ABSTRACT
When Jean-François Lyotard wrote The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979/1984), little could he know the immense changes that would take place some twenty years later as molecular biology entered the global knowledge economy. With the sequencing of the human genome in 2001, molecular biologists cited this achievement as groundbreaking, perhaps equal to the discovery of DNA itself. As these advances were publicized, we began to see mergers among academic institutions, government funded laboratories, and the corporate world, now allied in this new age of genomic data. Just shy of a decade later, the journals Science and Nature routinely report on genomics (the complete set of genes in an organism), proteomics (the complement of proteins expressed with a cell), and genetic data mining (searching large, interconnected databases for gene sequences) with little fanfare.
