Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology by Evelyn Fox Keller

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 497 ing Consumption and The Politics ofDomestic Consumption are fitting guide books for any historian of technology contemplatingjust such a venture. Regina Lee Blaszczyk Dr. Blaszczyk is assistant professor of history and American studies at Boston Uni­ versity, where she teaches material culture, the history of technology, and 20th-cen­ tury U.S. history. Refigwring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology. By Evelyn Fox Keller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Pp. xix+134; bibliography, index. $20.00 (cloth). Molecular biology has attracted historical attention in recent years, prompted perhaps by the Human Genome Project, the rise of the biotechnology industry, or the exuberant participant-histories of the 1970s and 1980s. A satisfactory explanation of this scientific field and its cultural and political moorings has yet to appear but much new work is on the way. Evelyn Fox Keller’s volume fills a special niche. It provides a broad overview of the uses of metaphor in scientific descriptions of the organism and the gene, and it connects molecular biology to a wide range of other technologically driven fields, including systems engi­ neering and computing. The book consists ofthree essays that Keller delivered in the June 1993 Wellek Library Lectures in Critical The­ ory at the University of California at Irvine. There are very few foot­ notes; a brief bibliography is included. Keller first explores how the concept of gene action has evolved from the turn of the century to the present. She considers the pro­ ductivity ofT. H. Morgan’s interpretation ofgene action, suggesting that the autonomous, powerful gene imagined by Morgan and his coworkers permitted them to frame important and solvable prob­ lems. By ignoring development, they could focus on phenomena that could be more easily tracked. Comparing A. H. Sturtevant’s lin­ ear construction of development to Richard Goldschmidt’s concep­ tion ofdevelopment as a complicated system, she proposes that Stur­ tevant’s ideas—which in effect subsumed development under genetics—had tremendous appeal because of their simplicity. The organism seemed to simply unfold from the genes, and even devel­ opment itselfwas genetically controlled. But gradually, over the last two or three decades, this construction of the gene and gene action has begun to unravel. The cytoplasm—traditionally gendered fe­ male—has attracted new attention, and the idea of “gene action” has been replaced by “gene activation.” Keller attributes this shift to many causes, including new technologies for manipulating DNA, shifts in gender relations, and historical relations between Germany and the United States. 498 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE In her second essay, Keller compares Maxwell’s Demon to Dar­ win’s Being to Schroedinger’s code script—his term for DNA. She points out that the informational and directive gene was, for Schroedinger and others, a solution to a paradox. This paradox was the apparent ability of life to violate the second law of thermodynamics. Though he did not use the imagery itself, Schroedinger made DNA the equivalent of Maxwell’s Demon or of the Archimedian point from which the world could be moved. The ability of life to violate physical laws was a consequence ofthe information contained in the chromosomes, he proposed, for the chromosomes in effect concen­ trated order. Here Keller excavates an important piece of the tan­ gled relationship between physics and molecular biology. For some 19th-century physicists, Maxwell’s Demon was a technologically so­ phisticated being—a pointsman on a railway, a strategist sitting at his telegraph wires—an intelligent being capable of influencing in­ dividual molecules. The mechanical nature of the Demon was im­ portant to them—itwas a machine; similarly, for Schroedinger, DNA had machine-like properties. It combined the skills of architect and builder, containing a complete plan for the execution of the body. This is rich material with the potential for further work. Finally, Keller considers the relationships between postwar systems engineers, cyberscientists, and molecular biologists. She first prom­ ises to explore the computer’s impact on biological representations of the organism but then goes on to do several other things instead. She shows that those attempting to build purposeful behavior into machines, such as systems analysts and engineers building warheads, drew on...