Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
of industrial corn than the traditional understandings of field or laboratory science. This
is in some ways the
ambition
of contemporary “big science” investments: a more complex,
dynamic, and commensurable world in which data really
can
flow freely like corn,
leaving new systems, processes, and discoveries in their wake. To do this, we must
domesticate data: establishing rituals and routines of collection, creating safe pathways
for samples to travel, and setting metadata standards to render them comprehensible
by others. And in doing so, data increasingly domesticate us.
Flies Dissatisfied with Information System
As historian of science Robert Kohler describes, the fruit fly
Drosophila
(and its most
common lab species, D. Melanogaster) was not born as a laboratory animal per se.
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Already “cosmopolitan,” it has cohabited with us in cities for millennia; it is the fruit fly
most likely to appear if you were to put a banana out on your window sill and then
wait for the larvae to mature. Breeding ferociously in autumn, it is most plentiful at
the beginning of the academic year—just in time for a fresh crop of undergraduate,
graduate, and faculty experiments. As raw material for students' projects, it is readily
available, cheap, easily maintained, and quickly restocked.Thus, there was always already
an elective affinity between the labs of urban bioscience and what would become one
of its most common objects. Melanogaster helped create a technology of research on
which fly researchers came to depend for their professional livelihood. Once inside the
lab, the fruit fly took on a new life of its own and came to drive research at paces never
before seen in genetics—eventually demanding novel data management and classifica-
tion strategies.
Scientists first began to use the fruit fly for genetic research in 1901 at Harvard and
since then it has become a dominant species in this new ecosystem: the lab. While
capable of sleepily surviving the outdoor winter, Drosophila took to the warmth and
security of labs with perennial reproduction. Defining an entirely new criterion of
fitness, its productivity in this new ecological niche pushed down the traditional species
inhabiting the genetic lab: the rat and mouse, the pea and primrose.
One of the foremost early Drosophila scientists, Thomas Morgan, writing of the
relentless reproductive productivity of Melanogaster, enthused: “It is wonderful mate-
rial. They breed all the year round and give a new generation every sixteen days.” As
time passed, however, he became “overwhelmed with work”: “who could have foreseen
such a deluge. With various help I have passed one acute stage only I fear to pass on to
another.” Only months later Morgan declared himself, none too happily, to be “head
