that biology is be-
coming information, but rather that biology is coming to depend more
and more on the technologies and information structures that store and
move data.
Biology and the Web
At the beginning of my i eldwork, I was consistently surprised by the
ways in which biologists narrated the history of bioinformatics along-
side histories of the Internet and information technology. An example
appears in fi gure C.1. The fi rst DNA sequence appears alongside the
invention of email, and the development of sequence-matching algo-
rithms (for instance, BLAST) alongside “Sendmail” and HTTP. Why
would biologists, I wondered, think of their past in this way? Further
investigation revealed not only that, from the origins of the ARPANET
to the creation of cgi.pm, technical developments in bioinformatics in-
fl uenced the developing World Wide Web, but also that biology was in
some small part responsible for the Internet's explosive growth in the
decade after about 1993. As access to large amounts of biological data
(particularly sequence data) became a more and more necessary part of
biological practice, biologists demanded that academic campuses have
bigger, better, and faster Internet connections. In an interview in 2001,
Ewan Birney, one of the pioneers of the EMBL database, when asked
about the infl uence of the Internet on genomics, replied, “It's a two-
way street—a lot of the web development was actually fostered by bio-
informatics. . . . The needs of molecular biologists was probably one of
the reasons why many campuses have upgraded their Internet connec-
tivity over the last decade.”
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It is biology that continues to push the limits of the Internet's capa-
bility for data transfer. For instance, GenBank and the EMBL database
share large amounts of data in order to make sure their databases are
