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A BOOK OF LIFE? HOW THE GENOME BECAME AN INFORMATION SYSTEM AND DNA A LANGUAGE LILY E. KAY* . . . in speaking ofgenes and chromosomes the language of information theory is often extremely apt.—Sir Peter B. Medawar [1, pp.56-57] We shall therefore pray for the banishment of the abusive use of the term "language"from thefield of molecular biosemiolics.—Marcel Florkin [2, p. 13] Introduction Most life scientists now view the human genome as an information system , as a book of life, a text written in a DNA language, or DNA code. In a 1989 Public Broadcast System (PBS) NOVA program, Decoding the Book ofLife, Eric Lander, promoting the Human Genome Project, takes a volume off the library shelves where numerous volumes of the "Book of Life" are stacked, explaining how to identify genetic misprints in the sequences [3] . The theistic resonances of this scriptural sublime further dramatize the biomedical mission. Walter Gilbert—probably the first to argue for copyrighting genetic sequences—envisions putting 3 billion bases on a single compact disk (CD), predicting that soon "One will be able to pull a CD out of one's pocket and say, 'Here is a human being; it's me!'. ... To recognize that we are determined ... by a finite collection of information that is knowable will change our view of ourselves. It is a closing of an intellectual frontier, with which we will have to come to terms" [4, p.96]. Addressing a large scientific gathering, biotechnology champion David ?Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139. The author wishes to thank the NIH-ELSI branch for their generous grant support of this project; Eric Kupferberg for his expert research assistance; Debbie Meinbresse for her fine editorial services; Sydney Brenner, Marshall Nirenberg, and Martynas Yeas for all their documentary contributions; and colleagues (especially Hans-Jörg Rheinberger) at the Max-Planck Institute of History of Science in Berlin for providing a nurturing scholarly community.© 1998 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 0031-5982/98/4104-1071$01.00 504 Lily E. Kay ¦ Language and UNA Jackson argues that "To be fluent in a language, one needs to be able to read, to write, to copy, and to edit in that language. The functional equivalents of each of those aspects of fluency have now been embodied in technologies to deal with the language of DNA" [5, p.358; 6]. That the "language of DNA" is not merely a popularization or powerful rhetoric but a representation with operational force is evidenced by the emergence in the late 1980s of the subspecialty of DNA linguistics within computational molecular biology—admittedly a small group, but it serves to illustrate the point. Practitioners in quest of biological meaning now apply Chomskian generative grammar as a framework for constructing a paradigm for understanding genomic organization and expression regulation in prokaryotic and eukaryotic systems. This quest has become even more urgent as sequences are cascading from human genome projects and their status: coding, regulatory, or so-called "junk DNA" (95-97 percent of the genome) needs to be established. Bioinformatics has become a visible genomic presence [7-9]. (For a more detailed discussion, see [10, ch. 8]). These contemporary examples demonstrate how pervasive and entrenched the notions of DNA language are in molecular biology and how strong the faith is that we can now simply word-process the genomic Book ofLife, as Robert Pollack aptly put it [6] . But, in fact, these are problematic metaphors, and they are not new. While the Book of Life, and its subsequent variant, the Book of Nature conjure centuries-old images, in their 20th-century garb they date to the 1950s and 1960s. They arose out of the work on the so-called genetic code and the widespread effects of the information discourse on science and culture. And these compelling metaphors and analogies also set considerable limitations to an unambiguous reading —and even more so, editing—of the genomic Book of Life. The breaking and completion of the genetic code, from 1953 to 1967, was one of the most important events in 20th-century science, a manifestation of the stupendous reaches of molecular biology...

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