Abstract
In this paper, we tell the story of efforts currently underway, on diverse fronts, to build digital knowledge repositories (‘knowledge-bases’) to support research in the life sciences. If successful, knowledge bases will be part of a new knowledge infrastructure—capable of facilitating ever-more comprehensive, computational models of biological systems. Such an infrastructure would, however, represent a sea-change in the technological management and manipulation of complex data, inducing a generational shift in how questions are asked and answered and results published and circulated. Integrating such knowledge bases into the daily workflow of the lab thus destabilizes a number of well-established habits which biologists rely on to ensure the quality of the knowledge they produce, evaluate, communicate and exploit. As the story we tell here shows, such destabilization introduces a situation of unfamiliarity, one that carries with it epistemic risks. It should elicit—to use Niklas Luhmann’s terms—the question of trust: a shared recognition that the reliability of research practices is being risked, but that such a risk is worth taking in view of what may be gained. And yet, the problem of trust is being unexpectedly silenced. How that silencing has come about, why it matters, and what might yet be done forms the heart of this paper.
Highlights
Efforts are currently underway, on diverse fronts, to build digital knowledge repositories to support research in the life sciences.1 To the extent that they are successfully constructed, adopted, and managed, such knowledge
Biologists have to familiarize themselves with digital knowledge bases, including the institutions, processes and computational expertise involved in the work of building and maintaining them
The significance of this reorientation can be helpfully clarified by viewing knowledge bases in the context of the knowledge infrastructures of which they are being made to form an integral part
Summary
Our analysis is most immediately informed by a contemporary initiative that we have been part of since 2013: the Gene Regulation Consortium (GRECO). GRECO targets the specific domain of molecular knowledge relevant for the cellular process of gene regulation. Under these “radical” conditions of reimagination, in which a new vision of scientific and technical capacity became predominant, researchers were put into a position where they started engaging the present from the point of view of the imagined and desired future, a future in which knowledge bases had been built and put to use as a normal part of research practice Such a domestication of the future, as our story aims to show, needs to be taken into account in evaluating the present situation in which the work of building and adopting knowledge bases is experienced and carried out as if it is principally a matter of confidence. The question of trust may be silenced in unproductive and irresponsible ways
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
