Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the emergence of cloud-computing “economies” in the field of metabolomics, and how shifts in the way that data is stored and disseminated entails shifts in the configurations of value and ownership in data-intensive, biomedical economies.

Paper long abstract:

Given the increasing "bigness" of post-genomic data—both in the size and complexity of datasets—biomedical researchers have developed technical innovations to cope with the challenges of interpreting and making sense of data. Cloud-based computing, typified in services offered by data giants Amazon and Google, has emerged as a potential solution for coping with the "data deluge" of post-genomic science. And yet, cloud computing is also changing how researchers organize, store, analyze, and communicate their data

This paper considers the emergence of cloud-computing "economies" in the field of metabolomics, the post-genomic study of the molecules and processes of metabolism, and one of the fastest growing omics. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with the UK and US metabolomics community, this paper examines the practices and rhetoric surrounding cloud-based developments at research institutions (Imperial College London, European Bioinformatics Institute, Scripps Research Institute) and instrument manufacturers.

This paper critically examines debates about the design of cloud-based science infrastructures, as a window onto the changing notions of data ownership and value in biomedical communities. As researchers claim that cloud-based computing confers undeniable benefits—reducing local hardware costs, enabling data analysis to scale with data size—I argue that cloud computing raises key questions about the economies of data: about who owns data in the long term, and who controls capacity and infrastructure? Ultimately, this paper contributes to STS scholarship on how the emergence of digital, neoliberal infrastructures and economies is changing the practices and politics of knowledge in the biomedical sciences.