Data-driven humility

On the need for more

What was the most lasting benefit of the Human Genome Project? It certainly had a lasting impact on me personally along with the other biologists of my micro-generation, much of our schooling sandwiched between the premier of the Jurassic Park movie and the publication of the first genome drafts.

I remember the feeling of being both inspired and a little deflated when I learned about the completion of the genome. What more could there be to learn? What was left to discover? (lol)

That feeling was of course shaped by the way that I had been taught to think about genes, from what I learned in biology class to how popular media talked about “the gene for” nearly everything. Genes are the “blueprint” of biology—the “code” of life. Reading the “book” of life would mean understanding it. Downloading the code would mean being able to wrangle it.

Years later, everyone else seemed to be deflated. Ruxandra Teslo’s recent post does a beautiful job covering this disappointment, its legacy, and its potential causes and cures—Why haven't biologists cured cancer? Well, it’s complicated.

But the excitement has just begun. Because the main success of the Human Genome Project wasn’t that it provided the solution to all the problems of biology. It was in showing just how much more there was to learn and building the foundational infrastructure, business, culture, and tooling for making data and making insights. As soon as the genome was published the focus was immediately on more genomes, more associations, comparative genomics, multi-omics, functional genomics. More and more and more data to connect sequence to meaning. As Mike Fortun writes in Genomics with Care: “For genomicists today, this command is utterly clear and compelling: there is no possibility of ever wanting, and of ever having, less data. Genomicists will henceforth, from here on out, work in an era not of Big Data, but of Bigger and Bigger (Meta)Data. Avalanching data.”

This call for more indeed gives us something quite profound as a lasting legacy. Historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller marks this moment in her book on the successes of the human genome project and the century of genetics that preceded it (emphasis mine):

“It is a rare and wonderful moment when success teaches us humility, and this, I argue, is precisely the moment at which we find ourselves a the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, of all the benefits that genomics has bequeathed to us, this humility may ultimately prove to have been its greatest contribution. For almost fifty, years, we lulled ourselves into believing that, in discovering the molecular basis of genetic information, we had found the “secret of life”; we were confident that if we could only decode the message in DNA’s sequence of nucleotides, we would understand the “program” that makes an organism what it is. And we marveled at how simple the answer seemed to be. But now in the call for a functional genomics, we can read at least a tacit acknowledgment of how large the gap between genetic “information” and biological meaning really is.

For Keller, the genome project didn’t fulfill our expectations, it transformed them. The legacy of the genome project then is in how it has forced us to question our assumptions and frameworks for understanding biology and for making sense of health and disease in the first place. Decades later, many continue to fall into these same traps, albeit with new statistical methods seeking for perhaps a more nuanced determinism. But don’t confuse humility with pessimism. In the gap between sequence and outcome there is so much more to learn, discover, and build. 

I started Oscillator on Tumblr about 15 years ago as a place to mind this gap between the story of biology as an information technology and the life of technologies in the real world, and what this might mean for building technologies, solving problems, and shaping our understanding of life on earth. Since then I’ve finished a PhD, started a family, been part of building a company from startup through IPO, started two magazines, made some art, and seen the stories of biology in the popular and not-so-popular imagination grow and evolve alongside dramatic changes to the business of biotechnology. In this moment, as new technologies emerge and reshape the story of biology anew, I am restarting Oscillator as a place to identify and document the new gaps that emerge and new opportunities they offer. Perhaps humility will come more naturally in a world of science powered by AI, where no one understands how AI works and the complexity and context of biological systems are a feature, not a bug.

Follow along to see how biology transforms.