On 23 and 24 July, 2007, the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen) held its first sociomics workshop at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK. The topic was transformation of knowledge production. Participants included social scientists together with those working on different elements of the proteomics knowledge production-line, including core facilities, data repositories, large-scale projects, MS, search engines, reference databases, standardisation and public funding. Recurrent motifs included gear-heads, black boxes, uncertainty and getting back to biology.