Life Out of Sequence : A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics

Thirty years ago, the most likely place to find a biologist was standing at a laboratory bench, peering down a microscope, surrounded by flasks of chemicals and petri dishes full of bacteria. Today, you are just as likely to find him or her in a room that looks more like an office, poring over lines of code on computer screens. The use of computers in biology has radically transformed who biologists are, what they do, and how they understand life. In Life Out of Sequence, Hallam Stevens looks inside this new landscape of digital scientific work. Stevens chronicles the emergence of bioinformatics—the mode of working across and between biology, computing, mathematics, and statistics—from the 1960s to the present, seeking to understand how knowledge about life is made in and through virtual spaces. He shows how scientific data moves from living organisms into DNA sequencing machines, through software, and into databases, images, and scientific publications. What he reveals is a biology very different from the one of predigital days: a biology that includes not only biologists but also highly interdisciplinary teams of managers and workers; a biology that is more centered on DNA sequencing, but one that understands sequence in terms of dynamic cascades and highly interconnected networks. Life Out of Sequence thus offers the computational biology community welcome context for their own work while also giving the public a frontline perspective of what is going on in this rapidly changing field. Thirty years ago, the most likely place to find a biologist was standing at a laboratory bench, peering down a microscope, surrounded by flasks of chemicals and petri dishes full of bacteria. Today, you are just as likely to find him or her in a room that looks more like an office, poring over lines of code on computer screens. The use of computers in biology has radically transformed who biologists are, what they do, and how they understand life. In __Life Out of Sequence__, Hallam Stevens looks inside this new landscape of digital scientific work.Stevens chronicles the emergence of bioinformatics—the mode of working across and between biology, computing, mathematics, and statistics—from the 1960s to the present, seeking to understand how knowledge about life is made in and through virtual spaces. He shows how scientific data moves from living organisms into DNA sequencing machines, through software, and into databases, images, and scientific publications. What he reveals is a biology very different from the one of predigital days: a biology that includes not only biologists but also highly interdisciplinary teams of managers and workers; a biology that is more centered on DNA sequencing, but one that understands sequence in terms of dynamic cascades and highly interconnected networks. __Life Out of Sequence__ thus offers the computational biology community welcome context for their own work while also giving the public a frontline perspective of what is going on in this rapidly changing field. During the last thirty years, computers have come to play an increasingly important role in biological work. Especially in the new ‘omic’ disciplines, biologists are as likely to be found in front of a computer screen as they are working at a laboratory bench. Life out of sequence is an account of these transformations: beginning in the 1960s and continuing to the present, it draws on archival research, participant observation in laboratories, and interviews to show how and why the life sciences have been automated, computerized, and digitized. The advent of bioinformatics meant not merely using computers to solve the same old problems. Rather, computers entailed fundamental shifts in training, funding, career paths, work practices, and knowledge production. Computers were originally designed as tools for simulation and data management with applications to military and physics problems. Bringing them from physics into biology meant importing specific modes of practice and specific modes of knowing into biology. This practice and knowledge is centered on data. The prominence of genomics suggests the degree to which twenty-first biology relies on data management, rapid data processing, industrial production, and the management of high-throughput workflows. Biology has become about generating, managing, and analyzing large volumes of biological data Thirty years ago, the most likely place to find a biologist was standing at a laboratory bench, peering down a microscope, surrounded by flasks of chemicals and petri dishes full of bacteria. Today, you are just as likely to find him or her in a room that looks more like an office, poring over lines of code on computer screens. The use of computers in biology has radically transformed who biologists are, what they do, and how they understand life. In this book, Hallam Stevens looks inside this new landscape of digital scientific work Looks inside this landscape of digital scientific work. This title chronicles the emergence of bioinformatics - the mode of working across and between biology, computing, mathematics, and statistics - from the 1960s to the present, seeking to understand how knowledge about life is made in and through virtual spaces. Building computers -- Making knowledge -- Organizing space -- Following data -- Ordering objects -- Seeing genomes -- Conclusion: the end of bioinformatics