Since Athel Cornish-Bowden has drawn attention to unwarranted faith in
strong genetic determinism in the pages of Nature Biotechnology, I thought
it was worth pointing out in this newsgroup that they have allowed the
opposition a few words, in the form of a Commentary article by Richard C
Strohman (The coming Kuhnian revolution in biology, Nature Biotechnology,
15, 194-200, 1997). My thanks to Jean-Pierre Mazat for making me aware of
this article.
The article predicts the necessity of a revolution in biological thinking
(in Kuhnian terms, which is the part of the article I have least sympathy
with) because strong genetic determinism and the practice of molecular
genetics have come to dominate to the exclusion of other approaches.
"The illegitimate extension of a genetic paradigm from a relatively simple
level og genetic coding to a complex level of cellular behaviour represents
an epistemiological error of the first order."
is a quote that gives a flavour of the article. The scope is broader than
the systems behaviour of metabolism that is the concern of many of us here,
but the critique has much in common with the ideas we have been trying to
promote. e.g.
"There is growing recognition that information for function may not be
located solely in genomic databases. That is, it is becoming clear that
sequence information in DNA .... contains insufficient information for
determining how gene products (proteins) interact to produce a mechanism of
any kind. The reason is that the mulitcomponent complexes constructed from
many proteins are themselves machines with rules of their own; rules not
written in DNA ...."
(but including the summation and connectivity theorems of Metabolic Control
Analysis.)
He also outlines an epigenetic theory of information processing that has
much in common with Hans Westerhoff's conference lecture on
Modular/Hierarchical Control Analysis (i.e. before the addition of all the
Kahn, Westerhoff et al algebraic analysis).
Take a read, and share your reactions with the group.
David Fell
=======================================================
David Fell, daf at bms.brookes.ac.uk (usual & current)
GESBI, UFR de Biochimie, Universite de Bordeaux II,
146 rue Leo Saignat, 33076 Bordeaux CEDEX, FRANCE.
David.Fell at u-bordeaux2.fr (April-June '97)
