Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Ciencias, Circuito Exterior, Cd. Universitaria, Copilco, Coyoacán, 04510 Mexico City, México.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2010;32(1):65-89.
Genomics poses challenges that are specific to historians of science. Such challenges are not necessarily met by most recent sociologically-oriented approaches. This paper argues that historians of genomics can draw some lessons from the history of molecular biology, in part because some of the actors, concepts, and tools have made a transition between the two fields. More importantly, historians face the marginalization of scientific fields and actors that played a role in the integration of both ultra-disciplines. While biochemistry and genetics played an underrated role in the rising of molecular biology, research on the molecular evolution of informational molecules (molecular phylogenetics) played a neglected but nevertheless central role in the development of conceptual and analytical bioinformatics tools for genomics. Even today genomic tools incorporate underlying assumptions that show their origins in problems of comparative biology. This is particularly true in the case of the algorithms for sequence alignment, first proposed by Needleman and Wunsch (1970). The present essay also makes reference to areas in the history of science that require further investigation for an understanding of the transformations brought about by genomics to biological research, namely, the role of automation--beyond sequencing--and the intersection of biology and mathematics.
基因组学提出了一些特定于科学史学家的挑战。这些挑战并不一定能被最近大多数社会学导向的方法所解决。本文认为，基因组学历史学家可以从分子生物学的历史中吸取一些经验教训，部分原因是一些参与者、概念和工具在这两个领域之间发生了转变。更重要的是，历史学家面临着科学领域和参与者被边缘化的问题，这些领域和参与者在这两个超学科的整合中发挥了作用。虽然生物化学和遗传学在分子生物学的兴起中扮演了被低估的角色，但信息分子（分子系统发育学）的分子进化研究在发展用于基因组学的概念和分析生物信息学工具方面发挥了被忽视但却至关重要的作用。即使在今天，基因组学工具也包含了一些基本假设，这些假设显示了它们在比较生物学问题中的起源。这在序列比对算法（由 Needleman 和 Wunsch 于 1970 年首次提出）的情况下尤其如此。本文还提到了科学史中的一些领域，这些领域需要进一步研究，以便理解基因组学给生物研究带来的转变，即自动化的作用（超越测序）以及生物学和数学的交叉。
