Notes - Life Out of Sequence - page 217

sequences. These problems have become by far the most visible applications
of computers in biology. But computers were, and are, used for a range of
other things (numerical simulations of population dynamics, simulation and
prediction of protein folding, visualization of molecules, experimental design,
simulation of evolution, simulation of the brain, instrument control, etc.). This
topic is not a history of all the ways in which computers have been used in
biology. Rather, its purpose is to understand why a certain set of problems and
practices came to be picked out and to dominate our understanding of life.
23. Approaches that focus on “dematerialization” in various forms include
Mackenzie, “Bringing Sequences to Life”; Pottage, “Too Much Ownership”;
Waldby, Visible Human Project ; and Parry, Trading the Genome . Others
(Lenoir, “Science and the Academy,” and Thacker, Biomedia ) describe bioinfor-
matics as a shift in the “media” of biological work.
24. It is important to distinguish this argument from arguments about
gene-centrism that have been put forward by numerous scholars (notably
including Keller, Century of the Gene , and Nelkin and Lindee, The DNA Mys-
tique ). Those arguments make the case that molecular biology has been domi-
nated by a near-dogmatic obsession with genes and other associated regulatory
elements rather than epigenetic or cytoplasmic aspects of biology; DNA acts as
a kind of “genetic program” or “master molecule” that controls all aspects of
an organism's behavior. I agree with these assessments. However, my claim is
slightly different in that it does not involve the claim that it is genes that are in
control; rather, the sequence as a whole is the object of analysis. The sequence
could be RNA, DNA, or protein, acting alone or in combination, with no
molecule necessarily at the top of the hierarchy. All sequences, not just genes or
DNA, contain meaning and importance for biological function that might be
understood by performing statistical analyses.
Chapter One
1. November, Biomedical Computing , 7.
2. November, Biomedical Computing , 8.
3. November argues that earlier efforts in biomedical computing laid the
groundwork for the large-scale computerization of biology during and after
the 1980s: “Today's life scientists are only able to take advantage of comput-
ers because they have access to tools and methods developed during a costly,
ambitious, and largely forgotten attempt to computerize biology and medi-
cine undertaken by the NIH in the late 1950s and early 1960s” (November,
Biomedical Computing , 8). But as November goes on to say, using these new
tools and methods involved fi nding ways of making biology more quantitative
and excluding nondigital aspects of biology. That is, biologists were developing
data-oriented forms of biological work. I would add only that, until the advent
of sequence, this data-oriented biology was practiced by only a small minority
of biologists.
4. Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer ; Ceruzzi, Reckoners ; Ceruzzi,
History of Modern Computing ; Edwards, Closed World .
5. Edwards, Closed World , 43.