Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
kinds of problems that were considered relevant to biology. In other
words, biology adapted itself to the computer, not the computer to
biology.
Ultimately, biologists came to use computers because they came to
trust these new ways of knowing and doing. This reorientation was
never obvious: in the 1970s, it was not clear how computers could be
successfully applied to molecular biology, and in the 1980s, Ostell and
a handful of others struggled to earn legitimacy for computational tech-
niques. Only in the 1990s did bioinformatics begin to crystallize around
a distinct set of knowledge and practices. The gathering of sequence
data—especially in the HGP—had much to do with this shift. Sequences
were highly “computable” objects—their one-dimensionality and their
pattern of symbols meant that they were susceptible to storage, manage-
ment, and analysis with the sorts of statistical and numerical tools that
computers provided. The computability of sequences made the HGP
thinkable and possible; the proliferation of sequence data that emerged
from the project necessitated a computerization that solidifi ed the new
bioinformatic ways of doing and knowing in biology.
I am not arguing here for a kind of technological determinism—it
was not the computers themselves that brought new practices and modes
of working into biology. Rather, it was individuals like Goad, who came
from physics into biology, who imported with them the specifi c ways
of using their computational tools. The computer engendered specifi c
patterns of use and ways of generating knowledge that were brought
into biology from physics via the computer. Chapter 2 will character-
ize these new forms of knowledge making in contemporary biology in
more detail, showing how they have led to radically different modes of
scientifi c inquiry.
