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In this paper, we progressively de-center the Human Genome Project (HGP) in the history of genomics and human genomics. We show that the HGP, understood as an international effort to make the human reference genome sequence publicly available, constitutes a specific model of genomics: prominent and influential but nevertheless distinct from others that preceded, existed alongside, and succeeded it. Our analysis of a comprehensive corpus of publications describing human DNA sequences submitted to public databases from 1985 to 2005 reveals a plethora of authoring institutions, with only a few contributing to the HGP. Examining these publications in a co-authorship network enables us to propose two different sequencing approaches—horizontal and vertical sequencing—whose changing dynamics shaped the history of human genomics. We argue that investigating the extent to which different institutions combined these approaches or prioritized one of them captures the history of genomics better than using the categories of large-scale sequence production and sequence use, as much scholarly literature concerning the HGP has done. Sequence production and use became fully distinct only within the HGP model, and especially during the last stages of this endeavor. By exploring a collaboration between Celera Genomics, a large-scale sequencing institution, and two medical genetics laboratories, we show the potential of our co-authorship network and its analysis for historical research. Our study connects the historiographies of medical genetics and human genomics and indicates that the so-called translational gap from sequence data to clinical outcomes may reflect the assumption that genomics was substantially different from prior and parallel genetics research. This essay is part of a special issue entitled The Sequences and the Sequencers: A New Approach to Investigating the Emergence of Yeast, Human, and Pig Genomics, edited by Miguel García-Sancho and James Lowe.

In this essay, we reflect on how the findings of the preceding papers enabled us to thicken the history of genomics. We have expanded the number of dimensions across which our historical work operated beyond extending the dimension of time. Building on this, we argue that the history of genomics became synchronically entangled with a range of communities, target species, and research agendas—among them yeast biochemistry, pig and human immunology, systematics, medical genetics, and agricultural genetics. We make sense of these entanglements with analytic categories to characterize modes of organizing and conducting sequencing, and the relationships between the practices of sequencing and the objectives of those collaborating around it: horizontal and vertical, proximate and distal, directed and undirected, as well as intensive and extensive sequencing. Our categories emerged as we analyzed and qualitatively interpreted datasets and co-authorship networks. Throughout this special issue, we have characterized genomics as a set of tools that open up connections between actors, institutions, experimental organisms, and historically contingent forms of research. We contend that presenting genomics in this way emphasizes the agency of the communities that mobilized the sequence data and offers a fresh perspective for addressing the medical and agricultural translation of that data. We close by proposing how we can develop our mixed-methods approach through the establishment of a domain ontology that would allow information on sequence submissions and publications to be connected to other forms of data, thus expanding the range of evidence available for historical analysis. This essay is part of a special issue entitled The Sequences and the Sequencers: A New Approach to Investigating the Emergence of Yeast, Human, and Pig Genomics, edited by Miguel García-Sancho and James Lowe.

This special issue on sequences and sequencers uses new analytical approaches to re-assess the history of genomics. Historical attention has largely focused on a few central characters and institutions: those that participated in the Human Genome Project (HGP), especially its final stages. Our analysis—based on an assessment of almost 13.5 million DNA sequence submissions and 30,000 publications of human, yeast, and pig DNA sequences—followed overlapping chronologies starting before and finishing after the concerted efforts to sequence the genomes of each species: 1980 to 2000 in yeast, 1985 to 2005 for the human, and 1990 to 2015 for the pig. Our main conclusion is that when broader sequencing practices—especially those addressed to nonhuman species—are taken into account, the large-scale center model that characterized the organization of the HGP falls short in representing genomics as a whole. Instead of taking the HGP as a model, we describe an iterative process in which the practices of sequence submission and publication were entangled. Analysis of co-authorship networks between institutions derived from our data shows how linked sequence submission and publication were to medical, biochemical, and agricultural research. Our analysis thus reveals the utility of big data and mixed-methods approaches for addressing science as a multidimensional endeavor with a history shaped by co-constitutive, synchronic interactions among different elements—such as communities, species, and disciplines—as much as diachronic trajectories over time. This perspective enables us to better capture interdisciplinary and interspecies work, and offers a more fluid portrayal of the connections between scientific practices and agricultural, industrial, and medical goals. This essay is part of a special issue entitled The Sequences and the Sequencers: A New Approach to Investigating the Emergence of Yeast, Human, and Pig Genomics, edited by Miguel García-Sancho and James Lowe.

This paper examines the model of network genomics pioneered in the late 1980s and adopted in the European Commission-led Yeast Genome Sequencing Project (YGSP). It contrasted with the burgeoning large-scale center model being developed in the United States to sequence the yeast genome, chiefly as a pilot for tackling the human genome. We investigate the operation and connections of the two models by exploring a co-authorship network that captures different types of sequencing practices. In our network analysis, we focus on institutions that bridge both the European and American yeast whole-genome sequencing projects, and such concerted projects with non-concerted sequencing of yeast DNA. The institutions include two German biotechnology companies and Biozentrum, a research institute at Universität Basel that adopted yeast as a model to investigate cell biochemistry and molecular biology. Through assessing these bridging institutions, we formulate two analytical distinctions: between proximate and distal, and directed and undirected sequencing. Proximate and distal refer to the extent that intended users of DNA sequence data are connected to the generators of that data. Directed and undirected capture the extent to which sequencing was part of a specific research program. The networked European model, as mobilized in the YGSP, enabled the coexistence and cooperation of institutions exhibiting different combinations of these characteristics in contrast with the more uniformly distal and undirected large-scale centers. This contributes to broadening the historical boundaries of genomics and presenting a thicker historiography, one that inextricably meshes genomics with the trajectories of biotechnology and cell biology. This essay is part of a special issue entitled The Sequences and the Sequencers: A New Approach to Investigating the Emergence of Yeast, Human, and Pig Genomics, edited by Miguel García-Sancho and James Lowe.

The history of genomic research on the pig (Sus scrofa)—as uncovered through archival research, oral histories, and the analysis of a quantitative dataset and co-authorship network—demonstrates the importance of two distinct genealogies. These consist of research programs focused on agriculturally oriented genetics, on the one hand, and systematics research concerned with evolution and diversity, on the other. The relative weight of these two modes of research shifted following the production of a reference genome for the species from 2006 to 2011. Before this inflection point, the research captured in our networks mainly involved intensive sequencing that concentrated primarily on increasing the resolution of genomic data both in particular regions and more widely across the genome. Sequencing practices later became more extensive, with greater focus on the generation and comparison of sequence data across and between populations. We explain these shifts in research modes as a function of the availability, circulation, distribution, and exchange of genomic tools and resources—including data and materials—concerning the pig in general, and increasingly for particular populations. Consequently, we describe the history of pig genomics as constituting a kind of bricolage, in which geneticists cobbled together resources to which they had access—often ones produced by them for other purposes—in pursuit of their research aims. The concept of bricolage adds to the thicker vision of genomics that we have shown throughout the special issue and further highlights the singularity of the dominant, thin narrative focused on the production of the human reference sequence at large-scale genome centers. This essay is part of a special issue entitled The Sequences and the Sequencers: A New Approach to Investigating the Emergence of Yeast, Human, and Pig Genomics, edited by Miguel García-Sancho and James Lowe.

Obra ressenyada: Myles W. JACKSON, The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.

This report offers a new perspective on the legacy of Dolly the sheep by tracing the chain of experiments within which she was produced as the first cloned mammal in 1996. We argue that the media storm that followed her birth, with intense debates about the ethics of escalating the technology and obtaining exact copies of humans, obscured the underlying motivations of the experiments and the important role that the cloning technology has later played in stem cell research and regenerative medicine. By adopting a historical perspective, we show that Dolly should be placed within an established research project that started in the early-to-mid 1980s and sought to genetically modify – rather than copy – farm animals. She was not the start, neither the conclusion of the project, this suggesting that we need a broader framework to fully capture her impact. When, instead of Dolly, we focus on the genetic modification research within which she was produced, the ramifications of that project go as far as recent efforts to sequence the genome of the pig and use that information as a model of human biology and disease. We conclude that historical studies may help to chart the long-term impact of scientific projects, especially when they have been funded by different administrative agencies, due to their outputs spanning disciplines and species.