This article provides an ethnographic account of how Big Data biology is produced, interpreted, debated, and translated in a Big Data-driven cancer clinical trial, entitled “Personalized OncoGenomics,” in Vancouver, Canada. We delve into epistemological differences between clinical judgment, pathological assessment, and bioinformatic analysis of cancer. To unpack these epistemological differences, we analyze a set of gazes required to produce Big Data biology in cancer care: clinical gaze, molecular gaze, and informational gaze. We are concerned with the interactions of these bodily gazes and their interdependence on each other to produce Big Data biology and translate it into clinical knowledge. To that end, our central research questions ask: How do medical practitioners and data scientists interact, contest, and collaborate to produce and translate Big Data into clinical knowledge? What counts as actionable and reliable data in cancer decision-making? How does the explicability or translatability of genomic Big Data come to redefine or contradict medical practice? The article contributes to current debates on whether Big Data engenders new questions and approaches to biology, or Big Data biology is merely an extension of early modern natural history and biology. This ethnographic account will highlight how genomic Big Data, which underpins the mechanism of personalized medicine, allows oncologists to understand and diagnose cancer in a different light, but it does not revolutionize or disrupt medical oncology on an institutional level. Rather, personalized medicine is interdependent on different styles of (medical) thought, gaze, and practice to be produced and made intelligible.

本文以人种学的方式描述了在加拿大温哥华举行的一项名为“个性化肿瘤基因组学”的大数据驱动的癌症临床试验中，如何产生，解释，辩论和翻译大数据生物学。我们深入研究了癌症的临床判断，病理评估和生物信息学分析之间的认识论差异。为了解开这些认识论上的差异，我们分析了在癌症治疗中产生大数据生物学所需的一组注视：临床注视，分子注视和信息注视。我们关注这些凝视的相互作用以及它们之间的相互依赖性，以产生大数据生物学并将其转化为临床知识。为此，我们的主要研究问题是：医生和数据科学家如何互动，竞争，并合作产生大数据并将其转化为临床知识？在癌症决策中，什么才算是可行和可靠的数据？基因组大数据的可解释性或可翻译性如何重新定义或与医学实践相矛盾？本文为当前关于大数据是否引发生物学新问题和新方法的辩论做出了贡献，或者说大数据生物学仅仅是早期现代自然历史和生物学的延伸。该人种学研究将重点介绍基因组大数据如何支撑个性化医学的机制，如何使肿瘤学家以不同的眼光来理解和诊断癌症，但不会在机构层面革新或破坏医学肿瘤学。相反，个性化医学取决于（医学）思维，凝视，