Читать книгу GenEthics and Religion - Группа авторов - Страница 22

The impact of the systems approach and of reinterpreting genetic information reaches beyond criticizing the genetic program metaphor. It contains also a critique of other metaphors that are used to explain the meaning of genomic information in terms of signs contained in DNA sequences: the book of life, the instruction book, the architecture plan, the blueprint, the text, and related ones, in other words all metaphors that work with a difference between signifier and signified and introduce a semantic relation between DNA as a ‘sign for’ and the meaning of this sign. Sign metaphors do not work within a systems approach because they presuppose that information for development preexists.

The assumption of preexisting meaning in organisms would also be difficult to defend from a hermeneutic point of view. Signs or compositions of signs (texts) that we use in language are not just prints on paper that can be copied or transformed by certain rules. Because they belong to language, texts are expressions of personal life. In contrast to spoken language, they are permanently fixed expressions of personal life. Language, as Gadamer puts it, is the universal medium of understanding, i.e. a medium in which the acts of understanding itself can occur [9, p 392]. If we have a text, we must assume a writer who transformed meaning into written signs, and there is a reader who transforms written signs back into meaning. Who and where is the writer of the genetic ‘text’? The genome is the product of evolution; nobody has ‘written’ it. Therefore, the text as a metaphor for explaining DNA must always be essentially flawed. It would be a non-written text, part of non-meant language. To seriously claim such a thing implies a conceptual confusion.

Metaphorically speaking, not biologically of course, we could say that in the framework of the systems approach that assumes that genetic information does not preexist development but is itself an emergent product of interactive dynamics, the body acts as something like ‘the author’ of the genetic information. I have myself used this way of speaking [14]. If genetic information as developmental information is composed from step to step as a result of the interactive dynamics in the cells, it is actually the body that brings about this information. This use of the metaphor of the body as author is nonetheless lopsided because the ‘bringing about’ of the text is certainly no intentional act. It is no act of speaking, but rather mindless, even if our body is not an object but an animated body, this sensible, living body we ourselves are. If we use this metaphor we must see its limits as well.

This holds true for all metaphors. We should not naturalize the metaphors. Often metaphors can be of great help in making sense of a natural phenomenon in a context where sense is not obvious.⁴ The metaphor tells a little story, it is a narrative in a nutshell, or, as Paul Ricoeur [31] has said (with reference to Beardsley), a miniature poem. Metaphors graft meaning from one discourse to another and sometimes also modify their meaning when they arrive within the new discursive context. Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart [32] speak of metaphors as messengers of meaning. The ‘author’ is such a metaphor of the body in relation to developmental genetic information: a messenger bringing meaning from the discourse about texts into the discourse about embodiment.

To regard the descriptive text as a text is not so far away from what the humanities (as the sciences of the texts) see as a text. Also regarding a historical text, the meaning that we understand is not necessarily the same meaning put into the text by the writer. The act of reading is interpretation. There is a convincing argument by Hans Georg Gadamer that the act of interpretation involves the reader in her or his proper cultural and social context as well. There is no interpretation without the active contribution of the interpreter, who has questions in mind, brings them to the case, questions which might differ considerably from those of the writer or other readers. A text brings something up, raises a subject; but it can only do this because of the interpreters’ participation [9, p 391]. The situation of the biologist who constructs a text in her or his attempt to understand is therefore not so different from that of the historian or the reader of historical literature who interprets a text as a testimony that has been written under different circumstances. But mind that this way of speaking about texts in genetics treats the interpretation of DNA as a text, not the sequence of DNA.

To see description as interpretation can perhaps also help to liberate our minds from old images and doctrines. We can play with metaphors more easily when we are aware of what they do, with which questions they resonate, and what they do not do. Living in highly technologized worlds where most things are constructed according to plans and instructions are abundant, it is no surprise that biologists started from the question how the organism is constructed according to instructions or a plan. Today we obviously need new metaphors for the genome-cell relationship that make better sense but are still easy to grasp. Many things are possible.

We could, for example, see the genome like a library. A library is – in contrast to a book – not an organized text, not a message with a stable content. The meaning that readers take out of a library depends on which books they are picking, which books they are leaving behind, what proportion of the books they check out they are reading, in which order they are reading them, what they read, hear or see from elsewhere, and on what they make of the texts they are using. The library metaphor is, however, also lopsided, because libraries still contain books that were written by authors, whereas the genome is not a written text at all. But when we put the emphasis on the side of the reading act, the comparison is more accurate. The cell ‘reads’ its genome like readers read when they are selectively and creatively using a library.

Or we can compare the mechanisms of how words gain meaning in spoken or written language. There is a similar phenomenon that we know well in language to that of the multifunctionality of genes or proteins. Words have multiple meanings; they are polysemous. Polysemy means the capacity for a sign to have various meanings. How can we understand each other with words if the words can mean different things? The answer is that one word can say different things, but which meaning is in the foreground depends on the context in which it is used.

When we now look back on the history of the genetic program we see that it was an attractive preconception about the meaning of the genome drawing on the language of computers, whose attractiveness can be explained in the historical and cultural context in the second half of the 20th century. It was essentially an anticipated story of how the genes work, invented before experimental knowledge in developmental genetics was available. Lily Kay has written the ‘history of the genetic code’ in a book with the ambiguous title ‘Who Wrote the Book of Life?’ [4].

The book of life was meant to be a book written by nature. But it turns out that it is rather written by humans, scientists in particular, but not just by them. We have seen politicians play their role as well. This writing, it emerges, happens not on the level of the genes but on the level of the explanations that have been promulgated and were selected because they seemed to be more meaningful than others.

When scientists today explain genetics to the general public there is a risk that they use the same old preconceptions over and over again, just because they feel or anticipate that this is what the public ‘out there’ will understand. They might be right that it is the program view and the family of sign metaphors that they do know ‘out there’. But this is nothing other than what, a few years earlier, the public was told by scientists to believe. I believe that the storyteller (in the best sense of the word: the scientist truly explaining genetics to the general public) has a responsibility to be not just rhetorical but authentic.