Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
could be physically linked in complicated ways via routers, switches, virtual
private networks, login hosts, load balancers, servers, and cache machines.
36. Sanger Centre, “The Farm FAQ.”
37. European Bioinformatics Institute, “Ensembl Release Coordination.”
38. In 2011, Ensembl was accessed by about 3.4 million unique web (IP)
addresses per year (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Information/News/press-releases/
press-release-28112011-directors.html). A quick search of PubMed yields
about 450 articles that refer to Ensembl.
39. Turner, “Video Tip.”
40. In the discussion of databases in chapter 5, I examine how specifi c
organizational structures affect the content of biological knowledge. Here I
am arguing that some sort of organization, some sense of spatial thinking, is
necessary for granting “knowledge” status to pieces of biological data in the
fi rst place.
41. The notion of interconnectedness comes from Tomlinson,
Globalization
.
42. For more on how knowledge travels, see Morgan and Howlett,
How
Well Do Facts Travel?
Chapter Five
1. Bruno Strasser argues that biological databases are an instance of the
“natural history tradition” within modern biology (Strasser, “Collecting and
Experimenting”; Strasser, “GenBank”). The “moral economies” of collect-
ing, exchanging, describing, comparing, and naming natural objects, Strasser
argues, belong more to the “wonder cabinet, the botanical garden, or the
zoological museum” than the laboratory. The biggest problem databases
had to solve, Strasser continues, were the social problems associated with
“collection of data, scientifi c credit, authorship, and the intellectual value of
collections.”
2. Bowker and Star,
Sorting Things Out
.
3. By suggesting that databases work as schemes of classifi cation, I am sug-
gesting their importance as tools for dividing and ordering the world in ways
similar to schemes for classifying and ordering living things, diseases, and races
(see Koerner,
Linnaeus
, and Suárez-Díaz and Anaya-Muñoz, “History, Objec-
tivity,” on the importance of plant and animal classifi cation; Rosenberg and
Golden,
Framing Disease
, on the classifi cation of disease; and Duster, “Race
and Reifi cation,” on race classifi cations).
4. Most of the historical and sociological literature that touches on bio-
logical databases has focused on their role as “communication regimes.” Ste-
phen Hilgartner, in particular, has argued that the genome databases are “novel
tools for scientifi c communication” (Hilgartner, “Biomolecular Databases”).
Although databases do provide effi cient means of distributing and sharing bio-
logical data and have initiated new standards and expectations for data access,
it is not suffi cient to understand biological databases as passive technologies
for storing and redistributing information, akin to scientifi c journals. (On data
access policies, see Hilgartner, “Data Access Policy.”)
