Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The consequence of this obsession with speed and quantity is that bi-
ologists are asking different kinds of questions. In the Burge lab, the spe-
cifi c nucleotide, the specifi c gene, the specifi c genome, even the specifi c
disease, move into the background. It is the
general
problems that are
at issue: How do all genes work? What are the overall rules for how ge-
nomes or diseases behave? Many informants remarked to me that they
perceived this as a major break with other kinds of biology that deal
with single proteins, single genes, and single species, which require years
of work at the bench to determine the particularities and peculiarities of
a locally defi ned object. I asked one graduate student in biology why he
found his work on gene regulation interesting. He replied,
I think that it's an interesting problem because you can look
at global changes; you can look at every gene in a cell at once.
Whereas, with a lot of other kinds of biology you have to break
things down into manageable problems, you can't look at things
on a whole system level, you can't look at the biological pro-
cesses all together because it's just not possible with the tools
that we have. . . . So, because of having all these tools and all this
data, you're able to look at the big picture.
But he was also quick to admit that the questions were also driven by
the availability of large data sets and the computational power to ana-
lyze them:
Student:
It's kinda circular: part of the reason why I think it's
interesting is because it's a good problem for me to solve . . .
it's becoming feasible to answer the question . . .
HS:
Because there's so much data?
Student:
Yeah, because of the methods that are available . . .
full genome sequencing, microarrays, the new faster sequencing
methods . . .
The kind of biology I am describing here, then, is driven by quantity;
it relies and depends on a constantly increasing stream of data. Data
drive biology toward general, rather than local and specifi c, problems,
and for that reason some have identifi ed this kind of biology as “theo-
retical.”
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However, this reorientation is less a result of a shift toward
theory than a result of the culture of quantity that has precipitated new
kinds of questions. It was not directly
caused
by sequencing or by micro-
array or other technologies. Rather, the technology and the culture are
