Post by Admin on Jan 20, 2024 0:49:30 GMT
Artists of our own lives
The genome is the starting point for a performance we enact over a lifetime, not a blueprint we’ve got to follow
aeon.co/essays/why-its-time-to-replace-the-genetic-blueprint-idea
In a popular article in Scientific American in 1955, at the dawn of the molecular genetic age, the Soviet defector, physicist and polymath George Gamow wrote: ‘Comparing a living cell with a factory, we can consider its nucleus as the manager’s office and the chromosomes as the filing cabinets where all the production plans and blueprints are stored.’ In May 2023, when Eric Green, director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, announced the newly released human pangenome – a collection of genomes representing the spectrum of human diversity in aggregate – he described it as ‘providing an expanding view of humanity’s DNA blueprint’.
The ‘genetic blueprint’ is just one example of the rich linguistic vocabulary of the genome. The production of proteins from DNA is called gene ‘expression’ and involves the ‘transcription’ of the DNA ‘code’ into ‘messenger’ RNA, followed by its ‘translation’ into the sequence of amino acids that create a protein molecule. The blueprint idea implies that genes encode the general shape and function of the body, and that developmental differences from these encoded plans are perturbations or errors around a prior design or evolved intention. The genetic blueprint reinforces the idea that the answers to all interesting biological questions lie in our genes, and that other lines of research are either indirect or trivial.
In Who Wrote the Book of Life? (2000), the historian of science Lily Kay documented how linguistic metaphors in genetics morphed, during the mid-20th century, from descriptive analogies into scientific ‘ontologies’ – concepts about what genes really are, and what they do. These ontologies morphed from metaphors into specific concepts, and guided scientific research itself.
Since Gamow coined the genetic blueprint, however, we have learned an astounding amount about the developmental and physiological regulation of gene expression. In 1980, for instance, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus discovered several entirely new classes of genes in Drosophila fruit flies that were later found to regulate development in all multicellular animal bodies from humans to horseshoe crabs. Their discovery initiated a new era of explosive research in molecular developmental biology, and they went on to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. We now understand that the embryonic development of the complex organs and the anatomical features of animal bodies involve detailed molecular conversations between cells and tissues through which cells and groups of cells establish their identities, achieve their complex morphologies, and establish their spatial and physiological relations. Although cells draw on genomic resources in this process, it is the molecules, cells, tissues and organs of the body that are the active agents in its material development.
The genome is the starting point for a performance we enact over a lifetime, not a blueprint we’ve got to follow
aeon.co/essays/why-its-time-to-replace-the-genetic-blueprint-idea
In a popular article in Scientific American in 1955, at the dawn of the molecular genetic age, the Soviet defector, physicist and polymath George Gamow wrote: ‘Comparing a living cell with a factory, we can consider its nucleus as the manager’s office and the chromosomes as the filing cabinets where all the production plans and blueprints are stored.’ In May 2023, when Eric Green, director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, announced the newly released human pangenome – a collection of genomes representing the spectrum of human diversity in aggregate – he described it as ‘providing an expanding view of humanity’s DNA blueprint’.
The ‘genetic blueprint’ is just one example of the rich linguistic vocabulary of the genome. The production of proteins from DNA is called gene ‘expression’ and involves the ‘transcription’ of the DNA ‘code’ into ‘messenger’ RNA, followed by its ‘translation’ into the sequence of amino acids that create a protein molecule. The blueprint idea implies that genes encode the general shape and function of the body, and that developmental differences from these encoded plans are perturbations or errors around a prior design or evolved intention. The genetic blueprint reinforces the idea that the answers to all interesting biological questions lie in our genes, and that other lines of research are either indirect or trivial.
In Who Wrote the Book of Life? (2000), the historian of science Lily Kay documented how linguistic metaphors in genetics morphed, during the mid-20th century, from descriptive analogies into scientific ‘ontologies’ – concepts about what genes really are, and what they do. These ontologies morphed from metaphors into specific concepts, and guided scientific research itself.
Since Gamow coined the genetic blueprint, however, we have learned an astounding amount about the developmental and physiological regulation of gene expression. In 1980, for instance, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus discovered several entirely new classes of genes in Drosophila fruit flies that were later found to regulate development in all multicellular animal bodies from humans to horseshoe crabs. Their discovery initiated a new era of explosive research in molecular developmental biology, and they went on to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. We now understand that the embryonic development of the complex organs and the anatomical features of animal bodies involve detailed molecular conversations between cells and tissues through which cells and groups of cells establish their identities, achieve their complex morphologies, and establish their spatial and physiological relations. Although cells draw on genomic resources in this process, it is the molecules, cells, tissues and organs of the body that are the active agents in its material development.