began to write this text when I had to wait a few hours for a flight connection at London Heathrow. I sat down with a coffee and my laptop at a small table, a bit away from the crowds. The topic I was thinking about was how we can make sense of what we know about the genes in our bodies. We know about genes and DNA, about genetic risks associated with mutations we happen to carry, and about the genome functioning within us. All this is something of us, something that belongs to our embodiment, makes it possible for us to live. I listened and looked around.
Complexity is within me, and outside as well. The acoustic space around me was filled by a constant rush from an enormous air ventilation system in the airport hall, an occasional squeak of a not too well lubricated escalator going down to the arrivals level, the chat of some fellow travelers nearby, and a strong, slowly speaking female voice over the loudspeakers giving instructions to two individuals to ‘go immediately to gate 14’. Signs everywhere with written instructions for passengers to go here or there, invitations to buy this or that, screens announcing the next flight departures and the corresponding gate numbers. Here, you just need to know where you want to go, to have the right ticket ready, and this immense machine of air transport will interact with you and take you there, I thought. The planes outside seemed like external extensions of the airport machine, little spin-off machines, which fly away and distribute people to places far off around the globe. That complexity outside was clearly a human-made construct, easy to read, made to be easy to read. Instructions all around. But our bodies? Do the genes make them readable for us too, testable and foreseeable? Genomes as our bodies’ instruction books? That was the question I wanted to think about.
Nobody would doubt that in an airport, the texts we see all around us are texts indeed. The act of gathering information from screens and panels (or from a hastily spoken ‘Hi'ere, how're you?’ at an immigration officer's desk) is essentially a complex act of understanding, and sometimes, if it is not entirely clear what it means, even interpreting. There is a meaning in all these signs. They really are signs, not just things that look like signs. Signs are fascinating constellations. Language is not an object. Language speaks. The information that is understood by passengers making their way through the airport is essentially lingual in its form. Its origin is a human mind, therefore those hearing or reading the messages know that what they hear and see are indeed messages: complex signs that can be understood as meaningful. Somebody wants to say something to you there. But who wants to say something to you through the genome? Is the genetic information information in and ‘for’ the organism? But in what sense of ‘for’?
And what about all those people that I saw sitting, chatting and walking around there in Terminal 5? I know that they are not human-made, and I know that they know it too. My body was not ‘built’ by my parents and the genome was not ‘written’ by them. I am glad, otherwise I would perhaps blame them for all the mistakes and limitations within it. It was rather the nature of their bodies that created my body. Our bodies are self-organizing, living organisms and essentially products of nature. How should we comprehend what we explain when we explain their functioning? Biology tells us how cells and bodies function. But then we need to explain to ourselves and to others what it means for us. It is only the psychological meaning of an experience that constitutes a ‘phenomenon’ [1].
We know that scientists who are gathering information about the structure and functioning of human bodies are supposed to avoid all subjective bias. They should measure and observe. The ideal of scientific knowledge is objectivity, provided by impartial measurement and reproducible experiments. But is this division of the world of knowledge into a realm of human information (that can be understood, misunderstood, that sometimes must be interpreted) and a realm of natural information (that can be gathered by measurements and in experiments) not too simple? Interpretation certainly happens also in biology, most active biologists would admit that. Biological theory is not an enumerative process of copying and pasting information from measurements together and adding them up into theories. Such theories would never make sense. To build theories that do make sense and have explanative power is not just an enumerative but a creative act. You need to see a pattern, a picture in all these data. The scientist's task is much more challenging (and rewarding) than just scooping up data and pasting them together: it is putting pieces together in a puzzle without knowing in advance what image the puzzle will have. Sometimes there are several possible combinations leading to different pictures, different ‘puzzles’ with the same pieces. Theories of the natural sciences sometimes seem to be ‘underdetermined’ by experimental facts, as Quine [2] has claimed. Applied to genetics: is there an alternative picture of the genome besides the image of the instruction book?
The least we must admit is that the life sciences produce descriptions which, in a certain way, interpret nature. The language of biology is no translation from another language; it describes. And this act of describing is essentially an act of making sense of what relates us to ourselves and to others in a certain way. Biological descriptions interpret the biosphere. They interpret the processes going on in our bodies. And they express their interpretation in a way that is meant to be as objective, as comprehensive, and as accurate as possible, in the form of an understandable language. The life sciences open a space of lingual meanings that are expressed in language, meanings that are ‘about’ the nature and the functioning of the body with its cells, membranes, proteins and chromosomes. This step of description is therefore, in a very fundamental sense, also a step of understanding. Aristotle, in his treatise De interpretatione, spoke of hermeneia as the act that is performed on things by language [3, p 105]. If this makes sense, hermeneutics, usually thought to be relevant only for the humanities and social sciences, would have relevance also for the natural sciences.
Again these people sitting about around me: what do they know about their bodies, about their genes? Do they have a picture in their mind of how the genes work in their bodies? If they have taken images from the media, their image will probably be an image of DNA as text, or instruction book, or blueprint. The genes would then contain instructions for the body on how to develop, how to stay alive, how to grow, and how to age. This is the message that is abundant in the media. It is the basic picture the media draw of the meaning of the molecular genetic evidence. Scientists themselves helped to create this picture. It corresponded to their expectations of molecular biology, at least in the 20th century [4, 5]. But today the scientific literature, when we listen to researchers, contains a different view and also the media start to take it up [6-8]. The old paradigm of the genome containing the genetic program has come into disrepute and a new idea is emerging. – Now in more detail:
Hermeneutics
The way in which the results of molecular biology are connected with meaningful images and stories, and how it is socialized, politicized and technologically exploited is deeply cultural. Therefore, molecular biology, even if it is a natural science, can fruitfully be looked at from a hermeneutic point of view. The task of hermeneutics, when we follow one of the most important theorists of hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, is not merely to develop a procedure to understand difficult texts, but to discover and explore the very conditions under which human understanding takes place [9, Part 2, II.1.c]. When we apply this to molecular biology, this means that the task of (genetic) hermeneutics is to discover and explore the conditions under which the meanings of genes, genomes, genetic texts and genetic factors in human life and societies can be understood.
I want to explore some aspects of this hermeneutic process that manifest themselves in the practical, cultural sides of genetics, mainly those that are connected to the fact that genetics is a heavily lingual
