This is a detailed history of one of the most important and dramatic
episodes in modern science, recounted from the novel vantage point of
the dawn of the information age and its impact on representations of
nature, heredity, and society. Drawing on archives, published sources,
and interviews, the author situates work on the genetic code (1953-70)
within the history of life science, the rise of communication
technosciences (cybernetics, information theory, and computers), the
intersection of molecular biology with cryptanalysis and linguistics,
and the social history of postwar Europe and the United States.
Kay draws out the historical specificity in the process by which the
central biological problem of DNA-based protein synthesis came to be
metaphorically represented as an information code and a writing
technology--and consequently as a "book of life." This molecular writing
and reading is part of the cultural production of the Nuclear Age, its
power amplified by the centuries-old theistic resonance of the "book of
life" metaphor. Yet, as the author points out, these are just metaphors:
analogies, not ontologies. Necessary and productive as they have been,
they have their epistemological limitations. Deploying analyses of
language, cryptology, and information theory, the author persuasively
argues that, technically speaking, the genetic code is not a code, DNA
is not a language, and the genome is not an information system
(objections voiced by experts as early as the 1950s).
Thus her historical reconstruction and analyses also serve as a critique
of the new genomic biopower. Genomic textuality has become a fact of
life, a metaphor literalized, she claims, as human genome projects
promise new levels of control over life through the meta-level of
information: control of the word (the DNA sequences) and its editing and
rewriting. But the author shows how the humbling limits of these
scriptural metaphors also pose a challenge to the textual and material
mastery of the genomic "book of life."
