Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
informatics—from the mid-1980s onward—could be described as Biol-
ogy 2.0. Biological objects could be represented and manipulated in
the computer and circulated in digital spaces. Biology 2.0 entails all the
kinds of changes and rearrangements of biological practice and biologi-
cal knowledge that have been described in these chapters. But the anal-
ogy predicts a further shift—to Biology 3.0. We can already perceive
the outlines of what this biology might look like. First, it draws on
the tools of Web 3.0, particularly the Semantic Web, to create a hyper-
data-driven biology. Not only will massive amounts of biological data
be available online (this is already true), but these data may soon be
semantically connected in such a way that discoveries about biological
function can readily fall out of the data. But Biology 3.0 also constitutes
an erasure of the boundary between the biological and the informatic:
biological objects and their informatic representations will become ap-
parently interchangeable. Data will be rich and reliable enough that
doing a digital experiment by manipulating data will be considered the
same thing as doing an experiment with cells and molecules.
Biology 3.0, like Web 3.0, is a return to a sensual, predigital biology
because it refuses to recognize any difference between the biological and
the digital, between “wet” and “informatic” biologies. The biological
and the digital will become a single entity centered on the problems
of organizing and sharing data. One might think of Biology 3.0 as an
autopoietic machine, generating itself from a feedback loop between
biology and information: the more deeply biology is conceived of as in-
formation, the more deeply it becomes a problem of data management,
the more productive such an informatic conception becomes, and the
more the notion of information is allowed to permeate the biological.
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Biology 3.0 predicts the culmination of the process in which the biologi-
cal and the informatic have become a single practice.
In other words, bioinformatics may disappear. The practice of using
computers to generate or run simulations in physics is not designated
separately from the rest of physics—there is no “phys-informatics.”
Such could be the case for bioinformatics—its practices seem likely to
become so ubiquitous that it will be absorbed into biology itself. More
precisely, what the notion of Biology 3.0 suggests is that the practices
and knowledge associated with bioinformatics may gradually subsume
those of the rest of biology. This process will not necessarily be a smooth
one. As we have seen, bioinformatics has its opponents, particularly in
those who believe that biology must proceed by asking and answering
specifi c questions, by fi lling in the details of how organisms work, gene
by gene, protein by protein. Others argue that computational work,
