Kay L E
Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sci Context. 1995 Winter;8(4):609-34. doi: 10.1017/s0269889700002210.
This paper focuses on the opening of a discursive space: the emergence of informational and scriptural representations of life and hereditiy 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.
生命与遗传的信息性及文本性表征的出现，以及它们在构建生物学意义时的自我否定后果。它探究了书写概念与生命之书，并展示了分子生物学对语言和文本性地位的主张如何破坏了其自身的控制目标。这些文本意义在历史上是偶然的。遗传与生命的信息性表征并非分子生物学内部认知动力的结果；它们不是解开DNA双螺旋碱基配对的逻辑必然。它们在20世纪40年代仍在基因的蛋白质范式内被引入分子生物学，并渗透到生命科学和社会科学的几乎每一个学科。这些基于信息的模型、隐喻、语言及符号学工具对遗传密码的形成至关重要，它们是从控制论、信息论、电子计算以及控制与通信系统——深深植根于二战和冷战军事经验的技术科学——引入分子生物学的。因此，信息话语在分子生物学中得以固定，并非因为它在狭义的认知意义上起作用（它并非如此），而是因为它将分子生物学置于战后话语和文化之中，或许是置于向基于信息的后现代社会的过渡之中。
