Fred Sanger, the inventor of the first protein, RNA and DNA sequencing methods, has traditionally been seen as a technical scientist, engaged in laboratory bench work and not interested at all in intellectual debates in biology. In his autobiography and commentaries by fellow researchers, he is portrayed as having a trajectory exclusively dependent on technological progress. The scarce historical scholarship on Sanger partially challenges these accounts by highlighting the importance of professional contacts, institutional and disciplinary moves in his career, spanning (...) from 1940 to 1983. This paper will complement such literature by focusing, for the first time, on the transition of Sanger’s sequencing strategies from degrading to copying the target molecule, which occurred in the late 1960s as he was shifting from protein and RNA to DNA sequencing, shortly after his move from the Department of Biochemistry to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, both based in Cambridge (UK). Through a reinterpretation of Sanger’s papers and retrospective accounts and a pioneering investigation of his laboratory notebooks, I will claim that sequencing shifted from the working procedures of organic chemistry to those of the emergent molecular biology. I will also argue that sequencing deserves a history in its own right as a practice and not as a technique subordinated to the development of molecular biology or genomics. My proposed history of sequencing leads to a reappraisal of current STS debates on bioinformatics, biotechnology and biomedicine. (shrink)

Fred Sanger, the inventor of the first protein, RNA and DNA sequencing methods, has traditionally been seen as a technical scientist, engaged in laboratory bench work and not interested at all in intellectual debates in biology. In his autobiography and commentaries by fellow researchers, he is portrayed as having a trajectory exclusively dependent on technological progress. The scarce historical scholarship on Sanger partially challenges these accounts by highlighting the importance of professional contacts, institutional and disciplinary moves in his career, spanning (...) from 1940 to 1983. This paper will complement such literature by focusing, for the first time, on the transition of Sanger's sequencing strategies from degrading to copying the target molecule, which occurred in the late 1960s as he was shifting from protein and RNA to DNA sequencing, shortly after his move from the Department of Biochemistry to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, both based in Cambridge (UK). Through a reinterpretation of Sanger's papers and retrospective accounts and a pioneering investigation of his laboratory notebooks, I will claim that sequencing shifted from the working procedures of organic chemistry to those of the emergent molecular biology. I will also argue that sequencing deserves a history in its own right as a practice and not as a technique subordinated to the development of molecular biology or genomics. My proposed history of sequencing leads to a reappraisal of current STS debates on bioinformatics, biotechnology and biomedicine. (shrink)

Scientific practices have been changed by the increasing use of computer simulations. A central question for philosophers is how to characterize computer simulations. In this paper, we address this question by analyzing simulations in biochemistry. We propose that simulations have been used in biochemistry long before computers arrived. Simulation can be described as a surrogate relationship between models. Moreover, a simulative aspect is implicit in the classical dichotomy between in vivo–in vitro conditions. Based on a discussion about how to characterize (...) a simulative aspect in this dichotomy, we will argue that an adequate understanding of computer simulations in biochemistry requires a previous understanding of simulations in experimental contexts. (shrink)

In this article, I examine various aspects of the application of Heidegger's motif of interpretative articulation (the core phenomenological motif of existential analytic) to the constitutional analysis of meaningful objects in scientific research that are contextually ready-to-hand. It is my contention that not only the concepts of the ‘fore-structure of understanding’ and the ‘as-structure of interpretation’, but also the extended concepts of the ‘hermeneutic fore-structure of meaning constitution’ and ‘characteristic hermeneutic situation’ are the keys to understanding the interpretative nature of (...) scientific research. The paper applies the constitutional analysis of hermeneutic phenomenology to several phenomena of scientific research—constitution of meaningful objects, situational fulfilment of a domain's general project, production of a domain's thematically given objects, implementation of readable technologies to what is contextually ready-to-hand, reading hypothetical theoretical objects, and exegetical textualizing within interrelated practices. The study is supplied with exemplary illustrations from enzymology and biochemistry. The correlation between a domain's interpretative articulation and the appropriation of research possibilities within the research everydayness is addressed. Special attention is paid to the belief in and reading of intracellular enzymes as hypothetical theoretical objects. (shrink)