The Jurassic Park narrative is instructive in showing how the surplus of meaning surrounding DNA is contested and how cloning serves as a fulcrum in the negotiation process. The result of this metaphorization of DNA is a surplus of meaning associated with the "master molecule," well illustrated in proposals for bioprospecting projects that have cloning whole organisms as an ultimate goal, such as the mining of dinosaur blood from the bodies of ancient mosquitoes trapped in amber famously depicted in Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park. More broadly, they laid the foundation for our present bioinformatics economy, in which the marriage of biology and information technology in postcapitalism has transformed the life sciences into a global network of commodity biological information. In doing so, they established a conceptualization of the DNA molecule as autotelic, that is, as an entity working toward its own self-contained end, through the use of such information metaphors as data, code, and program. Some historians of science have pinpointed the precise arrival of this new issue in biology to Erwin Schr–dinger's question, which became the title of his 1943 lecture series, "What is Life?" 2 On the one hand, Schr–dinger was simply asking a physicist's question: Why don't living systems succumb to dissipation, as do nonliving systems? On the other hand, Schr–dinger's question cued scientists in the emerging field of molecular biology to treat the concerns of biology more like those of physics. The historical precedent for this view of living things can be traced to twentieth-century physicists' perplexity over how to account for self-organization in life given the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. Her examples have in common the contemporary concern with bringing explanations of organic processes into alignment with theories about complex systems or, to be more specific, with treating living things as information-processing systems. Katherine Hayles argues that "a defining characteristic of the present cultural moment is the belief that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates," which she alternately describes as the "condition of virtuality" and the "computational universe." 1 The material substrates Hayles considers range from research in artificial life to science fiction novels.
It was like having a Xerox copier but nothing to copy with it.-Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
All the modern genetic technology was useless. The problem was that all known dinosaurs were fossils, and the fossilization destroyed most DNA.
0 kommentar(er)
