Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 11:52:02 +0000 From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk> Subject: BHA: The linguistic metaphor in biology Hi all, I'm cross-posting this from another lis* (on a wing and a prayer, because my posts haven't been getting through for some time, nor have i been receiving them) - because I think it has particular interest to critical realists, who have always stressed the role of metaphor and analogy. There doesn't seem a lot to separate Kay's 'poststructuralist' account from a critical realist one, since she seems to accept that the 'representation of life' has some purchase on the Real. Mervyn ------- Forwarded message follows ------- MOLECULAR BIOLOGY: In the Beginning Was the Word A review by R. C. Lewontin* ----------------------------------------------------------------- Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code Lily E. Kay Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 2000. 470 pp. $60, £45. ISBN 0-8047-3384-8. Paper, $24.95, £17.95. ISBN 0-8047-3417-8. ----------------------------------------------------------------- It seems impossible to do science without metaphors. Biology since the 17th century has been a working out of Descarte's original metaphor of the organism as machine. But the use of metaphor carries with it the consequence that we construct our view of the world, and formulate our methods for its analysis, as if the metaphor were the thing itself. The organism has long since ceased to be viewed like a machine and is said to be a machine. The ways in which the metaphors of biology have molded the concepts and experiments of the science have been a preoccupation of the historian of molecular biology Lily Kay. In Who Wrote the Book of Life? her most recent and unfortunately final book (she died of cancer in December), Kay asks how the view that DNA is "information" that is "written" in a "language" whose "words" are in "code" has driven the research program and claims of molecular biology. Kay's analysis of the history of molecular genetics is poststructuralist. That is, while not denying the objective reality of genes, proteins, and cellular elements, it is "grounded in the conviction that once a commitment to a particular representation of life is made--material, discursive and social--it assumes a kind of agency that both enables and constrains the thoughts and actions of biologists." Unfortunately, the outline of this claim in the early part of the book makes a formulaic use of the special jargon of poststructuralist theory, a jargon that will be impenetrable to any biologist not possessed of a considerable education in literary theory. But the biologist should persist, because the central chapters on "Genetic Codes in the 1950s" and "Writing Genetic Codes in the 1960s" present a compelling case for the ways in which the purely theoretical analysis of DNA as a code led to the determinative experiments that demonstrated the mechanism by which amino acid sequences are specified and constructed. Many biologists in the late 1950s (I among them) regarded with a certain contemptuous hauteur the attempts of renegade physicists to illumine the relation between gene and protein by engaging in the sort of cryptanalysis that became so romantic as a result of the wartime triumphs of Bletchley Park. But Kay shows quite convincingly that, although these codebreaking techniques could not in themselves provide the right answer, the view of DNA as code and amino acid sequence as plaintext was absolutely essential in the very conception of the critical experiments at the beginning of the 1960s. The brilliant paper by Crick, Barnett, Brenner, and Watts-Tobin, which demonstrated so elegantly that the DNA sequence was processed from a fixed starting point using each successive non-overlapping triplet to determine the next amino acid in the chain, and Nirenberg and Matthaei's path-breaking demonstration that poly-U RNA in an in vitro synthetic system resulted in the construction of a polypeptide consisting solely of phenylalanine, would have been conceptually impossible without the metaphor of the code. This, then, raises the problem of the counter-factual conditional that plagues all attempts to understand history: What if? What would have happened had the language metaphor never taken hold in molecular genetics? Would we now be ignorant of the details of the relation between DNA and protein? Would we have a different understanding? Would we know more about the world? or less? complete review at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5507/1263 --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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