Bioinformatics is the discipline that grew up in response to this digital 'population explosion.' Its practitioners aim to use the tools of information and communications technology and computer science to store, share, manipulate, and make useful this vast amount of biological data. As the sequencing of genes and proteins continues apace, bioinformatics provides ways to synthesize, organize, and use this proliferation of data - a new 'theoretical biology' for tracking populations and discovering drugs. In examining this discipline, this dissertation will combine multi-sited ethnography (Cambridge, Massachusetts and New Delhi, India) with archival research to reveal how bioinformatics has become a plausible and effective mode of investigating and understanding life. The project will examine the ways in which bioinformatics has become enmeshed with information and communication technology, global electronic and scientific networks, the vision of the Human Genome Project, and the commerce of biotechnology. It will be argued that bioinformatics goes beyond a metaphorical or actual conflation of life and information; its tools and practices represent life as a disembodied, manipulable, one-dimensional string. These strings encode specific concepts of what constitutes life and how humans are related to one another - bioinformatics is not culturally inert.
Intellectual merit: This project will contributing to our understanding of how computing, information and communications technology, and the biotechnology industry, are impacting our understanding of life, and the dynamics of global bioscience. In addition, this project will explore the practices of a hybrid scientific discipline (biology + computer science) - the increasingly prevalent interdisciplinarity in contemporary science has not been given significant attention in science and technology studies.
Broader impact: The project will shed light on the knowledge-making practices of a field of contemporary science with many implications for twenty-first century medicine and society. This critique will reveal what is elided and obscured in a bioinformatic approach to life and suggest ways in which other, equally productive, means of investigating the living world might become plausible.
