Phillip Thurtle is professor in the comparative history of ideas and history departments at the University of Washington. He is author of The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biological Science, 1870–1920, coauthor of the interactive DVD-ROM Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information, and coeditor of Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body.