Biology, Computing, and the History of Molecular Sequencing by Miguel García-Sancho

Author:Miguel García-Sancho
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2012-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

5.3 Research values and attitudes towards automation

The different trajectories of Sulston, Sanger and Hood suggest that the research priorities of their groups were the result of divergent values attached to the practices of science and technology, partly shaped by the institutional histories of Caltech and the LMB, and partly by their contrasting personas. For LMB Faculty members, science always implied personal involvement, and therefore technology was to be subordinated to human operators. By contrast, the Caltech group believed science could and should be fully automated; they consequently envisaged technology as both a scientific and commercial opportunity, in the form of an autonomous apparatus which could be used by researchers and marketed by a company. There were individual differences within the LMB and Caltech researchers, which were to some extent generational. Sanger and Sulston held different attitudes towards large-scale projects, but unlike Hood, they shared a belief in the public nature and universal availability of science.

We have seen that Sanger, Sulston and Hood’s values were reflected in divergent attitudes towards automation and embodied in different mapping and sequencing instruments: on the one hand, the LMB protocols and software always remained under the user’s control; on the other, Hood’s machine eliminated human intervention in a large part of the sequencing process. Caltech’s prototype sequenator was protected by patents, to transform it into a commodity to be marketed by ABI. Conversely, the LMB protocols and software were freely distributed to other researchers.

The contrast of values and attitudes between the LMB and Caltech does not simply reflect stereotypical differences between Europe and the US. The perspective of the LMB was generally shared by researchers based at institutions with a strong tradition in academic biology, even in the US – such as Watson, Gingeras and Roberts at Cold Spring Harbor – or laboratories proudly following the purely basic research approach defended by the founders or heroes of molecular biology – for example Waterston’s group at Washington University in St Louis. Conversely, Caltech’s approach to sequencing was adopted by new institutions with a strong focus on engineering and instrumentation, including European examples such as the EMBL, which also developed a fully automated DNA sequenator (see below).

The protocols and the sequenator should thus be seen as the technologies in which a particular institutional and personal style of conducting research was historically materialised.17 This historical dimension suggests that manual and automatic sequencing developed as progressively differentiating rather than mutually exclusive forms of work. Members of Hood’s group used manual sequencing protocols extensively before embarking in the DNA sequenator, and their first attempts at the automation of sequencing were based on Sanger and Gilbert’s techniques. However, given that these techniques had been designed to be applied by humans, the Caltech researchers gradually built an alternative sequencing strategy, one more suited to full automation. A reconstruction of how this strategy emerged will enable me to show how the contrasting styles of research at the LMB and Hood’s group resulted in different incarnations of sequencing as a form of work.

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