ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 introduces the history of the concept of the gene and how it can be read as the history of and challenges to reductionism in genetic science. It briefly discusses the central question of the book: how and why in the creative struggles of individual scientists reductionism was sustained, adopted, questioned, and challenged and how the book is an attempt to reinterpret the history of reductionism in genetic science over the twentieth century as an affective/emotive history. The chapter introduces five pioneering moments in the history of reductionism in genetic science/molecular biology, which are further discussed in the book. They are 1) the founding of the idea of the particulate gene in the work of H. J. Muller, 2) the gene as code-script as posited in the Noble Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s book What Is Life?, 3) the discovery of the double helix in the science of Rosalind Franklin, 4) the challenge to the concept of the particulate gene in Barbara McClintock’s theories on control and transposition, and 5) the hyper-reductionism of Craig Venter in sequencing and mapping the human genome. The chapter then briefly introduces the conception of the scientist-subjectivity so adopted and discussed in the book.
