ABSTRACT
This essay grew out of my response to a television series hosted and written by Canadian broadcaster, environmental activist and geneticist David Suzuki. I first viewed the four-part program in the UK, where it was called Cracking the Code (BBC2, 1993), and then again upon my return to Canada where it was aired on PBS as The Secret of Life. While recognizing the need to devise packaging strategies for diverse national markets, the interchangeable titles also reflect a conflation of the cybernetic and the organic, of code and life inherent to the informatic basis of genetics. Indeed, a recurring image throughout The Secret of Life visualizes this to perfection: the camera tracks-in on a room lined with filing cabinets stacked with spreadsheets of DNA’s coded instructions or “molecular software,” it then tracks-out to Suzuki who explains, “all this to spell out you or me.” This “life code” defines the new frontier upon which Suzuki’s enlightenment drama and companion book Redesigning the Living World (1993) is played out.
