CHAPTER ONE
Genesis:
What is Bioinformation?

Introduction

On 17 November 1903, the London Daily News led with an important crime story with the title Jewel Haul Sequel: The Fingerprint Clue.1 Contained within the report was a description of the arrest of one Henry Elliot, aged 26, on suspicion of the robbery of jewellery worth an estimated £5,000 from the auction house of Messrs. Knight, Frank and Rutley of Conduit Street. Arrested as he lay in his bed, Elliot denied the charges, asserting boldly, 'That's a lie!'. Chief Inspector Drew assured him it was not - that his presence at the scene had been established by the detection of 'traces of finger marks' that, when sent to Scotland Yard's newly formed Finger-Mark Impression Department, were confirmed as Elliot's very own. A search of his lodgings, which revealed the hoard, served to seal his fate. Although the article offers no account of it, we cannot but wonder what Elliot must have thought about this new technique that had turned his own body into a traitorous witness of his nefarious activities. How was it possible that information about his identity and his whereabouts could have been divined from mere fragments of his bodily material shed miles away from his home? What other information about his fate might be similarly derived?

The science of fingerprint identification was then still in its infancy, and its success relied on an allied technique of anthropometric classification developed in France in 1879 by Parisian police officer Alphonse Bertillon. Bertillon came from a family of notable statisticians and demographers, and he shared their interests in statistical probability, measurement and systems of classification, believing that they could be brought to bear in improving criminal identification. Drawing on these techniques, he devised a system of physical measurements of the head and body and notation of individual markings such as tattoos and scars. These measurements were entered onto cards and accompanied with a photographic portrait - the image that we now know as 'the mug shot' - that was used to create a unique descriptor and record of the offender.

These cards were then systematically filed and cross-indexed so that they could be easily retrieved. The utility of this new system of anthropomorphic identification was immediately evident to commentators of the day. As one journalist for the Standard newspaper astutely noted: '[B]y taking the measurements of a person it becomes possible to ascertain his identity even if he is already included in the records under any name whatever . [T]he highly ingenious mode of classification by which the cards are deposited in a cabinet is the most admirable part of the system, providing, as it does, a ready and perfect means of reference amongst many thousands of records.'2 However, Bertillon's method of obtaining these physical measurements was rather laborious to perform, requiring specialized technical equipment that needed to be constantly recalibrated. By harnessing it to eugenicist Francis Galton's emergent, much more efficient method of finger printing, an exceptionally powerful new technology was born for divining information about individuals - their identity, experiences and fate - from their own bodily materials.3

Molecular Biology and Bioinformational Metaphors

This enterprise was not, however, confined solely to the world of criminal activity and what was later to become forensic science. The question of how an individual's physiology could inform understandings of their life experience was, at virtually the same historical moment, also beginning to preoccupy those working in the new discipline of molecular biology. As the century progressed, a series of key breakthroughs improved understanding of genetic disease. The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of hereditary inheritance, Avery's discovery that genes are made up of DNA, and Watson, Crick and Franklin's later elucidation of DNA's double helical structure all allowed scientists to begin explicating the primary relationships and mechanisms that guide biological replication and function. A key set of questions animated much of this research. How do genotypes (the specific genetic make-up of individuals) affect phenotypes (the observable characteristics of that individual)? Are phenotypes genetically predetermined or can they be shaped by environmental interactions? How are biological messages or 'instructions' conveyed within an organism?

In order to find concepts and language capable of capturing the complexities of these processes, scientists drew on a number of metaphors that were popular at the time in the fields of cybernetics and communication theory. They began to describe DNA as containing genetic 'code' that signals to cells how they should operate or behave. This idea that biological material could contain information that directs the function of the organism was further cemented by the fact that this genetic code was signified by the letters of DNA's four nucleotide bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. The resultant strings of letters (ACGT) that are used to describe particular sequences of DNA thus appear as a kind of language or expressed information. Much debate later ensued over whether DNA was actually a form of information or whether it simply acted as a means of conveying biological instructions that we like to characterize as 'information'.4 Although that question has not, and perhaps will never be, fully resolved, it is clear that informational metaphors such as 'transcription', 'translation', 'coding for' and 'scripting' have since become very popular and powerful tropes for describing the genetic mechanisms and outputs that shape all of biological life. Use of the term 'bioinformation', which first entered public debate and reportage during the 1980s, has grown exponentially since then. It remains, however, a term that is, in many respects, rather poorly defined. So what exactly is 'bioinformation'?

What is Bioinformation?

A casual perusal of the internet reveals the many ways in which the term bioinformation is currently employed. It has been used to refer to DNA sequences stored on computer databases, archived pathological samples, biomedical records, the results of clinical trials and even pharmaceutical consumption patterns. Other references are made to 'genetic information'. This is defined as information derived from an individual's genetic tests, or from genetic tests taken by their family members, and can include information about the manifestation of a disease or disorder in that family's medical history. Bioinformation has also been used to describe information obtained from forensic and medical examinations, such as that contained in reports and notes documented in patient and criminal records. Yet another important form of bioinformation is ecological data derived from observational or field studies of human, animal, plant or microbial populations that provides information on habitats, prevalence and incidence of disease, mortality and the like.

It might seem, at first glance, that there are basically two kinds of bioinformation; the first we could think of as derivative, the second as descriptive. 'Derivative' bioinformation appears to be the kind that is derived directly from the organism or the individual DNA sequence information, for example. The second, 'descriptive' bioinformation, might be thought to include forms of information that we use to describe the biology of individuals and their way of life: information about their response to their environment, experience of disease, risk of mortality or social identity, for example. These two kinds of bioinformation seem to exist in two distinct registers: the first (DNA embedded in tissues) seems 'fleshier', the latter (such as medical records) 'wordier'. The resources that Polity has, to date, focused on in the series of which this book is one, such as coffee, gold or food, seem to be much less complicated entities, existing simply as physical goods that are traded as such in formal marketplaces. Their identities seem, in this respect at least, to be much more fixed: they are what they are. Bioinformation proves much harder to pin down. One of its unique characteristics, as we shall see, is that it can exist in many different material forms and can thus operate across many different 'registers' simultaneously. First, however, we need to extract bioinformation from its source.

The bodily structure of fleshy living organisms can provide all manner of information that may have utility in scientific or social endeavours. One of the primary scientific enterprises of the latter part of the twentieth century was to develop sophisticated new technologies for making this information available to others. There were three key parts to this work. The first involved finding ways of stabilizing fleshy, corruptible tissue and presenting it in more manageable forms, such as cryogenically frozen tissue or cell lines. The second involved developing techniques for examining or 'reading' the many varieties of biological information that could be derived from such investigations. These included,...