ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the move to ‘Big Biology’ in psychiatric genetics is concomitant with a network of production in which bioinformatics plays a central role. The social and epistemic organization of this network at the Centre has generated tensions and asymmetries between different styles of scientific reasoning. As F. Collins et al. recall, organizing ‘large-scale biology’ required the development of a new network of national laboratories-cum-sequencing factories, each with their own area of scientific expertise. Before the Human Genome Project (HGP) era, gene-finding methods in psychiatric genetics were conducted using a predominantly laboratory style of reasoning. The growing importance of bioinformatic methods and tools for understanding biological data – with some going so far to say that all biology is computational biology – has created a new hybrid scientist. The chapter considers how credit and reward is distributed among wet and dry researchers in post-HGP Big Biology.
