Shattered body shattered self.

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Is the genome a computer? Not, "is the genome, in the way It is constructed and In the way it functions, analogous to the way a computer is constructed and functions"?, but instead, is the genome a computer in its own right. a new class of computer"? This, it seems, is the furtive question underlying the emergent biotechnologies which use online databases, proprietary software, data mining tools, automated sequencing computers, neural nets, combinatoric algorithms for "rational drug design"--and many more practices which are imaged in this supplement.

There are many ways to understand contemporary biotech and the genome--one has only to visit GenBank, (1) one of the main database repositories, to see what researchers see: a myriad of "windows" and "maps" of DNA, RNA, splice sites, promoter regions, SNP (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) sites, ESTs (Expressed Sequence Tags), sequence-structure data, and meta-search engines which provide cross-database comparisons. But along with this, we can also note the "extra-scientific" windows onto the genome, from science-fiction film to policy and legal debates to the various efforts to clone dead pets. There is, then, no single way to navigate the genome, other than to remain attentive to what Donna Haraway calls "corporealization," or the processes by which "relations and practices get mistaken for non-tropic things-in-themselves." (2) What is provided here is a compound view: a visual organization that layers tables-as-taxonomies (e.g., The Periodic Table) with temporal tables (the monthly calendar) with the table -as-index (Web site screenshots and URLs). The reading of this layered representation is further adumbrated by the careful Juxtaposition of the contents of the cells, suggesting that the genome is above all a heterogeneous phenomenon that constantly hovers between science and society.

In our post-genomic" era we can expect to see more pop science books that deal with biotechnology. Already, secondary accounts, such as Matthew Ridley's Genome (3) and Jeremy Rifkin's The Biotech Century. (4) have offered us bestsellers that respectively celebrate and criticize biotech for a general public. Between Ridley's "gee-whiz" account and Rifkin's demonizatlon of biotech, it is interesting to consider Pierre Baidi's recent book The Shattered Self. (5) Several things are worth noting about this book: first, Baldi is a well-known researcher in the nascent field of "bioinformatics." Bioinformatics may be simply described as computational and computer-science approaches to molecular biology and biotech research. The computerization of the human genome project is a prime example of bioinformatics applied. Baldi is also the co-author of one of the first textbooks on bioinformatics, which makes extensive use of methods borrowed from Artificial intelligence (such as machine-learning approaches). In a not ins ignificant way, then, Baldi's book suggests that the new voice of biotech--that is, in Michel Foucualt's terms, who may have access to speak in relation to "truth" about biotech--is the bioinformatician. This hybrid figure is not a molecular biologist or biochemist (as were Francis Crick and James Watson), but an interdisciplinary combination of molecular biologist and computer scientist, it goes without saying that the starting point for someone trained in this field is that "DNA is information."

But more than this, Baldi's book is significant because of its basic premise: biotech research is transforming the way we think about "life" to such an extent that it reveals our common notions of a "whole," unified self as an illusion. In other words, where many pop science books ventriloquize science in order to re-affirm basic humanist values (enabling technologies in Genome, the dehumanization of patenting in The Biotech Century), Baldi puts forth a strange and perplexing suggestion: that our notions of "self" and subjecthood are not consonant with the biomolecular understanding of "self" and should thus be foregone: "Through millions of years of evolution our brains have been wired to provide us with an inner feeling of self, a feeling that each of us is a unique individual delimited by precise

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boundaries...A fundamental argument of this book is that this self-centered view of the world is problematic--in fact, it is 'scientifically' wrong. It is the result of evolutionary accidents. The reason for its past success lies in being an adequate model of the world during our evolutionary bootstrapping: a world without molecular biotechnology, human cloning, and the Internet." (6) On the one hand, the humanist in us is baffled at such propositions--that subjectivity is a temporary solution sought by evolution (pre-genome, as it were). We may wonder what such a view says about bioethics, and indeed Baidi's brief discussion of ethics is fraught with the difficulty of imagining a bioethics "beyond the human." But on the other hand, Baldi asks us to consider how developments in biotech and computer technologies are transforming our understanding of what it means to have a body, and to be a body. More critical analyses by Donna Haraway, Critical Art Ensemble, and Catherine Waldby (7) have each suggested that we move beyond the reaction-formation of technological instrumentality with regards to biotech (where the "tech" in biotech is seen as the dehumanizing factor in itself). They suggest that, instead, we consider the ways in which particular intersections of discursive practices are continually modulating, regulating and managing the boundary between natural and artificial, human and machine, biology and technology.

If one wanted to get an idea of these dual biological and technical strands of biotech, it would be possible to do so through a look at the various pop science books authored by researchers over the years. We could begin, for example, with Erwin Schrodinger's What 16 Life?. (8) one of the earliest formulations of genetic material in terms of "information" and "codes" (though at the time of its publishing the structure of DNA and the coding schema had not been elucidated). We could also include Francis Crick's Life Itself. (9) as well as his numerous articles on "the genetic code" throughout the 1950s. These writings were largely responsible for popularizing genetics' "central dogma" inside and outside of molecular biology circles. Likewise, biologists George and Muriel Beadle's The Language of Life (10) summarized the findings of molecular biology not only in informatic terms, but also in linguistic terms, helping to promulgate the idea that DNA was in some sense a "language." Popular books by the French team of Francois jacob, The Logic of Life. (11) and Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity. (12) extended the informatic tropes of DNA by adding to the discourse their famous research on genetic regulatory mechanisms. jacob and Monod took the notion of DNA-as-information further, suggesting that gene regulation formed a "genetic program" in itself that was not unlike the mainframe computers then being developed by the United States military and businesses such as IBM. In fact, it seemed that throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, a number of molecular biology and genetics researchers published either books or articles for a non-specialist public, each of which was a version of Schrodinger's question: What is life?, and each of which was a version of the answer: biological life is DNA, and DNA is information.

As Lily Kay effectively demonstrates in Who Wrote the Book of Life?. (13) the trope of the genetic code has had a long life, but one with fits and starts, divergent paths and discontinuous paradigms. Kay's over-arching point is that the notion of the "genetic code"-and indeed molecular genetics itself-emerges through cross-pollination with the discourses of cybernetics, information theory and early computer science. Kay provides roughly three, discontinuous, overlapping periods in the history of the genetic code-a first phase marked by the trope of "specificity" during the early part of the twentieth century (where proteins were thought to contain the genetic material), a second "formalistic" phase marked by the appropriation of "information" and "code" from other fields (Watson and Crick's research fits in here, especially Crick's formulation of "the coding problem"), and a third "biochemical" phase during the 1950s and 60s, in which the informatic trope is extended, such that DNA is not only a code but a fu lly-fledged "language" (genetics becomes cryptography, as in Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthai's work on "cracking the code" of life).

While Kay's historical analysis concludes with this third phase (her book stops in the 1960s, just prior to genetic engineering), it is not difficult for us to see at least two phases following upon it. One would have to be a "biotechnical phase," in which the ability to study and analyze genetic processes leads to new ways of manipulating, regulating and controlling those processes-a "control principle" in genetic engineering. The development of recombinant DNA techniques in the early 1970s is largely seen to spawn the era of genetic engineering, and the first international concerns

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over the ethical use of emerging biotechnologies. Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen's recombinant DNA research demonstrated that DNA could not only be studied, but could be rendered as a technology as well. The synthesis of Insulin--and Its subsequent patenting by Genentech--provides an important proof-of-concept for biotechnology in this period.

The most recent phase--a "bioinformatic phase"--has less to do with genetic engineering's control principle and more with the integration of computer science and biotechnology. The race to map the human genome proved In the end to be about bioinformatics more than anything else--the key players in the race were not scientists, but supercomputers, databases and programming languages. Even in its inception in the late 1980s, the Department of Energy's Human Genome Project signaled a shift from a control principle to a "storage principle," while never foregoing the ability to control genetic matter that characterized genetic engineering. This bioinformatic phase is increasingly suggesting that biotech and genetics research is non-existent without some level of computer technology. Emergent fields are each accompanied by a novel technology: gene expression (biochips), genomics (automated sequencing computers), proteomics (supercomputers), structural genomics (data mining software).

Note that these are not sequential but concurrent phases; though the genetic engineering tools of the biotechnical phase develop earlier than bioinformatics tools do, the latter are unthinkable without the agenda of the former. The control principle of genetic engineering has taken new forms with the availability of online genomic databases, just as the storage principle in bioinformatics has enabled the proliferation of novel software tools.

Broadly speaking, we can summarize this historical overview by describing a two-fold movement: that between metaphorization and autonomization. In the early and mid-century phases articulated by Kay, we have the gradual and discontinuous process by which the concept of "information" in cybernetics and information theory is appropriated by molecular biology as a metaphor (what Kay calls a "metaphor of a metaphor") for describing the genetic material. DNA acts in a manner analogous to information in technical systems, being both the carrier and the message from one generation to the next.

However, in the phases which follow upon this--the biotechnical and bioinformatic phases--Information is not so much taken as metaphor for DNA, but is seen to Inhere in DNA itself. With the rise of novel techniques for controlling and storing DNA in computers, the metaphoric stature of the informatic model collapses into DNA itself. The development of genome databases and bioinformatics software tools seems to point to the fact that information is no longer a metaphor for DNA, but that DNA is information. This autonomization of DNA with respect to information means that the genome itself can be regarded as a biological computer--something demonstrated in non-biological uses of DNA in biocomputing, for instance.

This broad transition from a metaphorization to an autonomization of DNA as information does not, of course, imply that biotechnology currently operates without metaphors; the recent hype surrounding the mapping of the human genome attests to the contrary--metaphors of the "book of life" and the "software of the self" were abundant, both in specialist and non-specialist media. What it does imply is that biotechnology research no longer looks askance to other fields for its metaphoric Inspiration. Rather, in assuming what Kay calls the "scriptural" tropes of DNA, biotech research increasingly approaches biological problems with the general principles of informatics. "Information" no longer comes from the outside (disciplinarily speaking) to describe a biological entity such as DNA. Rather, information is seen to be constitutive of the very development of our understanding of "life" at the molecular level--not the external appropriation of a metaphor, but the epistemological internalization and the technical au tonomization of information as constitutive of DNA. This cannot be overstated. It is this assumption which enables biotech research to envision a genome that can be variously encoded (sampled into an online database), recoded (data mining for novel genes) and decoded (synthesis of novel compounds in the lab): the body is no longer a medium transmitting the information of DNA (the model from cybernetic and Information theory); the body is itself "biomedia." From recombinant DNA plasmids to regenerative medicine-any time we encounter this technical recontextualization of biological processes, we have an instance of biomedia. No steam machines, no cyborgic fusioris of metal and flesh, no Turing machines or black boxes--only the technical creation of the conditions in which "natural" biological processes can occur in novel contexts (e.g., in vitro embryonic cellular differentiation for stem cell therapy).

Again, we would be wrong In thinking that a sufficiently advanced technology makes metaphor unnecessary; the current "bioinformatic phase" of the genetic code is not about the ability of technology to illuminate the vagueness of metaphor. But the overall status of the informatic metaphor with regard to biotech's understanding of "life" has significantly changed, and this is, in part, due to the ways in which new computer technologies have been integrated into biotech research. While researchers at an earlier time such as Crick never proposed the application of the principles of information theory, cybernetics, or electrical engineering to molecular biology research, their interpretation of "information" from those fields did significantly transform molecular biology--and the kinds of questions it could ask. In short, we can say that the metaphor of the "genetic code" has served a descriptive role within molecular biology, but it has gone on to become internalized as an epistemological foundation for biology a nd genetics. What we have been witnessing in the past twenty years or 50 (with the rise of a biotech "industry") is a further level in which the metaphor of information is actually materialized through sets of practices, techniques and technologies. The genome database is but one example of this (description, internalization, materialization). Indeed, nowadays it seems nearly impossible to think of DNA or the genome or biological life itself outside of those informatic terms established during the postwar era. When such approaches are offered, they are often dismissed as either too theoretical, non-scientific, or even mystical. The theories of symbiosis, epigenetics, complexity and autopoiesis have all, at one time or another, been the target of such critiques.

Given such histories, what are we to make of contemporary "What is Life?" books such as Baldi's The Shattered Self? On the one hand, it appears, uncannily, that researchers in bioinformatics are unconsciously beginning to put post-structuralist theories of the fragmented subject into practice (into code...). Except that Baldi's argument does not give evidence from a philosophical-cultural perspective, but from a biological-technical one: as Baldi suggests, the more we learn about "life" at the molecular and genetic levels (and informatic levels), the more we find that our common notions of an autonomous, unified, atomistic "self" are incommensurate with the view from biotech and bioinformatics: "In fact, our notions of self, life and death, intelligence, and sexuality are very primitive and on the verge of being profoundly altered on the scale of human history...This shattering is brought about by scientific progress in biology, computer science, and resulting technologies such as biotechnology and bioinforma tics." (14)

If there is a central question behind the debates and anxieties surrounding issues such as human cloning, stem cell research, or biopiracy, it is perhaps to be found here, in the nexus of questions that are simultaneously philosophical and technical. The questions which crop up with, say, stem cell research (In which instances is it acceptable to conduct research on embryonic stem cells?, etc.) are important questions, but they take place at the "terminal" points of a discourse. Within their infrastructure is a set of questions that have to do with something more fundamental, prompting a series of questions: Does biological potential equal biological life? What is the point at which the technical reconfiguration of biological life Is legitimized? Should our concepts of biological "life" include the technical? In pop science books like The Shattered Slef, we can see the bioinformatician grappling with the aporias of biotech's view of life, caught between the full implications of biotech, and their radical Incommensurability with notions of ethics and "the human."

The biomolecular view of life presents us with a "body" that is, in a troubling way, irreducible to the various anthropomorphisms that are attributed to the genome or DNA. A given process, such as the metabolism of sugar, may involve a network of thousands of biomolecules in networks and sub-networks. This "biomolecular body" is both human and inhuman, at once constituting ourselves as organisms, but also forming a bio-logic that has very little to do with representation, reductionism, or agency/causality. The challenge facing biotech today is not getting enough computational power, but asking the question of whether our notions--philosophical and ethical-of "the body" and "the human" are in need of a qualitative reformulation.

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NOTES

(1.) The GenBank can be found online at www.ncbl.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/index.html.

(2.) Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan(c)_Meets_Onco Mouse[TM] (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 141.

(3.) Matthew Ridley, Genome (New York: HarperCollins, 2000)

(4.) Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century (New York: Tarcher/Putnam. 1998).

(5.) Pierre Baldi. The Shattered Self (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

(6.) Ibid., p. 3.

(7.) Critical Art Ensemble, Flesh Machine (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1998) and Catherine Waldby. The Visible Human Project (New York: Routledge, 2000).

(8.) Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life? (Cambridge, England: University of Cambridge Press. 1967).

(9.) Francis Crick, Life Itself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981).

(10.) George Beadle, Muriel Beadle, The Language of Life (New York: Doubleday, 1966).

(11.) Francois Jacob, The Logic ok Life (New York: Pantheon, 1974).

(12.) Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (London: Fontana/Collins, 1974).

(13.) Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

(14.) The Shattered Self, p.3.

EUGENE THACKER [[e-mail]] is an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech. He has written extensively on biotechnology and the body and is also a member of Biotech Hobbyist.