Genes and the dialectics of nature (my title)

["Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Review of "The Century of the Gene", by Evelyn Fox Keller (Harvard University
Press, 192 pages, $33.99 Can)

- reviewed by Alanna Mitchell
Earth sciences reporter for The Globe and Mail (Toronto), December 30, 2000


Sometimes, with great luck, you happen on a book that is wondrous in its ability
to take a topic apart and explain it lucidly.

Sometimes, the joy is to be found in the way an author is able to put those
pieces back together.

And sometimes, it is the elegance both of analysis and synthesis that makes a
book truly great.

The Century of the Gene, by Evelyn Fox Keller, a professor of the history and
philosophy of science at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., reaches that level and then
vaults past it into the category of rare volumes that are unforgettable.

This the sort of book that, once found, can never be relinquished. The breadth
of intellect is so strong, the importance of the subject so acute, the language
so beautifully wrought, that you find yourself drawn to read it again and again,
only to find a new dimension each time.

You have the uncanny sensation of being in a room whose walls are covered with
mirrors reflecting -- you think -- reality. This book seems to take you gently
by the hand and lead you through the mirrors into an unsuspected world beyond.
And then to one never imagined beyond that, and then to hint at yet another
further on. And to do it all in the fresh spirit of exploration, never bound by
the suffocating strictures of orthodoxy.

In fact -- and this, is one of the most intense pleasures of the book -- Fox
Keller's explanation of how the thinking about the gene has evolved over the
past century is both as simple and as complex as the gene itself. Her topic is
also her metaphor.

Not that this is easy reading. While the language is clear and spare, it is so
densely packed that she does the lay reader a great favour by summarizing
herself both in an introduction and in a conclusion. Still, reading this book
often feels akin to reading a volume of chewy poetry.

Fox Keller centres the book around four seemingly simple questions: How is
genetic stability regulated? What does a gene do? How is an organism made? What
keeps development on track? She methodically traces the historical roots of each
question and shows how the thinking on it has evolved over time.

Her queries stem from the developments of the Human Genome Project, which began
in 1990 and is steadily mapping the complete genomes of humans. Fox Keller was
an early skeptic.

But now, having watched the dazzling success of the project, she has written
this book to set the theoretical stage for a concept that is heretical to the
public and to some scientists. Rather than explaining the mysteries of human
life, the Human Genome Project has merely helped to show scientists the vast
areas still to be explained.

As for the gene, the very concept of the thing that helped get scientists this
far along the track of knowledge is now increasingly suspected to be obsolete,
even unhelpful. It is this paradox that fascinates Fox Keller.

It comes to this: Molecular biologists have long been confident that once they
understood the organization of genetic information, they would understand the
secret of life. Now that they are beginning to realize that genetic organization
is a modest first step toward understanding biological meaning and that the two
are different.

What that means is that the functions routinely assigned to the gene --
guaranteeing stability from generation to generation, carrying responsibility
for individual traits, containing the program for development -- are now found
to be spread out among other "players in the game of life."

The trick now is to figure out what all the other players are and how they work.

For Fox Keller, the overwhelming need to look at that is driven by a different
force. While scientists over the past century have been fixated on understanding
evolution, they have not fully examined development.

The wonderful paradox is that both have to happen at the same time, within the
same organism, for life to work. There has to be both stasis and change, perhaps
even a form of Kant's circular causality that she refers to in another context:
every component is reciprocally both end and means.

Here's her analogy, borrowed in part from Stephen Jay Gould. If evolution -- so
driven by chance -- were a videotape, it would have a different ending each time
it was played. Fox Keller's concern is how each embryo, now that it is evolved,
makes it to adulthood with such reliability, despite being driven by so many
forces of disorder both within and without.

For her, if development were a videotape, it would have countless variations of
plot but the same ending each time it was played.

In other words, her concern is not genetic stability but developmental
stability. And this is the area she believes a new era of biological
investigation will turn to. So she pleads for a way to move past the concept of
the gene and even the language surrounding it that has so fired the public and
scientific imagination:

"Genes have had a glorious run in the twentieth century, and they have inspired
incomparable and astonishing advances in our understanding of living systems,"
she writes. "But these very advances will necessitate the introduction of other
concepts, other terms and other ways of thinking about biological organization,
thereby inevitably loosening the grip that genes have had on the imagination of
life scientists these many decades."

The fallout if that doesn't happen could be serious, she posits. If the gene,
with all its satisfying, misleading baggage, continues to hold the public's
attention, it may shape hopes and anxieties "in ways that are often off target,
and in fact counter-productive to effective discussion of public policy even
where the issues are real and urgent."

In other words, here we are, on the cusp of the 21st century, musing about
genetically modified organisms and cloning and genetic determination of our
babies, and trying to figure out how to control them with laws. Yet many of the
concepts that underlie them are not scientifically realistic.

Nothing, says Fox Keller in her complex way, is that simple.