Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
detached from hard evidence from the lab bench, is pointless at best or
misleading at worst. I am not suggesting that biology will completely
lose contact with bodies and molecules. What this study suggests, how-
ever, is a trend toward the centralization of such “wet” work—at places
such as the Broad Sequencing Center—and a decentralization of “dry”
work. The “wet” work of biology may become increasingly confi ned to
highly ordered and disciplined spaces designed to produce data with
the greatest possible effi ciency. Meanwhile, “dry” biology can be done
anywhere, by anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.
Homo statisticus
Biology 3.0 also brings into focus the ways in which changes in biologi-
cal practice may be tied to social and political changes. In the last forty
years, biology has been transformed from an autonomous academic sci-
ence into a venture that is intimately linked to health care, the phar-
maceutical industry, and the speculative worlds of high capital. These
changes have required exactly the sorts of modalities of work that bio-
informatics has provided: ways of talking and working across disci-
plines, ways of globalizing biological knowledge, and ways of speeding
up production and productivity. In other words, “bioinformatics” and
“Biology 3.0” are ways of characterizing and describing large-scale shifts
in the institutional context of biological work over the last decades.
We are just beginning to see how and where these far-reaching
changes in the way biology is practiced may have consequences for hu-
man health, for our sociality and identity. The bioinformatic imperative
for data gathering has led to several projects intended to vastly increase
the amount of human sequence data. In September 2007,
PLoS Biology
published the complete diploid genome of J. Craig Venter,
37
which was
followed closely by James Watson's genome in 2008.
38
Also launched in
January 2008 was the 1000 Genomes Project, an international collabo-
ration to completely sequence the genomes of several thousand anony-
mous participants in order to build an extensive catalog of human ge-
netic variation.
39
Its aim, like that of its precursor, the HapMap project
(completed in 2007, and which surveyed the genotypes—rather than
the full genomes—of a large number of individuals), is to contribute to
variation studies that link genetic variation to disease.
40
1000 Genomes
has now completed a pilot phase involving 1,092 individuals.
41
Over
the next several years, the project will build a vast library of human
sequence data (all publicly available) for bioinformatic work.
These public efforts are complemented by commercial enterprises in
