complex inter-textual relationships (genetic information vs. information about genes), we can more clearly see how cultural understandings of biology and biological theory work together. And we can also deduce what ethical implications different understandings may have.
Political Texts
One of the key moments when genetics became visibly politicized and a political text of genetics was written, was the announcement that a ‘working draft’ of the human genome sequence was finished. This took place on June 26, 2000; the key figures were President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair. At a media conference in the White House, they announced it as an ‘historic achievement’ of science. The politicians’ task was to find a comprehensible explanation as to why it was so important to humankind to know the boring details about the order of the T, A, G, and Cs in their DNA.
According to the White House press communiqué issued one day before, the key point in the subsequent announcement by Clinton and Blair would be:
‘that the international Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics Corporation have both completed an initial sequencing of the human genome – the genetic blueprint for human beings’ [10].
People who did not know about genetics and the biological significance of DNA did possibly know what a ‘blueprint’ is supposed to be: a detailed plan, more precisely a paper-based reproduction of a construction plan as it is commonly used in architecture or engineering.1 The image of the blueprint seemed to fit with DNA because it is also a result of a copying process that occurs in every cell division.
However, the message contained in the lightheartedly spoken phrase the ‘genetic blueprint for human beings’ was complex and contained several elements. We can perhaps better identify them when we tentatively translate ‘blueprint’ into the term ‘construction plan’. I see at least six elements in this statement:
(i) There is a construction plan that contains the details about how we are made;
(ii) Development and life are essentially a constructive process based on a plan;
(iii) The DNA sequence is or represents the construction plan for building the organism, i.e. for its development and life;
(iv) By sequencing the human genome we learn the details of the construction plan for human beings;
(v) Now we know how human beings are constructed, and
(vi) Two countries that are scientific leaders, the US and the UK, have achieved this.
Bill Clinton, in his oral speech, was even more outspoken:
‘Today's announcement represents more than just an effort making triumph of science and reason. After all, when Galileo discovered he could use the tools of mathematics and mechanics to understand the motion of celestial bodies, he felt, in the words of one imminent researcher, that “he had learned the language in which God created the universe”. Today we are learning the language in which God created life’ [12].
This breakthrough must be immense, comparable to Galileo's mathematical astronomy and the birth of modern cosmology (that was not anti-religious). The laws of nature were thought of as language that God used in His (perhaps still ongoing) act of creation. With his reference to God and to creation, Clinton theologized or sacralized the genome. Genome sequences do not just look like language, they are language, even the most important language one can imagine: the language in which God created us as living creatures.
It is interesting to see how the old biblical image of the ‘book of life’ has been transformed by this explanative step. Originally it had a moral meaning. In Exodus (32: 32f) it was said that HaShem had a book that contains the names of those who are righteous and worthy of life. Those who are blotted out of this book will die. In the context of genomics, the book of life and its language is re-read as God's language, the instructions He uses in His work of creation. The moral meaning, which said that the book of life noted who is worthy and should live, drops away. A new moral meaning is established instead of the old. Now, it is a hopeful source of benefit for human life, of good to be done, particularly of medical innovations and cures for some of the most devastating diseases.
National interests certainly played their roles. Behind the Human Genome Project was an international partnership led by the US and the UK. For this purpose it was useful that it was something so powerful that could be announced: nothing less powerful than the language in which humans were made. It is human life's innermost secret, previously known only and exclusively to the One who created us. Now it would be available and accessible for human use. But it is not just the power that this genetic knowledge provides to those who control it that makes this performance by Clinton and Blair a political text, it is also the structure of this knowledge itself that proves to be power-related. From a Foucauldian perspective it cannot be overlooked that there is a correspondence between the genome as the controller, genetic information that is our ‘makeup’, the language in which we are created and the power of those who have control over genomic information or who control the experts who provide the necessary genetic know how.
Metaphysical Texts
When the metaphor of the ‘program’ first appeared in the published literature of molecular biology in the early 1960s, very little was known on a molecular basis about how different genes actually work in development. The genetic program was a story in a nutshell that explained comprehensively in advance how genes could organize development and make life possible. If the genome contains only information (a sequence of four different nucleotides), an explanation was needed of how organisms can be made of information, i.e. how the 1-dimensional sequence of components of the DNA polymer can be transformed into a 3- or 4-dimensional reality of an organism. The program was the key idea.
The notion of the ‘gene’ originated much earlier, but in another context. It was the problem of inheritance not development that first led biology to talk about genes. Johannsen's famous definition in 1909 [13] aimed at the factors – whatever their precise nature may be – that can be passed on by egg and sperm and determine the traits and characteristics of the next generation of organisms. The gene was an answer to what we can dub the ‘bottleneck-problem’ of biology [14]. This problem is located within the gap between the generations. How can the form and structure of a species in one generation be rebuilt from the two tiny germ cells that are passed onto the next generation? Oocyte and sperm fuse and build together one single cell, the zygote, which must be capable of developing into the whole new organism. What component of the oocyte can be responsible for this? A major discovery was that it is not the membranes, not cytoplasm, not the proteins, but nucleic acid, essentially the nucleic acid contained in the chromosomes. Chemically it is DNA, a double-stranded, enormously long molecule shaped as a double helix. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered its chemical structure in 1953. The implication was, however, that a sequence of only four different building blocks, the nucleotides, must be the key responsible element in heredity. How can that be possible? How can a sequence, or the information contained in the sequence, guide development? The bottleneck-problem was tightened from a cellular level to a molecular one.
Information is essentially a pattern of differences that can be reliably translated into another pattern and therefore can be said to determine the second pattern. However, genetic information was not thought to be semantic in the sense of carrying an intention to represent this second pattern. It is neither the previous generation that encodes
