Of Flies, Mice, and Men: On the Revolution in Modern Biology, by One of the Scientists Who Helped Make It (review)

François Jacob. Of Flies, Mice, and Men: On the Revolution in Modern Biology, by One of the Scientists Who Helped Make It. Trans. Giselle Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 158 pp. $24.00.

I am generally suspicious of books by venerable scientists who think it is their prerogative to make pronouncements on all sorts of subjects outside their specialties. Although the present book falls into that category, it nonetheless has many redeeming features. François Jacob, a Nobel laureate (in Physiology or Medicine), writes engagingly and provides a sense of excitement about developments in modern biology in terms accessible to anyone with even a minimal biological background. It is to some degree "gee-whiz science," but it is not naive. At only 150 pages of text, this can be an easy evening's read.

One of the book's strengths is that it focuses on the process of science--as a creative, imaginative, unpredictable, messy activity. New ideas and avenues of research often emerge at times and in places where they are least expected. No amount of money or planning can automatically produce significant new discoveries. Science is characterized as fluid and dynamic, and Jacob chides those who would try to develop any universal theory that is static and unalterable. His view of science is clearly no product of simple positivist euphoria, but rather is informed by a more philosophical appreciation of the nature of theory and theory-change than is often the case with older (especially successful) scientists. Finally, Jacob perceives science as similar to other areas of creative human endeavor, such as the arts: all are attempts to understand "reality," and good art and good science do that in a way that functions through the avenue of consensus among colleagues (a bit of social constructionism here).

Despite its strong points, the book has problems. Although it is a good summary of some of the striking developments in molecular biology in the past half-century, it contains nothing particularly new. It is also somewhat repetitive--for example, there is frequent reiteration of the claim that evolution and development both work by preserving and using blocks of genes rather than individual genes. (Still, such messages are important to get across, and, as anyone who teaches knows only too well, repetition is an effective pedagogical device.)

In addition, Jacob espouses the standard scientist's view that research should always be expanding and that increased funding, while not certain to yield new and exciting results, is most likely to do so in the long run. His approach to the subject of social responsibility is also conservative: scientists must be responsible, yes, but they should not curtail their research for fear that it might be misused at some time in the future. He sidesteps the more likely cases in which the results of research are obvious (e.g., plant molecular biologists working for Monsanto on terminator genes, physicists working on missile guidance systems).

Jacob also treats some important issues ahistorically--particularly the Lysenko affair in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, and the whole philosophical school of dialectical materialism. The latter is dismissed (p. 31) with a one-sentence rejection of Engels's Dialectics of Nature without so much as an explanation of what dialectics is all about. The former is presented solely as the passing off of the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics by a charlatan because it agreed with preconceived Soviet ideology (pp. 28-31). No historical context is presented--for example, the series of famines resulting from World War I and the willful destruction of agricultural materiel by fleeing landowners after the 1917 revolution, and the enormous losses in World War II--which may have made the promise of a rapid agricultural breeding program more understandable.

Finally, Jacob's writings evince an enormous faith in the power...