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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.3 (2002) 643-646



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Book Review

Who Wrote the Book of Life?
A History of the Genetic Code


Lily E. Kay. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. xix + 441 pp. Ill. $24.95 (paperbound, 0-804-73417-8).

The late Lily Kay, a historian with a passionate concern for her work along with a pioneering spirit that sought to chart less-well-trodden scholarly paths, has left us with a considerable legacy of papers and monographs in the history of twentieth-century molecular genetics and biology. Her latest, and unfortunately final, work will stand as a testimony to her many outstanding and illuminating contributions. Who Wrote the Book of Life? is a study of the origins of the genetic code from roughly 1940 to 1967. Her thesis is that "molecular biologists used 'information' as a metaphor for biological specificity. . . . As such, it became a rich repository for the scientific imaginaries of the genetic code as an information system and a Book of Life" (pp. 2-3).

The history that Dr. Kay presents is situated, in her own words, "not only within the history of life science but also along the rise of communication technosciences (cybernetics, information theory, and computers), at the intersection of cryptanalysis and linguistics" (p. xv). The ultimate result of this form of social construction, according to Kay, was that "once linguistics, like biology, came under the spell of the information discourse in the 1950s, the two entities—language and DNA—emerged, not surprisingly, with similar features" (p. 7). In addition, the book has much to say about the relationship between theoretical and empirical biology in the twentieth century, and the relation of biology to prewar and especially postwar military technology. Applied to the history of the genetic code, these themes are highly revealing not only of how interest in the code originated, but also of how ideas about the structure of the code developed along the way, from 1953 (publication of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick), through 1961 (Nirnberg and Matthei's two papers in PNAS), to the Cold Spring Harbor meetings in the mid-1960s, at which the specific triplet codes for each amino acid were finally established. The pace of the research, the competitiveness, the strategy-seeking among rival groups, the interplay between theory and laboratory bench are all engagingly captured in this study.

What is particularly intriguing about the story as Kay presents it is the way in which ideas about a genetic code originated from a combination of wartime cryptanalysis (the process of decoding messages), semiotics (including linguistics), and theoretical considerations from physics and mathematics. Most readers will be surprised to find names like George Gamow (cosmologist), John von Neumann and Claude Shannon (mathematicians), Norbert Wiener (cyberneticist and system theorist), and Henry Quastler (physician and histologist), along with institutions like the Office of Naval Research, Los Alamos Laboratory, Bell Laboratories, General Electric Research Laboratory, and MIT, at the heart of the origins of work on the genetic code. But that is just Kay's point: the idea of a code (if there even was a "code" in the usual sense of the term) was the outgrowth of a particular social and economic context that included World War II and especially the period of the Cold War. It is in this context that the problem was first framed [End Page 643] as one of information flow, and in which the metaphor of a genetic "code" first arose—a metaphor that was simultaneously illuminating and confusing, yet has remained as part of our genetic vocabulary right down to the present time.

It is significant for the building of Kay's cultural-embededness argument that the development of thinking about a genetic "code" was dependent on the entire military establishment, from decoding problems in World War II and the Cold War, to the large-scale availability of computers, such as MANIAC at Los Alamos...

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