Abstract
Accounts of ‘biocapital’ abound in studies of the contemporary biosciences. However, these have tended to pay attention to the use and consumption of biological knowledge rather than the means and conditions of the production of data. This article draws on an ethnographic account of a high-throughput genomics laboratory (the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA) to show how the means through which biological data is produced exerts a determinative effect on the kind of knowledge that is generated by the laboratory. High-speed, high-volume, high-efficiency production of data requires the high-throughput consumption of data by statistical and computational techniques. These techniques, in turn, generate general, broad-scale accounts of biological systems, rather than particular knowledge about individual genes or biological components. This cycle of production and consumption is described as ‘bioinformatics’ in order to indicate the centrality of computers and computing to the knowledge production process in contemporary biology.
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Notes
For a review see Helmreich, 2008.
In this regard one might also point to the work of Bronwyn Parry, who argues that ‘new modes of transaction’ enable information to be ‘ “rendered” in new, more transmissible forms’ (Parry, 2004, p. xviii).
Where I refer to individuals by first name only, their names have been changed.
Six Sigma is a business management strategy first implemented by Motorola that attempts to quantify and control variation in output by carefully monitoring and correcting product defects. The name reflects the aim to implement processes that produce products that are defective only 0.00034 per cent of the time, that is, in which defects are normally distributed, but occur only as rarely as events six standard deviations from the mean (Six Sigma events) (Stamatis, 2004).
Several other Sloan students also applied lean principles and other management techniques to aspects of the Broad Institute : Scott Rosenberg (2003) analyzed the computer finishing process and Kazunori Maruyama (2005) studied the electrophoretic sequencing process itself.
Disproportionate with respect to the Broad Institute as a whole, and with respect to the profession of ‘biologists’ as a whole. The Broad Institute is particularly proud of its large community of Tibetans, most of whom work at the sequencing center; this occasioned a visit by the Dalai Lama to the Broad Sequencing Center in 2003, during his visit to MIT. The pipette used by His Holiness is still mounted on the wall of the sequencing center together with his portrait.
For more on the design of the Broad Institute's Institute, and especially its ‘transparency’ see Higginbotham, 2006 and Silverberg, 2007.
In other words, the sequence itself was not ‘published’. This raises the dilemma that it would be possible for a third party to download and analyze the chimpanzee data and publish this analysis, thereby scooping the sequencing lab. However, a set of informal rules – agreed to at Fort Lauderdale in 2003 – allow the sequencing lab first rights to publish on the organism that they sequence. In theory, a journal would not accept a paper from another group.
13,454 1:1 human-chimpanzee orthologs were found. The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, 2005.
The chimpanzee paper is fairly typical of the kind of large-scale work that the Broad Institute undertakes. Their website lists active areas of research as: ‘deciphering all the information encoded in the human genome; understanding human genetic variation and its role in disease; compiling a complete molecular description of human cancers …’. As well as many genome projects, work has included attempts to completely characterize human genetic variation (HapMap, 1000 Genomes), work to completely characterize cancer and its genetics, and work to create an RNAi library which covers every known human gene.
For example: a bioinformatic project to understand mRNA alternative splicing aims to discover the splicing ‘code’ – the sequence patterns that influence or determine how the mRNA gets sliced. The approaches (based largely on sequence data) do not attempt to understand the splicing mechanisms (the spliceosome complex), but rather analyze a large volume of alternative splicing sequence data to find common patterns.
See the latest Request for Applications for NHGRI grants (National Human Genome Research Institute, 2006).
The author notes the irony here in the fact that, in 2009, Toyota came under serious scrutiny for the failure of their processes to produce consistent and reliable products.
On the history of computers in business see also Edwards, 2001.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Peter Galison, Stefan Helmreich, the STS Circle at the Kennedy School of Government, and the Modern Science Working Group in the Department of History of Science at Harvard for reading early drafts of this article. This work was supported in part by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (#7745) and a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (#0724699).
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Stevens, H. On the means of bio-production: Bioinformatics and how to make knowledge in a high-throughput genomics laboratory. BioSocieties 6, 217–242 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2010.38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2010.38