Genbank-natural History In The 21st Century?

摘要

The American nucleic acid sequence database GenBank, as well as its European (European Molecular Biology Laboratory, EMBL) and Japanese (DNA Databank of Japan, DDB J) mirror organizations, each contain far more nucleotides than "the number of stars in the Milky Way," as the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) once put it in a press release (1). The early history of this database illustrates the transformation of biology into a new science that links the methods of natural history with those of experimentation. GenBank represents the cutting edge of biology, but it also belongs to the centuries-old tradition of natural history-a tradition best characterized as the practice of collecting, describing, naming, comparing, and organizing natural objects. The method applies equally to plants, bones, or molecular sequences. This view challenges the received historical picture, in which the experimental sciences overtook natural history in the late 19th century and triumphed in the mid-20th century with the rise of molecular biology. As GenBank and other databases attest, the practices of natural history have been imported into the experimental sciences.