Bruno J. Strasser

The Experimenter's Museum: GenBank, Natural History, and the Moral Economies of Biomedicine

Today, the production of knowledge in the experimental life sciences relies crucially on the use of biological data collections, such as DNA sequence databases. These collections, in both their creation and their current use, are embedded in the experimentalist tradition. At the same time, however, they exemplify the natural historical tradition, based on collecting and comparing natural facts. This essay focuses on the issues attending the establishment in 1982 of GenBank, the largest and most frequently accessed collection of experimental knowledge in the world. The debates leading to its creation—about the collection and distribution of data, the attribution of credit and authorship, and the proprietary nature of knowledge—illuminate the different moral economies at work in the life sciences in the late twentieth century. They offer perspective on the recent rise of public access publishing and data sharing in science. More broadly, this essay challenges the big picture according to which the rise of experimentalism led to the decline of natural history in the twentieth century. It argues that both traditions have been articulated into a new way of producing knowledge that has become a key practice in science at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

GenBank--Natural History in the 21st Century?

Since its foundation, the nucleic acid sequence database GenBank has merged the values of natural history with those of the experimental sciences.

Collecting, Comparing, and Computing Sequences: The Making of Margaret O. Dayhoff’s Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure, 1954–1965

Collecting, comparing, and computing molecular sequences are among the most prevalent practices in contemporary biological research. They represent a specific way of producing knowledge. This paper explores the historical development of these practices, focusing on the work of Margaret O. Dayhoff, Richard V. Eck, and Robert S. Ledley, who produced the first computer-based collection of protein sequences, published in book format in 1965 as the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure. While these practices are generally associated with the rise of molecular evolution in the 1960s, this paper shows that they grew out of research agendas from the previous decade, including the biochemical investigation of the relations between the structures and function of proteins and the theoretical attempt to decipher the genetic code. It also shows how computers became essential for the handling and analysis of sequence data. Finally, this paper reflects on the relationships between experimenting and collecting as two distinct “ways of knowing” that were essential for the transformation of the life sciences in the twentieth century.

Data-driven sciences: From wonder cabinets to electronic databases.

Even by the journal’s own standards, this was a wild claim. In July 2008, Wired magazine announced on its cover nothing less than ‘‘The End of Science’’. It explained that ‘‘The quest for knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data’’. Such claims about the emergence of a new ‘‘data-driven’’ science in response to a ‘‘data deluge’’ have now become common, from the pages of The Economist to those of Nature. Proponents of ‘‘data-driven’’ and ‘‘hypothesis-driven’’ science argue over the best methods to turn massive amounts of data into knowledge. Instead of jumping into the fray, I would like to historicize some of the questions and problems raised by data-driven science, taking as a point of departure the three rich papers by Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Muller-Wille on Linnaeus’ information processing strategies, Sabina Leonelli and Rachel Ankeny on model organisms databases, and Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio on microarray data in clinical research. That a historical approach is warranted is made clear by the remark of the great book historian Robert Darnton that ‘‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way’’ (Darnton, 2000, p. 1). In particular, perceptions of an ‘‘information overload’’ (or a ‘‘data deluge’’) have emerged repeatedly from the Renaissance though the early modern and modern periods and each time specific technologies were invented to deal with the perceived overload (Ogilvie, 2003; Rosenberg, 2003). This commentary will explore the similarities and differences between past and present data-driven life sciences, from early modern natural history to current post-genomics. Renaissance naturalists were no less inundated with new information than our contemporaries. The expansion of travel, epitomized by the discovery of the New World, exposed European naturalists to new facts that did not fit into the systems of knowledge inherited from the Greeks and Romans. This prompted those interested in understanding the natural world to devise newmethods for managing this data, such as note-taking strategies, and new systems of classification (Blair, 2010; Ogilvie, 2006). Ironically, as Charmantier and Muller-Wille point out, these methods and systems, which were meant to tame the information overload, made it possible to accumulate even more data. But accumulation was usually only a mean to an end. These early naturalists established collections, which included specimens, drawings, and texts, so that they could compare these items systematically and draw from the comparisons conclusions about the natural world. In general, they were not testing specific hypotheses, but trying to bring order to the bewildering diversity of natural forms by examining large amounts of collected ‘‘data’’. This tradition continues to be central in natural history to the present day. As George Gaylord Simpson, the leading American paleontologist of the twentieth century,made clear in 1961, natural history, and taxonomy in particular, was the ‘‘science that is most explicitly and exclusively devoted to the ordering of complex data’’ (Simpson, 1961, p. 5). What is striking about Simpson’s definition is not only that he chose the ‘‘ordering of complex data’’ as the most essential element of natural history, but also how similar his definition is to current characterizations of the supposedly unprecedented data-driven sciences. This should come as no surprise since, for several centuries, the natural historical sciences have fundamentally been data-driven sciences. But was natural history driven by data alone? Most likely not, because natural history has never been free of ontological assumptions. For example most naturalists assume the existence of natural groups. As Charmantier and Muller-Wille show, Linnaeus who struggled with a data deluge of his own creation and devised numerous note-taking methods to deal with it, could only do so because he began with a hypothesis about the genus categories he used to organize his data. In other words, Linnaeus may have been driven by his data, but his approach was not exclusively datadriven. This conclusion, however, is insufficient to distinguish early modern approaches to data with contemporary ones. Indeed, as Keating and Cambrosio show in their paper, modern day biostatisticians analyzing cancer microarray data were equally driven by various hypotheses. For example, the determination of the sample size needed to produce statistically significant results required researchers to make an hypothesis about the number of classes that the data might reveal. In other words, they too were guided by

Collecting Nature: Practices, Styles, and Narratives

The standard narrative in the history of the life sciences focuses on the rise of experimentalism since the late nineteenth century and the concomitant decline of natural history. Here, I propose to reexamine this story by concentrating on a specific set of material and cognitive practices centered on collections. I show that these have been central for the production of knowledge not only in natural history, from the Renaissance to the present, but also in the experimental sciences. Reframing the history of the life sciences in this way makes historical continuities visible and raises new possibilities to contextualize recent developments in science, such as the proliferation of databases and their growing use.

Institutionalizing molecular biology in post-war Europe: a comparative study

The intellectual origins of molecular biology are usually traced back to the 1930s. By contrast, molecular biology acquired a social reality only around 1960. To understand how it came to designate a community of researchers and a professional identity, I examine the creation of the first institutes of molecular biology, which took place around 1960, in four European countries: Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland. This paper shows how the creation of these institutes was linked to the results of post-war economic reconstruction. Then, it compares how the promoters of these different institutional projects delimited the goals of their discipline, reflected on its history, and suggested how research should be organised. I show how they carefully positioned their new discipline within the emerging national science policy discourse of the 1950s, and aligned it with the current vision of scientific modernity. In particular, I discuss how they articulated the meaning of molecular biology with respect to five common themes: the role of physics in the atomic age, the relations between fundamental research and medical applications, the ‘Americanisation’ of scientific research, the value of science in the reconstruction of national identities, and the drive towards interdisciplinary research. This paper thus demonstrates that beyond the local and national accounts there is a European history of molecular biology.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Coproduction of Neutral Science and Neutral State in Cold War Europe: Switzerland and International Scientific Cooperation, 1951–69

Neither science nor state has ever been transcendentally “neutral,” but they have sometimes been made neutral, together, as this paper shows in the context of cold war Europe. The paper explores how the Swiss government tried to “depoliticize” and “demilitarize” new international research institutions in the fields of high‐energy physics (CERN), space research (ESRO and ELDO), and molecular biology (EMBL) in order to make science neutral. Conversely, this paper investigates how participation in “neutralized” scientific institutions supported Switzerland’s neutrality policy and strengthened this essential element of its national identity. It thus addresses symmetrically the coproduction of neutral science and neutral state.

The transformation of the biological sciences in post-war Europe

The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) will celebrate its 40th birthday next year. This seems like a good opportunity to take a closer look at how EMBO came into being in 1964, and at the driving forces that established this first European organization to represent molecular biology. Investigating the origins of EMBO also allows us to explore the history of molecular biology in Europe and how it changed from a marginal specialty into a well‐established practice in most fields of experimental biomedicine. > When EMBO was informally created in Ravello, it was just a ‘club’ of life scientists who wanted to promote molecular biology research in Europe Like many other institutions, EMBO has its official history, and the canonical version was laid down in a sample copy of The EMBO Journal by John Tooze, former Executive Director of EMBO: “In December 1962, immediately following the Nobel Prize Investiture ceremony, John C. Kendrew together with James D. Watson visited the Centre Europeen de Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) in Geneva on their way home from Stockholm. Leo Szilard, the nuclear physicist‐turned‐molecular biologist, was also in Geneva at the time. Having decided that the Cuban missile crisis [October 1962] might lead to war he had left New York and had taken refuge in Switzerland. During the course of a conversation the three visitors had with Victor Weisskopf (CERN Director General), Leo Szilard proposed that Europes molecular biologists should attempt to emulate their colleagues in particle physics and try to persuade their governments to establish an international laboratory for molecular or fundamental biology patterned on the CERN model. […] The upshot was a meeting held at Ravello, Italy on 16–17 September 1963. [A group of molecular biologists] discussed the possibility of international cooperation in fundamental biology. The group decided that a European organization was a more …

Molecular biology in postwar Europe: towards a 'glocal' picture

This special issue of Studies collects a set of original papers on the making of molecular biology in postwar Europe. It includes several contributions on countries which have not yet received much attention in the historiography of molecular biology, for example, Italy, Spain, Germany, or Switzerland, along with new perspectives on better known cases such as France and Britain. Yet not all papers deal with developments on the national level: some papers focus on single laboratories or follow specific research tools and practices; others adopt comparative approaches and international perspectives. While each study per se offers much rich material and analysis, together they document the breadth of new scholarship in the field and, through the common time frame and the European focus, introduce a comparative perspective which contributes significantly to our understanding of the early history of molecular biology and to the postwar transformation of the sciences more generally. The picture which emerges differs from conventional ‘big picture’ accounts in that it is based on in-depth local studies. That we focus on developments in Europe does not mean that we turn a blind eye to American developments. On the contrary, the scientific and political relations to the United States and how these played out in the different national contexts, as well as in the attempt to build a European laboratory, become one of the central themes. Other questions raised by the set of papers are: the impact of the different wartime legacies on national developments; the role and relative weight of postwar economic developments, national science policies, and local or national research tra-

The Evolutionist, the Creationist, and the ‘Unsure’: Picking-Up the Wrong Fight?

The public acceptance of evolution is under constant scrutiny. Surveys and polls regularly measure whether the public accepts evolutionist or creationist views. The differences between groups, such as people from various countries, are then explained by variations in religious views. But what is often overlooked, is that the data also show that a large proportion of the population, about one-third, is unsure what to believe. This figure generally goes unnoticed. We argue that the emphasis on religious variables obscures another, perhaps more important, variable: the conceptual understanding of evolution. This factor may help explain why so many people are unsure about evolution and offers a greater potential to increase public understanding and acceptance of the theory, perhaps with the active involvement of science educators.