ABSTRACT
For as long as any of us can remember, the gene has been represented predominantly in both science and society as ‘the secret of life’ (Watson 2003), the ‘grail of human genetics’ (quoted in Cook-Deegan 1994), the ‘code of codes’ (Kevles and Hood 1993), and with more prosaic metaphors of ‘blueprints’ and ‘programmes’. Such metaphors are all too familiar, and so for the purposes of this essay I will put them under yet another sign, G. rex: the gene as king, ruler, sovereign legislator and ultimate authority. I choose this representation, G. rex, as a way to build on a set of images that Evelyn
Fox Keller uses to close the book which has contributed greatly to our understanding of how scientific conceptions of ‘the gene’ have changed over the last hundred years, The Century of the Gene (2000). After documenting and analysing the shifting metaphors that not only accompanied but propelled the study of genes and organisms in twentiethcentury life sciences, Keller leaves her readers contemplating two representations of the awe-inspiring thunder lizard, T. rex. In the first image from the not-so-distant past, we see T. rex erect, head raised and tiny forelimbs jutting forward, a towering figure
structured by the invisible fields of paleotonology and evolutionary theory that positioned this dinosaur as an upright reptile. Evidentiary and conceptual changes in these fields that are not on display with the creature but are nevertheless part of the visual representation, begat a new T. rex, now more closely related to birds and with an entirely different but perhaps no less fearsome posture: spine parallel to the ground, head down and forward, and oriented overall, not towards an imposing display of height, but bent towards the hunt, prowling, on the move. The bones themselves are of course unchanged, as are most of the connections
between them; it’s exactly the same T. rex. Yet it is an entirely different T. rex: a new representation re-patterned in accord with new concepts and new imaginings that took place in the research wings of the museum. My G. rex is an extension of Keller’s visual analogy, joining up with her efforts to analyse how ‘the gene’ has been re-conceptualised and re-imagined over time. There are, of course, other ways to metaphorise the emergent paradigm shift that
comes with the territory of the ‘new genetics’. Medical anthropologist Margaret Lock, for example, deploys not a dinosaur analogy but a cosmological one when she gathers some of the same scientific-cultural changes into the phrase ‘the eclipse of the gene’, which, in her analysis, is accompanied by the ‘return of divination’ (Lock 2005). Genes, according to Lock, have been eclipsed because genetic tests for complex conditions such as Alzheimer’s fail to provide the ‘information’ about future health status they promised; such tests are put to use nonetheless, in what Lock describes as less-than-rational divinatory exercises to predict one’s future. Many scientists and analysts of science are casting about for such new metaphors and
images, a number of which I discuss in what follows. Our charge is to approach such ‘representations of changing scientific representations’ critically, but this doesn’t mean asking ‘is the representational metaphor right or wrong?’ so much as it means asking, in terms derived from J.L. Austin’s (Austin 1962) speech act theory, ‘is this figure more or less felicitous?’ – is it well-met, happily encountered, productive of thought and conducive to our most admirable behavior? Even though Lock’s ‘eclipse’ metaphor evokes something important about the contemporary moment, for example, I do not find it especially felicitous. Analysing changing scientific representations of ‘the gene’ in terms of a cyclic occlusion or a cosmic play of enlightening and darkening suggests fixed entities on vast orbits, where the alternatives have long been been laid out and the passing of one (modern reason in the form of genetics) only entails the re-arrival of another (a more primitive divination). With genetic astronomy eclipsed, the narrative appears to run, genetic astrology again rules the darkened day. In my reading of the new genetics, what ‘the gene’ is undergoing is less about obscuring
or hiding and more about a repositioning and refiguring through extension: the gene is not being eclipsed, it is being abducted into new, more complex, more diffuse, and more powerful albeit delicate patterns, networks, systems – or knots, as I will collectively metaphorise these terms here. The king, G. rex, is not dead or eclipsed – it’s a knot.
