Keller, Evelyn Fox. (1995) Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth Century Biology. (The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine). New York: Columbia University Press.

Evelyn Fox Keller’s Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth Century Biology is divided into three distinct sections, each of which chronicles a particular era in the development of biology in this century and examines the prevailing metaphor of that era and its impact on research. The first chapter, entitled "Language and Science: Genetics, Embryology, and the Discourse of Gene Action" examines the "guiding metaphor" of early genetics: gene action, or the gene as an active agent which animates and constructs organisms. Keller traces the development of this metaphor through both genetics and embryology and considers how it drives research as much as it shapes it. She argues that it is the confidence in the power and agency of genes that gives rise to projects like the Human Genome Project (HGP).

By 1924 geneticists were already arguing that "the genes are the primary internal agents controlling development," and by 1926 genes had been declared "the basis of life" (7). Keller argues that this claim of priority is both ontological and temporal: first the gene, then life; the gene is "at one time a fundamental building block and an animating force" (10). In the early 1950s, a new metaphor was introduced by Watson and Crick: the gene as information, a metaphor which "authorized the expectation—anticipated in the notion of gene action—that biological information does not increase in the course of development. It is already fully contained in the genome" (19). In a more familiar turn, biology, it was argued, is destiny. The implication of this for research, as Keller argues, is that "if our genes really make us what we are, it makes perfect sense to set the identification of these sequences as the primary, and indeed ultimate, goal of biology" (21). In contrast to this, there existed other metaphors which argued not for strict unidirectional causation but for something far more complex. DNA can be regarded as "data to a parallel computing network embedded in the global geometrical and biomedical structure of the cell" (28) and genes cast as "context dependent catalysts of cellular changes" or "passive sources of material upon which a cell can draw" (29). This shift in metaphor is important because it has implications beyond simple changes in language. As Keller argues, "the ways in which we talk about scientific objects are not simply determined by empirical evidence but rather actively influence the kind of evidence we seek (and hence are more likely to find)" (35).

The second chapter, titled "Molecules, Messages and Memory: Life and the Second Law," offers analysis that weaves quantum physics into Lacanian discourse. It is by far the most difficult chapter of the book, relying heavily on complex scientific theory; nonetheless it contains some interesting and worthwhile insights. Keller traces the introduction of the idea of chromosomes as "code-script" to the work of Erwin Schroedinger, the "father" of quantum mechanics, who in the 1940s was searching for an answer to the apparent contradiction between the relentless dissipation described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the apparent stability of genetic memory. He argued that the resolution is found in the chromosomes "that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual’s future development. . . . They are law-code and executive power—or to use another simile, they are architect’s plan and builder’s craft—in one" (47). Schroedinger’s most pressing question was "What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive" (66). His answer was that matter lived through a process of negative entropy, that "the device by which [it] maintains itself. . . really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment" (68). In other words, an organism stays alive by resisting death. To underscore the importance of context (as opposed to empirical observation) in scientific metaphors, Keller points out that at the time of this writing, Schroedinger was in exile from the Nazi occupation of Germany. It may be important to note that his earlier writings lack what Keller calls this "preoccupation with survival" (70).

The final chapter of Keller’s book, "The Body of a New Machine: Situating the Organism Between Telegraphs and Computers," discusses the development of new communication and information technologies and the metaphors they helped generate. Molecular biology, Keller contends, "sought to reduce its world, to find the essence of life in organisms so rudimentary and so simple as to be immune from the mystifying and recalcitrant chaos of higher complex organisms" (81). At the same moment, information theory and cyberscience emerged to cope with the explosion and complexity of information that is the result of developments in telephony. The contrast between cyberscience and molecular biology represents a contest between complexity and simplicity.

These tensions can be traced to disciplinary transgressions between physics and biology, Keller asserts. Molecular biology, trying to build itself in part by shedding traditional ideas of "organismic" biology and its preoccupation with function, purpose and organisation, is mirrored, ironically, by engineers and physicists who are grabbing at older organic models to develop representations of circular feedback and systems theory. Biology is used in these theories as a model to explain the functioning of machines and social systems, which are contained by the catch-all "organism," an assemblage of "sensory devices, communication facilities, data analysing devices, centres of judgement, directions of action, and effectors, or executing agents" (90). Since the central features of a system for these theorists are "function, coordination, interdependence, and purpose," the biological organism represents the ideal model (91).

In contrast, the field of genetics was developing with "the epistemological and technological benefits of reductio ad simplicatum" the most elegant example of which is Francis Crick’s "Central Dogma" of 1958 which emphasised the unidirectional causality of genes. "Instead of circular feedback, it promised a linear structure of causal influence, from the central office of DNA to the outlying subsidiaries of the protein factory" (93). It is information, in the colloquial sense, that is travelling from executive office to shop floor in this model, and it is the colloquial use of information that leads to the conflation of information and instruction that is so common to discourse on genetics. This last point is especially poignant when one considers, as Keller does, that "techniques of recombinant DNA created a new order of opportunities for cloning and sequencing, for propelling molecular biology even further toward becoming an informational science, a science of command, control and communication" (113).

"Cyberscience and molecular biology may have been part of the same historical moment," Keller continues, but they were moving in opposite directions. "While the first one was busy using the organism to illustrate a new kind of machine, the other was seeking to model the organism after machines of yesteryear" (97). On the other hand, developmental biology, as embryology had come to be known by the mid 1960s, has resisted the tendency to claim the "notion of information to support a highly reductionist and unidirectional causal structure," arguing instead for a dynamic and interactive conception of organisms. "The bottom line for [scientists working in this vein] was that genes alone cannot suffice to explain the phenomenon of embryogenesis; one way or another, the entire organism must be involved" (103). Unfortunately, no one could pinpoint exactly what that involvement might be, and with simplicity as "the new credo in biology" it is a line of questioning that lacks the popular appeal of the linear, causal models of gene action.

This last point underscores the importance of Keller’s work in these essays. Evaluating the importance of her observation essentially implies an evaluation of the power of words. How important are metaphors? What difference does it really make whether genes are thought of as CEOs or foot soldiers? "Can words have force in and of themselves?" Keller answers her own question early in the first essay when she argues that words "acquire force only through their influence on human actors. Through their influence on scientists, administrators, and funding agencies, they provide powerful rationales and incentives for mobilizing resources, for identifying particular research agendas, for focusing our scientific energies and attention in particular directions" (21).

The impact is clear, then, and in projects like the effort to map the human genome we see it at work. The usefulness of Keller’s investigation in this regard, therefore, is as a model for the interrogation of current and future scientific discourse with an eye to anticipating its impacts.