The position and role of humanity in the world of life is examined in the light of the ontological structure of life itself. This problem is approached by considering the possible units of life representing various modes of life phenomena. I argue that the only meaningful unit of life without interposing some special external conditions is “global life” framed in a star‐planet system. Any other possible unit of life exhibited by various kinds of individuals is conditional in the sense that (...) it would leave out an essential part as “co‐life.” The relationship between human being and the global life should be understood in this general scheme of individual and global life. It is emphasized, however, that human being occupies a unique position in global life in the sense that humanity can promote either a cancerous situation or a healthy higher‐order enhancement of the global life. (shrink)

Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 publication What is Life? is a classic of twentieth century science writing. In his book, Schrödinger discussed the chromosome fibre as the seat of heredity and variation thanks to a hypothetical aperiodic structure – a suggestion that famously spurred on a generation of scientists in their pursuit of the gene as a physico-chemical entity. While historical attention has been given to physicists who were inspired by the book, little has been written about its biologist readers. This paper (...) examines the case of the English evolutionary botanist and cytologist Irène Manton, who took an interest in What is Life? for its relevance to her own research in chromosome structure as a clue to plant phylogeny. Drawing on recently discovered correspondence between Manton and Schrödinger, the paper reconstructs Manton ‘s path to the book and her response to it by way of throwing new light on a pivotal moment in the history of the debate on chromosome structure. (shrink)

Recalling the title of Yoxen’s classical paper on the influence of Schrödinger’s book, I analyze the role that the work of H. Pattee might have played, if any, in the development of Biosemiotics. I take his 1969 paper “How does a molecule become a message?” (Developmental Biology Supplement) as a first target due to several circumstances that make it especially salient. On the one hand, even if Pattee has obviously developed further his ideas on later papers, the significance of this (...) one springs out right from the title, the journal and date of publication and, of course, its content. On the other, this paper in particular has been somehow rediscovered recently and not only within the frame of biosemiotics (eg, in history and philosophy of biology by E.F. Keller). Following the parallelism with Yoxen’s perspective, I contend that Pattee’s work was relatively influential with respect to a good amount of attempts to rethink living systems within theoretical biology around the 70s. This influence diminished together with the decay or even collapse of those attempts under the impact of molecular biology as it was being developed those years. Eventually, Pattee’s work has been taken up again. Notwithstanding, it is quite clear that Pattee himself was not intending to contribute specifically to Biosemiotics and that he was probably unaware of any such discipline, at least until recently. Then, we should as well ask (as Yoxen wonders with respect to Schrödinger) to which extent Pattee’s influence has been a direct one or rather an indication of the relevance of his ideas and the resonance of his hypotheses with those of biosemiotics. For this task I will sketch a few points of convergence and divergence and examine the work of some authors who either address directly this issue or have contributed significantly to build up the history of Biosemiotics. (shrink)

Genes and messages have a long association in biology, dating back at least to Weismann. But, through most of this history, even with the dramatic concreteness that molecular biology lent to this association, the image dominating most thinking about messages was drawn from the nineteenth-century technology of the telegraph. In the mid-twentieth century, a new technology, the computer, arrived to displace the telegraph. With that displacement, the meanings of many terms—of “message,” “information,” “organization,” indeed, “organism” —have, over the past few (...) decades, all been transformed. In this article, I explore the computer’s impact on biological representation of the organism in two disciplines: molecular biology and developmental biology. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper focuses on the opening of a discursive space: the emergence of informational and scriptural representations of life and their self-negating consequences for the construction of biological meaning. It probes the notion of writing and the book of life and shows how molecular biology's claims to a status of language and texuality undermines its own objective of control. These textual significations were historically contingent. The informational representations of heredity and life were not an outcome of the internal cognitive (...) momentum of molecular biology; they were not a logical necessity of the unravelling of the base-pairing of the DNA double-helix. They were transported into molecular biology still within the protein paradigm of the gene in the 1940s and permeated nearly every discipline in the life and social sciences. These information-based models, metaphors, linguistic, and semiotic tools which were central to the formulation of the genetic code were transported into molecular biology from cybernetics, information theory, electronic computing, and control and communication systems — technosciences that were deeply embedded with the military experiences of world war II and the Cold War. The information discourse thus became fixed in molecular biology not because it worked in the narrow epistemic sense (it did not), but because it positioned molecular biology within postwar discourse and culture, perhaps within the transition to a post-modern information-based society. (shrink)

Preparative and analytical methods developed by separation scientists have played an important role in the history of molecular biology. One such early method is gel electrophoresis, a technique that uses various types of gel as its supporting medium to separate charged molecules based on size and other properties. Historians of science, however, have only recently begun to pay closer attention to this material epistemological dimension of biomolecular science. This paper substantiates the historiographical thread that explores the relationship between modern laboratory (...) practice and the production of scientific knowledge. It traces the historical development of gel electrophoresis from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, with careful attention to the interplay between technical developments and disciplinary shifts, especially the rise of molecular biology in this time-frame. Claiming that the early 1950s marked a decisive shift in the evolution of electrophoretic methods from moving boundary to zone electrophoresis, I reconstruct various trajectories in which scientists such as Oliver Smithies sought out the most desirable solid supporting medium for electrophoretic instrumentation. Biomolecular knowledge, I argue, emerged in part from this process of seeking the most appropriate supporting medium that allowed for discrete molecular separation and visualization. The early 1950s, therefore, marked not only an important turning point in the history of separation science, but also a transformative moment in the history of the life sciences as the growth of molecular biology depended in part on the epistemological access to the molecular realm available through these evolving technologies. (shrink)

This paper considers a possible national cultural and scientific synthesis which failed to take place: namely the integration of the Central European theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger into the primarily experimental orientations of the Oxford physics of the 1930s. We also consider the effect of the Oxford social and intellectual atmosphere generally, incluing the persistence of previous traditions which undervalued Science relative to the Arts, and University research relative to tutorial provision in the Colleges. The Oxford situation is then briefly contrasted (...) to that which Schrödinger later found in Dublin between 1939 and 1956, and which was to have a significantly more productive outcome. (shrink)

This paper is about the interaction and the intertwinement between history of science as a historical process and history of science as the historiography of this process, taking molecular biology as an example. In the first part, two historical shifts are briefly characterized that appear to have punctuated the emergence of molecular biology between the 1930s and the 1980s, one connected to a new generation of analytical apparatus, the other to properly molecular tools. The second part concentrates on the historiography (...) of this development. Basically, it distinguishes three phases. The first phase was largely dominated by accounts of the actors themselves. The second coincided with the general ‘practical turn’ in history of science at large, and today’s historical appropriations of the molecularization of the life sciences appear to be marked by the changing disciplinary status of the science under review. In a closing remark, an argument is made for differentiating between long-range, middle-range and short-range perspectives in dealing with the history of the sciences. (shrink)

Preparative and analytical methods developed by separation scientists have played an important role in the history of molecular biology. One such early method is gel electrophoresis, a technique that uses various types of gel as its supporting medium to separate charged molecules based on size and other properties. Historians of science, however, have only recently begun to pay closer attention to this material epistemological dimension of biomolecular science. This paper substantiates the historiographical thread that explores the relationship between modern laboratory (...) practice and the production of scientific knowledge. It traces the historical development of gel electrophoresis from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, with careful attention to the interplay between technical developments and disciplinary shifts, especially the rise of molecular biology in this time-frame. Claiming that the early 1950s marked a decisive shift in the evolution of electrophoretic methods from moving boundary to zone electrophoresis, I reconstruct various trajectories in which scientists such as Oliver Smithies sought out the most desirable solid supporting medium for electrophoretic instrumentation. Biomolecular knowledge, I argue, emerged in part from this process of seeking the most appropriate supporting medium that allowed for discrete molecular separation and visualization. The early 1950s, therefore, marked not only an important turning point in the history of separation science, but also a transformative moment in the history of the life sciences as the growth of molecular biology depended in part on the epistemological access to the molecular realm available through these evolving technologies. (shrink)