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Affymetrix GeneChip products automatesequence analysis, genotyping and gene expression monitoring. GeneChip systems help researchers more efficiently acquire, analyze and manage genetic information to meet today's complex scientific challenges.

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Contemporary developments within the sciences of genetic engineering and biotechnology have been instrumental in constellating a series of relationships that are bringing together research in molecular biology (genetics, biotech, immunology, endocrinology), developments in applied research and clinical technologies (genomic mapping, gene therapy, PCR, DNA chips), and a variety of legal, social, and ethical issues (biotech & corporatization, patenting issues, genetic screening & DNA fingerprinting).

For example, in May of 1998, Perkin-Elmer Corporation (a leading supplier of "life systems" technologies for research and analysis in pharmaceutical, biotechnology, environmental, and agricultural industries), The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR - a not-for-profit genetic analysis organization), and Dr. J. Craig Venter (a controversial genetic researcher and director of TIGR), announced that a new genomics company (Celera Genomics) would be formed with the intent of completing the mapping of the human genome in less time and for less money than the government-supported Human Genome Project.

The alliance between Perkin-Elmer, Venter, and TIGR (whose website icon consists of a tiger leaping from a double helix of DNA) not only constitutes an important shift from national or government-supported research to a commercial or corporate frame, but it also marks an important encircling of research and development, a technology industry (new sequencing-machines produced by Perkin-Elmer), and commerce.

The excerpted files which follow in this essay are attempts to bring up some of the theoretical and technical issues that have manifested themselves within the domains of genetics and biotechnology research. This is made especially evident by the move of many technoscientific practices onto the Internet and Web, from searchable genomic databases, to computer applications used for protein modeling, to software programs designed to simulate and/or predict biochemical processes.

In this literal - or rather, materialized - instance of genetic/biochemical and computer-based/network-based information, what gets defined or is assumed to constitute such objects as "information," "gene," and "database" have direct relationships and consequences for what constitutes the body, the individual, and the property of the social subject. From these issues, two main points are emphasized:

The first is that these technoscientific practices and logics form discrete examples where the relationship between the body and language is reconfigured as a relationship of materiality and data/information. Secondly, this manifestation has been occurring in a socio-cultural site thoroughly enframed by the technological apparatus of computer and telecommunications-based developments, contributing to the increasingly intimate conjunction of molecular science research and technological development that constitutes contemporary technoscience.