Notes - Life Out of Sequence - page 227

being produced”). By analogy with a fantasy role-playing game (called World
of Bioinformatics Quest), pursuers of these careers have different attributes
for coding, statistics, presentation/writing, research focus, and collaboration.
“Getting the right attributes is therefore critical, and playing to your strength
will result in more Papers TM and Grants TM .” Barton, “World of Bioinformatics
Quest.” This post provides a detailed, if amusing, description of the various
sorts of practices in bioinformatics and how biologists perceive the differences
between them.
7. An epitope tag is a region of a folded protein that is recognized by an
antibody. Tagging a protein with an epitope allows it to be recognized by
antibodies, which allow the construction of a simple test for the presence of a
protein.
8. Broad Institute, “Who is Broad?”
9. This observation invites comparison with Shapin's arguments about
seventeenth-century laboratory spaces in which certain technical practices were
hidden from view (Shapin, “Invisible Technician”).
10. Goffman, Presentation of Self , chapter 3.
11. Goffman gives the example of a watch-repair shop in which the watch
is taken into a back room to be worked on: “It is presented to [the customer]
in good working order, an order that incidentally conceals the amount and
kind of work that had to be done, the number of mistakes that were fi rst made
before getting it fi xed, and other details the client would have to know before
being able to judge the reasonableness of the fee that is asked of him.” Goff-
man, Presentation of Self , 117.
12. Goffman, Presentation of Self , 125. He adds that the back region is
often reserved for “technical” standards while the front is for “expressive”
ones (126).
13. For several months while I was working in the MIT biology depart-
ment, and regularly interviewing scientists across the road at 7CC, I remained
completely unaware of the existence of 320 Charles.
14. For more on the design of the Broad Institute, and especially its
“transparency,” see Higginbotham, “Collaborative Venture”; Higginbotham,
“Biomedical Facility”; Silverberg, “The Glass Lab.”
15. Broad Institute, “Philanthropists.”
16. Crohn's disease is a genetic disorder affecting the intestinal system. On
the Broad's work on Crohn's disease, see Rioux et al., “Genome-Wide Associa-
tion Study.”
17. Gieryn, “Two Faces,” 424.
18. Silverberg, “The Glass Lab.”
19. Womack et al., Machine , 12-13.
20. Womack et al., Machine , 57.
21. Womack et al., Machine , 129.
22. Womack et al., Machine , 152.
23. Broad Institute, “Rob Nicol.”
24. Six Sigma is a business management strategy fi rst implemented by Mo-
torola that attempts to quantify and control variation in output by carefully
monitoring and correcting product defects. The name refl ects the aim to imple-