Big data in the experimental life sciences
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Big data in the experimental life sciences Bruno J. Strasser: Collecting experiments: Making big data biology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019, 392 pp, $45.00 Emanuele Ratti1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Bruno Strasser’s Collecting Experiments is an essential book to understand the present ‘big data’ situation in the experimental life sciences. It provides a solid framework to interpret the relationship between collecting data and experimenting in biology, it thoroughly shows how we got to the present ‘big data’ biology situation, and it articulates suggestions on how we should interpret bioinformatics as a discipline and its relation to experimental biology, even though this is not his central goal. But it should not be read in isolation. Rather, it has to be considered in tandem with other important scholarly works, such as, but not limited to, November’s Biomedical Computing (2012), Leonelli’s Data-Centric Biology (2016), and Stevens’ Life Out of Sequence (2013). What I intend to do in this review is to provide (1) some context to understand the book, (2) a summary of the main contents with emphasis on the important contributions that it provides, and (3) two suggestions for future work.
The context Strasser’s book is motivated by an urgent need to understand the big data revolution in biology. The significance of the so-called data-driven or data-intensive turn in biology has been widely debated, in particular its epistemological magnitude, and the changes in how biologists perceive their profession. But, according to Strasser, in order to understand what happened in the past 30 years or so we should take a step back and realize how the interplay between databases and molecular biology is only an instance of a general dynamics affecting the experimental life sciences in the twentieth century. Therefore, Strasser’s book “is about the development and use of
* Emanuele Ratti [email protected] 1
Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
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data collections in the experimental life sciences from the early twentieth century to the present” (6). A work on the role of collections in the experimental life sciences is important and timely because something about collecting and experimenting has been perceived throughout the history of biology as in sharp opposition, as if there was a science war between the two. Strasser lists some ways in which this opposition has been conceptualized. For instance, the opposition has been understood as a tension between natural history disciplines, such as taxonomy and paleontology, and experimentalists since the mid-nineteenth century. Others tried to make sense of the opposition by building it around the ‘laboratory’ against the ‘museum.’ But Strasser seems to identify the real opposition in something even more fundamental, which is the value of biological diversity and comparisons versus the narrow focus or ‘exemplarism’ of many of the experimentalists such as those worki
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