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This is a detailed history of one of the most important and
dramatic episodes in modern science, recounted from the novel vantage point of
the dawn of the information age and its impact on representations of nature, heredity,
and society. Drawing on archives, published sources, and interviews, the author
situates work on the genetic code (1953-70) within the history of life science,
the rise of communication technosciences (cybernetics, information theory, and
computers), the intersection of molecular biology with cryptanalysis and linguistics,
and the social history of postwar Europe and the United States. Kay
draws out the historical specificity in the process by which the central biological
problem of DNA-based protein synthesis came to be metaphorically represented as
an information code and a writing technology -- and consequently as a "book
of life." This molecular writing and reading is part of the cultural production
of the Nuclear Age, its power amplified by the centuries old theistic resonance
of the "book of life" metaphor. Yet, as the author points out, these
are just metaphor: analogies, not ontologies. Necessary and productive as they
have been, they have had their epistemological limitations. Deploying analyses
of language, cryptology, and information theory, the author persuasively argues
that technically speaking, the genetic code is not a code, DNA is not a language,
and the genome is not an information system (objections voiced by experts as early
as the 1950s). Thus, her historical reconstruction
and analyses also serve as a critique of the new genomic biopower. Genomic textuality
has become a fact of life, a metaphor literalized, she claims, as human genome
projects promise new levels of control over life through the meta-level of information
control of the word (the DNA sequences) and its editing and rewriting. But the
author shows how the humbling limits of these scriptural metaphors also pose a
challenge to the textual and material mastery of the genomic "book of life." Lily
E. Kay, formerly an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
is affiliated with Harvard University. |
