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Category Archives: Bioinformatics

Synthesis is appropriation

In contemporary society, we make use of the notion that things may be synthetic. Thus we may speak of synthetic biology, “synthesizers” (synthetic sound), synthetic textile etc. Such things are supposed to be artificial and not come from “nature”. However, the Greek root of the word synthesis actually seems to refer to the conjoining of […]

Posted 11 December 2016 † Johan § Philosophy ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

The minimal genome of Craig Venter’s Syn3.0

The J Craig Venter Institute has published a paper detailing the genome of their new Syn3.0 synthetic organism. The major accomplishment was to construct a viable cell with a synthetic, extremely small genome: only 473 genes and about 500 kbp. Even though it is considered to be fully “synthetic”, this genome is not built from […]

Posted 28 March 2016 † Johan § ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Method and object. Horizons for technological biology

(This post is an attempt at elaborating the ideas I outlined in my talk at Bio-pitch in February.) The academic and investigative relationship to biology – our discourse about biology – is becoming increasingly technological. In fields such as bioinformatics and computational biology, the technological/instrumental relationship to nature is always at work, constructing deterministic models of […]

Posted 22 March 2016 † Johan § Computer science § Philosophy ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

Is bioinformatics possible?

I recently gave a talk at the Bio-Pitch event at the French-Japanese institute. I was fortunate to be able to speak about some of the ideas I’ve been developing here among so many interesting projects (MetaPhorest, HTGAA, Yoko Shimizu, Tupac Bio, Bento Lab etc). The topic of my talk was “Is bioinformatics possible”? A deliberate […]

Posted 21 February 2016 † Johan § Computer science § Philosophy ‡ Comments (1) °

Reactive software and the outer world

At Scala Matsuri a few weeks ago (incidentally, an excellent conference), I was fortunate to be able to attend Jonas Bonér’s impassioned talk about resilience and reactive software. His theme: “without resilience, nothing else matters”. At the core of it is a certain way of thinking about the ways that complex systems fail. Importantly, complex […]

Posted 12 February 2016 † Johan § Computer science § Philosophy § Software development ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,