Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
spaces of biological work and how biological knowledge is authorized
through its movement between spaces. The last part of the chapter ex-
amines the production of data in more detail. It shows that production
sequencing requires the kinds of effi cient and accountable work that
computers enable.
In describing Robert Boyle's “House of Experiment,” Steven Shapin
has shown how the physical spaces (and the fl ow of people, materials,
and data within them) crucially structured the knowledge that was pro-
duced: “The siting of knowledge-making practices contributed toward a
practical solution of epistemological problems.”
4
The organization and
policing of space, particularly the division into private and public, was
central to the validation and authorization of knowledge claims. De-
spite the manifest differences between seventeenth-century houses and
modern laboratories, something similar can be said about bioinformat-
ics: the ways in which labs are organized and the ways in which data
fl ow within them contribute to the solution of the practical epistemo-
logical problems posed by computer scientists, biologists, and database
managers having to work together. The biological knowledge, the forms
of labor, and the spaces of bioinformatics reproduce one another. The
kinds of epistemic changes described in chapter 2 require the simultane-
ous transformations in work and space that are detailed here.
Divisions of Labor: Producers and Consumers
Attention to the dynamics of contemporary biology shows that there
are two distinct kinds of work being carried on. First, there are individu-
als working to transform samples into data; second, other individuals
analyze these data and make them into biological knowledge. These
linked processes can be described as the production and consumption
of data, and it is through a cycle of production and consumption that
bioinformatic knowledge is generated. Both production and consump-
tion require both biological and computational expertise. By marking
consumption of data as high-value work, while considering data pro-
duction to have lower value, biologists are able to police the kinds of
knowledge that are considered valuable and acceptable in bioinformat-
ics. This policing can be understood as a form of continued resistance
to (and discomfort with) computational and data-driven approaches;
data-driven biology has required biologists to defend their skills and
expertise within a landscape of new problem-solving approaches. By la-
beling production as less “scientifi c” or “biological,” biologists are able
to maintain control of biological work.
