This project leads to book tentatively entitled Code, Program, Text: Information and the Transformation of Molecular Biology. It focuses on the years 1953-1973, when researches unravelled salient mechanisms of DNA function, representing it as information transfer: a genetic code in which DNA messages are transcribed and then translated into proteins. These works have elucidated key features of living systems: genetic transmission, mutation, and regulation. They have also altered our basic concepts of nature, organisms, health, disease and behavior, and through genetic engineering technologies, have endowed scientists with unprecedented power over life.
The aim of this project is to reconstruct a critical history of the genetic code, posing the questions: how did scientists come to view organisms and molecules as information storage and retrieval systems; by which processes did life come to be conceptualized as a text written in a natural language; what have been the cognitive/social consequences of this transformation. The work examines conceptual models, linguistic tools, and representational strategies that produced a discourse of heredity grounded in terms such as code, program, tape, message, reading- frame, language, information and text; terms that were absent in life science before the 1950s. The study is framed within an historically specific knowledge/power nexus linked by epistemic and technological objectives, discursive and nondiscursive practices. It draws on the history of biology, cybernetics, communications technologies, information theory, digital systems, and the militarization of Western (especially American) culture during World War II and Cold War. Thus this study hopes to show that the information-based transformation of molecular biology is part of a broader cultural and discursive trend nested in postwar political and technoscientific reconfiguration.
