Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter by Natasha Myers (review)

Science studies scholars have grown accustomed to hearing contemporary biology described in terms of genomics, DNA sequences, and computation. Natasha Myers's Rendering Life Molecular hones in on a different subfield in life science—X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, mostly proteins. Proteins, like DNA, are sequences, but it is the arrangement of the polypeptide chain in space that enables it to bind molecules, catalyze reactions, transmit signals, and assemble into larger units. X-ray crystallography enables researchers to deduce the three-dimensional positions of the constituent atoms of a protein, by analyzing how those atoms scatter X-rays. However, getting from scattering data to a reliable atomic structure requires enormous computational work along with judicious interpretation. Computers and software packages are indispensable to crystallographers, but key parts of the scientific work cannot be automated. Skilled crystallographers possess a great deal of knowledge, tacit as well as codified, about which structures make biological and physical sense.

Myers pays careful attention to how crystallographers work, and how they communicate their findings to each other, their students, and interested publics. She argues that these structural biologists draw on their own bodily experience of three-dimensional space to understand how atoms are arranged in proteins, and how protein domains enact key functions, which often require subtle movements in space. Crystallographers convey their understanding of conformational change in proteins and imagine functional mechanisms by mimicking the molecules with their own bodies. This happens in lab meetings, classrooms, cafeterias, and conferences. Myers found that when she asked scientists about their kinesthetic explanations, however, her questions were met with self-consciousness or silence. These movements are means to an end—communicating scientific ideas—and drawing attention to them disrupts the flow. In other contexts, communicative movements can be explicitly acknowledged, even choreographed. Since 2008, as Myers discusses, there has been a yearly "Dance Your PhD Contest" sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She also analyzes a fascinating pedagogical production from Stanford in the early 1970s, a human dance and music performance called "Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level," directed by Robert Alan Weiss (and featuring Paul Berg). These examples provide fresh ways to think about some kinds of scientific communication as tangible and ephemeral.

The book is structured as three sections. The first, "Laboratory Entanglements," provides an in-depth description of what crystallographers do, and what counts as success. The second section, "Ontics and Epistemics," focuses in on the practices of making protein models. The third part, "Forms of Life," draws out the implications of crystallographic work for thinking about the nature of life. Here she is particularly interested in how the language of crystallographers subverts their mechanistic commitments; researchers often describe their proteins as if they have more agency or live-liness than one expects from inanimate molecules. As a historian of biology, it was this section that disappointed me, because so much more could be done to situate the ambivalence and contradictions of how crystallographers discuss their active proteins in the genealogy of springy matter (Julien La Mettrie), molécules organiques (Count Buffon), and Naturphilosophie, as well as the protoplasm she mentions along with nineteenth-century attempts to render vitality in physicalist terms. The slippage between mechanistic explanations and vitalistic images is older and richer than she acknowledges, thought she does cite some excellent historical literature on life, automata, and technology. In addition, Myers's description of the mid-twentieth-century loss of interest by professional biologists in "life" could have been deepened by engaging Michel Morange's Life Explained (2008).

Given the importance of computation to crystallographic work, historians of technology will find relatively little discussion of computers, the development of customized software for protein modeling, and the division of technical labor in crystallographic work. But these are disciplinary quibbles. Myers is an ethnographer, and her book reflects her methods and commitment to theory. In the end, it was her vivid portrait of crystallographers at...