| Between the 1960s and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century computers have transformed from esoteric devices to ubiquitous tools in biological work. Archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews have been combined to explain and investigate the consequences of this shift.;Early computers were used in the military and soon after for solving problems in the physical sciences. As such they were designed to solve specific kinds of problems: namely, problems of data management, simulations with large numbers of discrete data points, and statistical and stochastic problems. Computers also entailed and required the trappings of Big Science: big funding, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and careful management of laboratory spaces. The introduction of computers into the life sciences has imported both this style of knowledge production and these forms of practice and organization into the discipline of biology. Biology questions have become re-oriented from those that seek to understand individual genes or proteins towards those that seek to use the data management and statistical power of computer to understand large sets of biological objects. Meanwhile, biological practice has been transformed to organize and manage the interdisciplinary intersections between biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians, and engineers who are all required in order to perform productive biological work.;Moreover, the long strings of letters that represent protein and DNA sequences were especially susceptible to the kinds of data and statistical manipulations which could be performed on computers. The computer enabled the study of life 'out of sequence,' finding patterns in the apparently disordered spaces of genomes. |
