Two Histories of Bioinformatics: Data Science vs Life Science

Abstract

This paper focuses on two attempts to reconstruct the history of bioinformatics as a scientific discipline. Paulien Hogeweg who coined the term “bioinformatics,” presents one of them, while Hallam Stevens, who is both a historian and sociologist of science, offers the other. Although both of them can speak authoritatively about bioinformatics inasmuch as Hogeweg was personally involved in creating the field while Stevens has amassed a substantial amount of microsociological, scientometric and other evidence, they tell two fundamentally different stories. According to Hogeweg, bioinformatics came about as a response to new epistemic demands on the life sciences that arose from several key discoveries in molecular biology in the middle of 20th century. For Stevens, the new discipline was the result of transplanting computational methods and technologies into biology. This difference stems from divergent interpretations of what bioinformatics is, and these in turn depend upon different ontological claims about the nature of living things. The link between the concepts of life and information is explained by Hogeweg through a systems approach. Stevens discounts that link and concentrates instead on the transposition of scientific practices from other disciplines and on the new ways of understanding the living which are generated by this transposition. The attempt to define bioinformatics as a scientific discipline ends for both of these theorists a tautology: the discipline is defined by something defined by this same discipline, that is, by a certain idea about information and/or data. The effect of this tautology is that a normative criterion for delimitation of disciplines (a set of requirements which are necessary and sufficient for considering a field of research as a scientific discipline) does not allow us to explain how each of them occurs individually. Instead, a descriptive criterion is proposed, which is to be understood as the study of the conditions which make possible the differentiations in scientific practices which have already taken place. A distinct understanding of information or data and the ontology associated with it should be the outcome of a study of this kind and not presupposed by it.