The Poetics of DNA (review)

With DNA, abracadabra's triangle is reduced to three letters

(note 7, p. 232).

Genes act like we think we do

(p. 119).

The Poetics of DNA, an elegant intellectual adventure, could have been more accurately titled The Politics of the DNA Discourse. It proposes that the process of identifying and describing the "DNA gene" has served as a means for allaying fear of change and for rewriting "the truth of humanity in safe and conservative terms" (p. 27). An important book for science and social science, being one that provides fascinating critical thinking on singularly important issues of our time, it might well invoke consternation from scientists. Why? Judith Roof argues throughout that the idea of DNA and the gene are ideological constructions rather than scientific facts and that they serve as vectors for promoting homophobic, sexist and racist discourses.

Roof writes that the humanities can show science "how the relation between science and representation produces a paradox that is self-contained in the figure of DNA's double helix" (p. 22). In arguing against the use of linguistic and structuralist models and analogies in science, the following sentences are paradigmatic of the whole, synecdoche if you will:

The gene is the imaginary embodiment of a binary principle never detached from ideas of gender, the logic of heterosexual reproduction, or the structure of kinship . . . . The DNA gene is the perfect synthesis . . . the signifier par excellence, whose significance reflects all other significance and whose imagined operation enacts the structuralist principle by which it is situated as a reduction of all

(p. 48).

In all this, DNA and genes are imagined as surreptitious narrative double agents that serve to reproduce dominant misogynistic ideologies.

As a consequence of the seriousness of Roof's postmodernist political critiques of one of the most important areas of scientific research of the 20th century, this study should perhaps be debated first and foremost by scientists, who might be interested in reflecting on the consequences it could have for their own work, conceptually speaking. While that is relatively unlikely, this book will certainly provide for lively debate in graduate seminars on the history of science. Ideally, it will impel students to return to Watson's epiphany and the importance Erwin Schrödinger's text What Is Life? (1946) played in eventually invoking that epic discovery.

Although the author is careful to state that the book is not ultimately about the "truth"-value of DNA or the complexities of molecular biology, my reaction as a reader with an undergraduate degree in molecular biology and a doctorate in symbolic anthropology is that ultimately that is exactly what is at stake here. Herein the value of a study such as this goes far beyond a better public understanding of the debate over the nature of DNA and the gene and the implications. Its value should finally be judged in terms of what all of this means in the end for the field of molecular biology itself. It is no doubt fascinating to read how DNA serves as a cultural form, as a vehicle for chauvinist patriarchal hegemony, but in the end, deoxyribonucleic acid exists and its structure and basic biochemical function is certainly not a figment of the imagination. That is the fact of the matter, and as science advances, we progressively learn more and more about the complexities of the system and especially the role mRNA plays, and therein lies the poetry of it all. As I see it, then, the most important question to ask must remain how this study might or might not inform the thinking of molecular biologists with a broad enough interest in the humanities to seriously consider the arguments made here. Will The Poetics of DNA have any influence on future scientific investigation and insight into the nature and function of DNA itself?

While Roof is careful to note that she is referring to the use of figurative speech referring to genes and DNA, of the consequences of imagining them...