Making room for new faces: evolution, genomics and the growth of bioinformatics

Abstract

Genomics poses challenges that are specific to historians of science. Such challenges are not necessarily met by most recent sociologically-oriented approaches. This paper argues that historians of genomics can draw some lessons from the history of molecular biology, in part because some of the actors, concepts, and tools have made a transition between the two fields. More importantly, historians face the marginalization of scientific fields and actors that played a role in the integration of both ultra-disciplines. While biochemistry and genetics played an underrated role in the rising of molecular biology, research on the molecular evolution of informational molecules (molecular phylogenetics) played a neglected but nevertheless central role in the development of conceptual and analytical bioinformatics tools for genomics. Even today genomic tools incorporate underlying assumptions that show their origins in problems of comparative biology. This is particularly true in the case of the algorithms for sequence alignment, first proposed by Needleman and Wunsch (1970). The present essay also makes reference to areas in the history of science that require further investigation for an understanding of the transformations brought about by genomics to biological research, namely, the role of automation--beyond sequencing--and the intersection of biology and mathematics.