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

电子计算机已成为现代生物学和医学中几乎所有研究的必备条件。绝大多数研究生物过程的人--从分子水平到全球--都使用计算机来帮助他们进行观察、管理数据、进行计算、设计和测试理论模型，并讨论他们的发现。在这些能力的作用下，计算机技术从根本上改变了生物学家处理其主题的方式，无论是在学术研究环境中还是在价值数十亿美元的生物技术行业中。无处不在的计算机深刻地影响了科学界和更广泛的社会成员对自己与其他有机体和环境的关系的理解方式。然而，尽管在20世纪末的研究中，与计算机相关的所有实践和概念上的变化，专业历史学家才刚刚开始研究计算机技术对生命科学的影响。在一定程度上，这是由于20世纪最后25年缺乏对生物学的历史分析。然而，关于计算机对物理学和气象学的影响的现有出版物，以及过去50年来关于“大”分子生物学出现的持续辩论，表明彻底探索计算机对生物学的影响将是多么有价值，以及如何利用现有工作的框架来发起这样的探索。通过调查生物学家将计算机带入实验室的最初动机，以及他们实际上是如何使用这些计算机的，这篇科学和技术研究论文改进补助金将揭示生物学的研究对象，特别是极其复杂的基因，是如何从计算机无法描述的系统的样本转化为计算机可以描述的系统的样本的。该项目将通过考察三个有关计算机科学使用的战后项目如何塑造生物学中的研究实践和概念来解决这个问题：1)由Robert Ledley、Lee Lusted和Bruce Waxman领导的早期倡导在生物研究中使用计算机；2)麻省理工学院-国立卫生研究院-数字设备公司LINC(实验室仪器)联合项目；以及3)由Edward Feigbaum、Bruce Buchanan和Joshua Lederberg领导的斯坦福大学的DENDral(树状算法)项目。除了重建计算机如何成为生物学家实验室的标准设备外，该项目还旨在了解生物体类似于数字计算机软件的概念是如何如此迅速地变得如此根深蒂固的。NSF基金将支持麻省理工学院、剑桥大学、斯坦福大学和美国国立卫生研究院的档案之旅。

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 researchsettings 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.