F.W.A.

Korsten - Refiguring Life - Review

EVELYN FOX KELLER
Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology,
In barely fifty years, biology has changed from
a stuffy, slightly reactionary discipline into the
avant-garde among the sciences. It is a total
transformation, which makes it a
metamorphosis. Certainly when it comes to
genetics, biology is the discipline which knocks
the hardest on the doors of the future. While
half a century ago it was mainly interested in
the past, in the slow and gradual course of
evolution, in classification and registration, the
scene is now determined by large-scale
technological manipulation. This sweeping
development has created some ethical
problems, which makes the how and why of
this metamorphosis a pressing question, and
one which leads directly to another: what does
the future have in store for us? A
metamorphosis may seem miraculous if you
are in the middle of the transformation, but the
miracle can always be rationalized afterwards.
Such rationalizations are often disguised
projections into the future: scientists claim to
have understood what has happened, and
pretend that they will be able to direct
(however marginally) the course of the
follow-up. Thus, Evelyn Fox Keller's latest
book - Refiguring Life: Metaphors of
Twentieth-Century Biology - is a
combination of retrospective reconstruction
and (disguised) forward projection. But
although Fox Keller describes a change, she
does not explain it, which invalidates her
projection into the future.
Fox Keller's first two chapters sketch this
change on the basis of what were once
powerful scientific metaphors. In the first
chapter, she deals with the metaphor of
'Sleeping Beauty': the beautiful egg cell
peacefully waiting to be fertilized by the
handsome and active prince, the sperm cell.
The Sleeping Beauty metaphor was not only
annoyingly 'gendered', it also blocked attention
being given to the possibility of independent
activity from the egg cell, which could enable
its fusion with the sperm. It is now known that
the egg cell itself is indeed active, in other
words, actively promotes fertilization, which is
quite different from passively awaiting
penetration by a sperm cell. So, exit the
metaphor of Sleeping Beauty. Fox Keller
describes magnificently how the central
metaphor functioned and disappeared; it is
unfortunate that she does not explain how
scientists acquired the funds, the possibilities
and the fresh ideas to develop the renewed
vision.
Therefore, metaphors are strong, but not
all-powerful, as once again becomes evident in
the second chapter. Here, the central
metaphor is the manikin - the little man -in the
gene, the homunculus, the demon, or the
'signal man'. What Darwin still called 'Being' in
1844 is the beginning of a line which Fox
Keller continues or follows via Maxwell's
'demon' in 1870, to Schroedinger's 'soldiers'
or 'local government stations' in 1944. This
cognitive metaphor implies that a gene directs
the development of cells according to a coded
script, as if it were an authoritative entity with a
will and intentions of its own. This view allows
for concrete scientific progress. At the same
time, the metaphor stopped scientists from
thinking about the gene as part of a feedback
system. They do now, of course. Nowadays,
biological organisms are - also - defined as a
message in a system of messages. Molecules,
for example, give orders to, or respond to
orders from, other molecules. Again, Fox
Keller gives a clear description of a historical
development. It is a pity that she does not
probe deeper into the flow of money, the
ideas, the individuals and the institutions which
made the metaphor obsolete.
However, Fox Keller does give one important
explanation. In particular the American war
machine has had unexpected creative spin-offs. (And not only 'has
had'; it still has. Fox Keller reports how, as early as 1950,
Watson and Cricks gave the first definition of a
cyborg in an advisory document to the US Air
Force. Another military spin-off: the computer
was first used to speed up complex
military-ballistic calculations, and then speeded
up thought about feedback systems. As a
result, biological organisms can now be
defined as cyber systems, or as forms of
'circular feedback'. And finally, our present
Internet began as a nuclear-proof
communication system developed by the
American Ministry of Defense.) In this
connection, what is Fox Keller's explanation
for the transmutation of concepts from physics
to biology? She argues that, during World War
II, the research into fundamental particles was
organized better and on a larger scale, and
was therefore accelerated. When the war was
over, the purse strings were tightened, and a
great many physicists were left in need of a
job. They began to look for opportunities to
apply their methods elsewhere, and as a result,
the theory of quantum mechanics was
translated, biologists concentrated on the
search for the smallest particle - gene, DNA -
and the system of which it was part. Fox
Keller's retrospective rationalization fails
for two reasons: after World War II, there was
not more work in biology than in physics; and
the shift from physics to biology had started
earlier - without any necessity on the part of
physics, and without biology requesting it.
Moreover, the careful observer will also
discover tendencies towards genetics and
manipulation within the field of biology itself. It
remains particularly regrettable that Fox Keller
does not explain what drove the physicist
Schroedinger, even before the war was over,
to make his move from physics to biology in
his lecture What is life (1944). Perhaps there
is no explanation. Why would a famous
physicist, for no apparent reason, suddenly
step onto the field of biology; and moreover,
right away with a lecture which would totally
transform the nature of this other discipline?
Failing to explain this, not even attempting to,
is as good as concluding that science develops
in mysterious ways. Such a conclusion is not
exactly shocking, but, for an approach with the
pretensions of being critical, this means that the
reach of this criticism is limited. A second
problem is that Fox Keller only examines the
role of the war machine from an institutional or
instrumental point of view. In an earlier book -
Secrets of Life And Secrets of Death - she
treated the military machine more critically, but
even so, she avoided the problem of how
undesired metaphors and inherently violent
institutions could contribute to desirable human
progress.
Both points of criticism come together here:
basically, evaluation and criticism are only
possible in retrospect. Hannah Arendt defined
human development in the future perfect, as in
'it will have been'. The implication of this vision
is self-evident: it is difficult to determine the
agenda of the present, and impossible to
determine that of the future. Around 1944,
biology took a new course, and nobody then
knew where it would lead. Technical facilities
lent a hand, as did institutional, and economic,
social circumstances. All this is ready-to-eat
food for the scientific sociologist. All that
remains is that puzzling first step. After all,
what Schroedinger said in his lecture could
have been nonsense, could it not? What
Refiguring Life therefore makes clear is
that although something is indeed being
re-figured, there is also, always, somewhere,
the courage to go in for new, basically
unknown possibilities. Biology has changed
modally, from 'it was like this' to 'it will have
been like this'. This makes Fox Keller's project
slightly paradoxical: critical, but only in
retrospect. To paraphrase Arendt: only by
having been published can a work be judged -
afterwards. In this respect, ethics is trailing
endlessly behind the facts. In the case of
modern biology, this is a disconcerting idea, at
least to all those who cannot accept, as a
matter of principle, that the present always
runs ahead of us into a future. translation
OLIVIER / WYLIE