which such an account might be squeezed.
Here’s another thing worth knowing about genes: a gene on its own is useless. It can’t replicate,10 it can’t even do the job that evolution “appears” to have given it. Frankly, there is no real point in calling a gene on its own a “gene” at all: the name connotes an ability to (re)produce, but a lone “gene” is sterile, just a molecule that happens to resemble a part of the DNA in a chromosome. It’s common to say that a gene is a piece of DNA with a particular sequence, but the truth is that such a physical entity only becomes a gene in the context of a living system: a cell, at minimum. Genes are central ingredients of life, but by the time you reach the level of the gene there is nothing left that is meaningfully alive.
No, life starts with the cell. And that’s why a gene only has meaning by virtue of its situation in a cell. Does this, then, mean that the cell is more fundamental to biology than the gene? You might as well ask if words are more fundamental to literature than stories. It is “stories” that supply the context through which words acquire meaning, making them more than random sounds or marks on paper.
And by “context” here I don’t just mean that a gene has to be in a cell in order to represent any biologically meaningful information. I mean also that, for example, the history of the cell, and of the entire organism, might matter to the function a gene has. A gene that is “active” at one point in the organism’s growth might represent a quite different message – have a different implication – than at a later or earlier point. Yet the molecular machine (the protein) encoded by the gene may be identical in the two cases. The gene doesn’t change, but the “instruction” it represents does.
You might compare it to the exclamation “Stop it!” Is that an instruction? Well, of course you don’t know from that enunciation alone what it is you are supposed to stop, but perhaps you might regard it as a generic instruction to desist from the activity you’re engaged in. But what if you hear someone shout “Stop it!” as you see a football rolling towards a cliff edge? Is that an instruction to desist in anything, or on the contrary an injunction to action? You need to know the context.
* * *
The gene-centred narrative of life is just one example of our urge to somehow capture the essence of this complicated, astounding process – to be able to say “life starts here!” Science’s reductionist impulse gets a bad press, but breaking complicated things down into simpler ones is a tremendously powerful way of making sense of them. I think that what many people who complain about reductionism are reacting against is not so much this process of analysis – of taking apart – in itself, but the tendency then to assert “this is what really matters”. Science has sometimes been a little slow to recognize the problem with such assertions. When one group of physicists started insisting it was going to find a Theory of Everything – a set of fundamental laws from which the entire physical universe emerged – others pointed out that it would be nothing of the kind, because it would be useless in itself for predicting or explaining most of what we see in the world.
It’s not just that we should resist the temptation to see reductive analysis as a quest to identify what is more important/fundamental/real in the world. Sometimes the phenomenon you’re interested in only exists at a particular level in the hierarchy of scale, and is invisible above and below it. Go to quarks and you have lost chemistry. With genes and life it is not quite that extreme – but at the level of genes you are left with only a rather narrow view of some of the entities and processes that underpin this notion we call “life”. Life remains a meaningful idea from the macro level of the entire biosphere of our planet right down to the micro level of the cell. Within those bounds it encompasses a whole slew of factors: flows of energy and materials, the appearance of order and self-organization, heredity and reproduction. But below the level of the cell, you’ll always be overlooking something vitally important in life. As Franklin Harold has put it:
Something is not accounted for very clearly in the single-minded dissection to the molecular level. Even as the tide of information surges relentlessly beyond anyone’s comprehension, the organism as a whole has been shattered into bits and bytes. Between the thriving catalog of molecules and genes, and the growing cells under my microscope, there yawns a gulf that will not be automatically bridged when the missing facts have all been supplied. No, whole-genome sequencing won’t do it, for the living cells quite fail to declare themselves from those genomes that are already in our databases … The time has come to put the cell together again, form and function and history and all.
It is precisely the multivalent, multiscale implication of the word “life”, too, that creates the tensions, ambiguities and ambivalences about what it means to “grow a human”. We are thereby “making a life”, but not “making life”. That same truth is spoken in jest in a cartoon by Gary Markstein in which two white-coated scientists contemplate IVF embryos. “Life begins at the Petri dish!” exclaims one embryo; “Cloning for research!” demands another. “Even the human embryos are divided”, sighs a scientist.
This is the struggle we face in reconciling our notion of life as human experience with the concept of life as a property of our material substance. We are alive, and so is our flesh. While those two visions of life were synonymous, we could ignore the problem. Having a mini-brain grown in a dish from a piece of one’s arm tends to make that evasion no longer tenable.
It’s no wonder that different cultures at different times have had such diverse attitudes to the connection between the human body in utero, forming in hidden and mysterious fashion from something not remotely human-like, and the human body in the world. The insistence by some people and in some belief systems that “life begins at conception” is a modern utterance, often claiming firm support from the very science that in fact shows how ill-defined the idea is.
But the tension is an old one, as demonstrated by preformation theories of the human fetus. This was an anthropomorphization of the cell as explicit as that in cartoons that attribute voices and opinions to human embryos in petri dishes. Intuition compels us to look for the self in the cell. An insistence on locating it instead in our genes – as cell biologist Scott Gilbert puts it, to see “DNA as our soul” – comes from the same impulse. Perhaps we must be gentle in dispensing with these superstitions. Aren’t old habits always hard to shake off?
GROWING HUMANS THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY
So far, nothing beats sex. Biologically, I mean. If you want to grow a human, you need a sperm and an egg cell – the two cell types called gametes. And you need to get them together. That’s an objective towards which an immense amount of our culture is geared.
In describing the process in which a fertilized egg develops into a person, I hope in this chapter to give back some of the strangeness, the proper unfamiliarity, to embryology: to show how removed our individual origins are from the comforting intimacy of the gracefully curled fetus that is generally our first ultrasonic glimpse of a new human person.
We are folded and fashioned from flesh in its most basic form, according to a set of instructions that is far removed from a kind of genetic step-by-step. We are shaped from living clay according to rules imperfectly known and often imperfectly executed, and which orchestrate a dance between the cell and its environment.
But
