Dissertation Research: The Rise of the Digital Organism: How Computers Shaped Biology

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Electronic computers have become a sine qua non of almost all research in modern biology and medicine. The overwhelming majority of those who investigate biological processes--from the molecular level to the global--employ computers to help them make observations, manage data, perform calculations, design and test theoretical models, and discuss their findings. Serving in these capacities, computer technology has radically transformed how biologists approach their subject matter, both in academic research settings and in the multi-billion dollar biotechnology industry. The ubiquitous computer has profoundly influenced the way in which members of the scientific community and of broader society understand themselves in relation to other organisms and the environment. Yet for all of the practical and conceptual changes associated with computers in late-twentieth century research, professional historians have only begun to study the impact of computer technology on the life sciences. In part, this is due to the paucity of historical analysis of biology during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the existing publications on the computer's impact on physics and meteorology as well as the ongoing debates on the emergence of "big" molecular biology over the past five decades indicate how a thorough exploration of the computer's influence on biology would be valuable and how one could use the framework of existing work to launch such an exploration. By investigating biologists' original motives for bringing computers into their laboratories, and by examining how they actually made use of these computers, this Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant will shed light on how biology's objects of study, especially the enormously complex gene, were transformed from exemplars of systems that computers could not describe into exemplars of systems that computers could describe. The project will approach this problem by examining how three postwar projects concerning the scientific uses of computers shaped research practices and conceptions in biology: 1) the early advocacy for the use of computers in biological research, led by Robert Ledley, Lee Lusted, and Bruce Waxman; 2) the joint MIT-National Institutes of Health-Digital Equipment Corporation LINC (Laboratory Instrument) project; and 3) the Stanford-based DENDRAL (Dendritic Algorithm) project, led by Edward Feigenbaum, Bruce Buchanan, and Joshua Lederberg. Beyond reconstructing how computers came to be standard equipment in the laboratories of biologists, the project aims to understand how the notion that the organism is analogous to digital computer software became so deeply entrenched so quickly. NSF funds will support trips to archives at MIT, Cambridge, Stanford University, and NIH.