History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Pottage, Alain
London School of Economics and Political Science - R.A.Pottage@lse.ac.uk
Bio-potentiality. On the "Informaticisation" of Life
As the focus of biotechnological research shifts from the compilation of sequence information to the analysis of expression data, so patents in the field(s) of bioinformatics proliferate. Most of these patents related to the various technologies which are used to elicit and record expression data, principally microarray technologies and adjunct programs or devices. Bio-activity is transcribed into electronic signals, which are then re-animated by informatic simulations of evolutionary, developmental and metabolic processes. It has often been said that, as a result, the value of genetic material is increasingly found less in molecules than in information. But what kind of `information' is expression data, and what kind of `bio-political' power over life does it imply? This paper proposes that rather than understand the `informaticisation' of life in terms of the reduction of living processes to manipulable data, one should understand it in terms of the reconstitution of life as a commutable, and hence computable, medium. The logic of bio-switches tells us a lot about the way in which bioinformatics creates bio-potentiality.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006