Multivariate statistics and the enactment of metabolic complexity

Abstract

This ethnographic study, based on fieldwork at the Computational and Systems Medicine laboratory at Imperial College London, shows how researchers in the field of metabolomics – the post-genomic study of the molecules and processes that make up metabolism – enact and coproduce complex views of biology with multivariate statistics. From this data-driven science, metabolism emerges as a multiple, informational and statistical object, which is both produced by and also necessitates particular forms of data production and analysis. Multivariate statistics emerge as ‘natural’ and ‘correct’ ways of engaging with a metabolism that is made up of many variables. In this sense, multivariate statistics allow researchers to engage with and conceptualize metabolism, and also disease and processes of life, as complex entities. Consequently, this article builds on studies of scientific practice and visualization to examine data as material objects rather than black-boxed representations. Data practices are not merely the technological components of experimentation, but are simultaneously technologies and methods and are intertwined with ways of seeing and enacting the biological world. Ultimately, this article questions the increasing invocation and role of complexity within biology, suggesting that discourses of complexity are often imbued with reductionist and determinist ways of thinking about biology, as scientists engage with complexity in calculated and controlled, but also limited, ways.