Judith Roof
There has been a literature of genetics ever since philosophers and scientists began considering the mechanisms of heredity by which physical traits passed from generation to generation. Empirical observation gave rise to various theories about how that transmission occurred. Generally, these ideas were bound up with theories of human reproduction. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that semen was responsible for passing on traits, while the Greek physician of that same classical era, Hippocrates, developed a theory of pangenesis in which the material enabling heredity was collected from throughout the body. Amr ibn Bahr Al-Jahiz, ninth-century North African philosopher and zoologist, considered species’ struggles to survive in their environments.
Enlightenment considerations of heredity still reflected these notions. The observation and classification of varieties of organic beings raised questions about how species maintained consistency from generation to generation and how changes might be introduced as part of a more comprehensive set of questions about evolution. In the late eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin’s Zoönomia (1794–96) advanced the ideas that mammals derived from a single source or “filament” and that they acquired and passed on new traits developed in response to their environments. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck elaborated these ideas in Philosophie zoologique (1809), asserting that individuals develop new, useful traits, lose useless traits, and pass these alterations on to their progeny. In his Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, published in 1868, nine years after On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin set out a mechanism of heredity in which an individual’s “pangenes,” circulating throughout the organism, gather traits and migrate to the reproductive cells. That Darwin’s theory of evolution needed some mechanism for the transmission of traits sparked greater interest in issues of heredity, producing some opposition to Lamarck’s ideas, especially on the part of August Weismann, a German evolutionary biologist. Weismann disagreed with Lamarckism and pangenesis, positing instead that germ cells were unaffected by the environment and, thus, that an individual’s acquired traits were not passed to the next generation.
The plant breeding experiments of Gregor Mendel produced an account of heredity that worked according to sets of statistical rules. Through experiments with pea plants, Mendel hypothesized that the basic unit of heredity was an “allele,” and that alleles passed on definable traits (such as plant size and blossom color) in statistically measurable proportions. Providing a set of concepts that would enable biologists to infer the processes of heredity underlying the appearance of phenotypical traits (those expressed in bodily forms), Mendel’s paper, “Experiments on plant hybridization,” was published in an obscure journal in 1866. The paper’s rediscovery in 1900 by Hugo DeVries and Carl Correns invigorated work on the connections between reproductive biology and genetics that had continued after Darwin. William Bateson, who translated Mendel’s paper into English, coined the term “genetics” in 1905.
Genetics spawned its own literatures, including the scientific literatures devoted to discoveries about genetic science; popularizations and histories; discussions of ethical issues; critiques of genetics and its popularizations; and fiction and literary criticism that employ concepts from genetics as either subject matter or a major trope. The scientific literature of genetics worked through increasingly complex observations and statistical models based on Mendel’s findings. Thomas Hunt Morgan, who worked with fruit flies, demonstrated that genes, responsible for the transmission of traits, are located on chromosomes. With several colleagues, Morgan published the first major work of scientific genetics, The Mechanisms of Mendelian Heredity (1915). While research continued on the operation of genes, mutations, and traits, others such as Linus Pauling, James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins tried to discern the structure and mechanisms of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a substance first identified in the late nineteenth century, and then identified by biochemist Oswald Avery as the chemical that made up genetic material. Using X-ray diffraction images of DNA produced by Rosalind Franklin, Watson and Crick were able to describe the DNA molecule’s double helical structure. They published their findings in two essays in Nature in 1953. After the discovery of the structure and function of DNA, the scientific literature of genetics focused on mapping DNA, tracking the mechanisms by which genes managed organic processes, and determining the distribution of genes in populations. In 1990 genetic research took up the highly visible project of attempting to map the entire human genome.
After Watson and Crick described the structure of DNA and genetics evolved into a field with a certain popular appeal, descriptions of genetics aimed at the general public began to appear. One of the first was Watson’s autobiographical account of his work with DNA, The Double Helix (1969). Crick followed twenty years later with his own account, What Mad Pursuit (1990). Horace Judson produced the first popular history of the DNA “revolution” in biology in The Eighth Day of Creation (1979). Following governmental genome mapping initiatives begun in the late 1980s, more histories and popular accounts of genetic research appeared in the 1990s. Jonathan Weiner traces the career of behavioral geneticist Seymour Benzer in Time, Love, Memory (1999); Matt Ridley produced Genome (1999). Lily Kay’s comprehensive academic history, Who Wrote the Book of Life? (2000), was followed by A.H. Sturtevant’s A History of Genetics (2001), and Michel Morange’s The Misunderstood Gene (2001). The latter shifts attention to the complexities of genetic operation as well as genes’ cooperation with other processes. Morange also suggests that the promises of medical breakthroughs made on behalf of genetic research are neither so simple nor one-sided as they may seem.
As the Human Genome Project was officially established in 1990, more accounts aimed at a broad audience appeared. James Watson, the initial head of the Human Genome Project, published additional memoirs and essays arguing for the importance of genetic research – a collection of essays he wrote after 1953, A Passion for DNA (2000), and a new history and overview of post-DNA genetic research, DNA: The Secret of Life (2003). Robert Cook-Deegan traces the interactions of the Department of Energy (the original sponsor of genetic research in the United States), the National Institute of Health, and various private corporations established to aid and profit from genetic research in The Gene Wars (1994), as does Kevin Davies in Cracking the Genome (2001). In The Genome War (2004), James Shreeve focuses on the ways that genetic researcher Craig Venter transformed genetic research into a profitable corporate enterprise.
Other literature focuses on more specific ethical issues about the interrelation between public knowledge and private profit or on the palliative possibilities of genetic research. Watson’s promotional essays were anticipated by collections of essays that consider the ethical issues of genetic research, such as Daniel Kevles and Leroy Hood’s The Code of Codes (1992), which raises questions about how genetic information is to be used in forensics, its effects on reproductive policies and insurance, how to protect individual privacy and prevent the possibility of discrimination, and how to marshal equitably the distribution of resources in relation to potential medical uses of genetic information. Timothy Murphy and Marc Lappé’s essay collection, Justice and the Human Genome Project (1994), focuses on such social issues as how genetic information will alter our understandings of racial and class difference and pressure towards certain standards or norms represented by genetic profiles. Barbara Rothman’s The Book of Life (2001) considers the potential eugenic practices genetic science enables.
In the 1970s, critiques of the claims of genetic science began to appear, to be followed by analyses and assessments of its popularizations as well as of the hype surrounding the Human Genome Project. Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene (1976), which suggested shifting the frame of reference by which we understood the activities of genes from the scale of the organism to the gene itself. Dawkins argued that what genes preserve and replicate, rather than organisms or their traits, are the genes themselves. Humans are merely one vector among many engaged in this process. Others countered Dawkins by extending their critique to the assumptions underlying the broader field of genetics. In Biology as Ideology (1991), Richard Lewontin questioned genetics’ assumptions about genetic cause and somatic effect, pointing out that the assumption that genes govern all life processes reduces the totality of the living organism to a mechanical process. He continued to question the assumptions and claims of genetics in It Ain’t Necessarily So (2000). In Exploding the Gene Myth (1999), Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald also raised questions about the ways genetic science is disseminated, especially where popular simplifications make hyperbolic claims about what genetic science may be able to do. Offering correctives to such media claims, Hubbard and Wald recast genetic science in more accurate terms and reconsidered several key public issues of genetic research: eugenics, gene screening, the link between genes and behaviors, the manipulation of genes, DNA identifications, and genetic discrimination.
In the mid-1990s, in addition to scientists themselves, science historians, sociologists, and humanities scholars began analyzing the larger assumptions of the discourse used to describe genetics in the public sphere. Taking up Richard Lewontin’s questions, Evelyn Fox Keller, in Refiguring Life (1995), demonstrated the ways the linguistic figurations of genes influenced both public perceptions of genetic research’s possibilities and the directions of research itself. In The Century of the Gene (2000), she seconded Hubbard and Wald, focusing on the problems created when genetic science is represented through a reductive, one-cause-to-one-effect relationship. Arguing for a far more complex understanding of science, Keller urged against seeing genes as the answer to all biological questions. In What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee (2002), Jonathan Marks also critiqued reductive versions of genetic science and questioned what distinctions and commonalities genes and the genome enable us to make.
Sociologists and humanists also began analyzing the rhetoric, metaphors, and images deployed in representations of genes and genetic science for the popular audience. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee examined what they called “the DNA mystique”–the sets of ideas enabling DNA and genetics to become the symbols by which questions of family, individual character, causality, and the future of medicine are understood. In Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics (1998), José van Dijck also examined the images through which genetic science has been represented in the public sphere, showing, like Keller, how such representations actually influence the directions of scientific thought, and how genes have become an “imaginary” force dislocated from genetic science itself. In The Meanings of the Gene (1999), Celeste Condit analyzes the public stories told about genes, discerning the anxieties they represent, and identifying worries about genetic determinism and discriminatory eugenics. She studies the tension between a reductive genetics – in which genes are presented as dominating biological causality – and properly complex biological ideas – in which genes are appreciated as one element among the many others involved in living systems.
Even before Watson and Crick discerned the structure of DNA and the mode of genetic replication, ideas about engineered beings emerged in what would become, in the 1930s, “science fiction.” H.G. Wells, whose The Time Machine (1895) imagined the future evolutionary divergence of humanity, posited extreme vivisection experiments in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Most science fiction about genetic tinkering, however, appeared after studies of DNA and genetic science had become more sophisticated. A general fascination with the relations among genetics, DNA, evolution, and the meaning of life is the theme of science fiction such as Gordon Dickson’s Dorsai (1976) or Donald Moffitt’s Genesis Quest (1986). Narratives that involve the galactic distribution and gathering of DNA include Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–89), Otto John’s 2005 Footprints in the Dust and an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation –“The Chase” (Season 6, Episode 20). The majority of genetic fictions, however, focus on the possibilities of cloning, genetic engineering, and mutations, all of which contribute to the larger themes of hubris, overreaching, and the disasters of tinkering with nature. At the same time, however, the figure of the mutant also becomes one way some fans of science fiction understand their relation to society.
Narratives of cloning deploy genetic manipulation as the mechanism by which the traditional figure of the double appears. The uncanniness of multiples, questions about identity and individuality, and the transmission of consciousness through genetic replicants preoccupy many of these tales, the first of which, A.E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A (1945), appeared before the term “clone” was in use. P.T. Olemy’s The Clones (1968) posits clones as a means of communicating with extra-terrestrials, while Richard Cowper’s Clone (1972) is a futuristic adventure tale in which clones struggle to re-find one another. Nancy Freedman’s Joshua, Son of None (1973), in which a scientist clones John F. Kennedy, explores the question of whether clones are doomed to follow in the footsteps of their source, while Ben Bova’s Multiple Man (1976) is a murder mystery involving clones of a presidential assassin. In Imperial Earth (1975), Arthur C. Clarke focuses on futuristic wonders as a rich citizen of Titan returns to earth to clone himself. Evelyn Lief’s The Clone Rebellion (1980) imagines a future in which clones are used as slaves and sources for organ replacement.
In addition to clone narratives’ presidential fascinations, these stories also allegorize political issues, as in Naomi Mitchison’s Solution Three (1975), which imagines cloning as a reproductive solution to patriarchy and heteronormativity, and Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil (1976), which explores attempts to refashion a Hitler figure. Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990) raises the specter of cloning extinct species, less horrible than the complications surrounding human cloning, but daunting when it involves prehistoric reptiles. All of these present similar anxieties to those mapped in 1818 by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, imagining the problems that arise when humans take over the privileges of a creator.
Cloning narratives are closely related to stories based on genetic engineering, which tend to appear slightly later than the cloning tales. Also concerned with the effects of human overreaching and the deleterious effects of meddling with the natural order, genetic engineering tales offer ready allegories for issues of government control, class, race, and imperialism, while projecting the possibilities of designing adaptation and evolution itself. One of the earliest treatments of social control through engineered beings was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), though its manipulations had more to do with the in vitro environments of fetal development than with genetic engineering. Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy traces the effects of interbreeding between humans and aliens, where the question of hybridization versus purity becomes a matter of species survival, asking whether any process of genetic manipulation, no matter how well intended, should be permitted to triumph at the expense of another species’ extinction? Elizabeth Hand’s Winterlong: a novel (1997) imagines individuals genetically engineered to fulfill certain societal roles. Dean Koontz’s Starblood (1972) and The Watchers (1987) both examine the ethics of genetic engineering, the former showing its potentially deadly effects on a genetically engineered child, and the latter exploring what happens when lab experiments with animal DNA get out of hand.
Other genetic-engineering tales focus more on the enhanced powers of the genetically modified in the adventure genre or explore the intersection between genetic engineering and computer engineering as a way to extend human powers. One of the earliest genetic engineering adventure tales, Kobo Abe’s Inter Ice Age 4 (1970), depicts genetic engineering as a survival tactic used to develop humans who can breathe under water. Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1986) presents a battle between genetically engineered “Shapers” and mechanically aided “Mechanists,” while James Patrick Kelly’s Wildlife (1994) traces the experiences of a genetically engineered newspaper reporter exploring a future in which genetic engineering permits alteration by personal whim. Richard Powers’s Gold Bug Variations (1992) combines computer codes, DNA, and music in an epic meditation on the parallels and intersections of codes and the human mind.
Mutants figure unanticipated interruptions in the course of evolution and history as well as the effects of nuclear holocaust. Olaf Stapleton’s Odd John (1935) is an early version of mutant exceptionalism. The course of psychohistory’s designed return to galactic civilization is threatened by the appearance of a mutant in the second volume, Foundation and Empire (1952) of Isaac Asimov’s epic Foundation Trilogy. The themes of species and/or racial conflict also continue in narratives involving mutants, especially as both the mutants and the conflicts are produced by a nuclear holocaust. Poul Anderson’s Twilight World (1961), for example, posits post-nuclear-holocaust battles between mutated beings and those unaffected, with the mutants eventually colonizing Mars. Mutant by Henry Kuttner (1963) stages a battle between the telepathic mutants created by nuclear war and regular humans. Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964) describes a post-nuclear landscape filled with mutants and a repressive religious regime. Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) features a telekinetic paraplegic, and M. John Harrison’s The Committed Men (1971) narrates the post-nuclear holocaust cooperation between humans and mutant reptilian beings. Other mutant narratives focus on mutants’ isolation and difference, offering a metaphor for science fiction aficionados, some of whom refer to themselves as “slans” after the title of A.E. Van Vogt’s novel (1946) about mutants who secretly exist among normal humanity.
Comic books are another major genre of popular literature that has tapped genetics, genetic engineering, and mutations. Marvel Comics, which specializes in super-hero tales, produced two successful series premised on genetic mutations. The character of Spiderman, who first appeared in 1962, is what the comics term a “mutate,” or a normal human whose DNA was altered by the infusion of genes from another organism – in the case of the unassuming protagonist, Peter Parker, a radioactive spider. The mutation produces a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation from the polite Parker to a crime-stopping super-being with a spider’s capacities to produce webs, swing through the air, jump long distances, and fall without harm. A year later, Marvel introduced the “X-Men,” the genetically mutated representatives of the next stage in human evolution. A new species, dubbed Homo superior, the X-Men combine human powers with extreme abilities borrowed from other species. Wolverine, for example, sports long metallic claws and becomes furry, when he, like Spiderman, transforms from a human to a mutated appearance. Other X-Men have a range of powers, including the ability to fly, heal quickly, project energy, exhibit superhuman strength, and read minds. They tend to combine these capabilities with animal signifiers such as gills, fur, tails, and wings. These genetically modified and mutated comic figures have made their way to film, the X-Men in 2000, and Spiderman in the series beginning in 2002.
In addition to breeding superheroes, other themes from genetics also provide pretexts for fiction film. Picking up the themes of meddling with the order of things, and the invasion of aliens and ultimate combination of human and alien genes, sci-fifilms capitalize both on the monstrous appearance of prehistoric insects and reptiles awakened from the safe slumber under volcanoes or on the North Pole by cataclysmic events and on the frightening possibility of the invisible coexistence of mutants, clones, and the genetically engineered. Although, strictly speaking, reawakened monsters such as Gorgo and Godzilla do not represent genetic tinkering, they do manifest the reappearance of genetic material thought to be long extinct. The theme of the reptilian meddler recurs in the 1995 Species, in which a reptilian alien invader comes to earth to alter human DNA and take over the world.
Blade Runner (1982) explores issues of identity and responsibility that derive from producing a subculture of android clones who return to earth to find their creators so that they can extend their artificially limited life-spans. Indiscernible from humans except by trained experts, the clone androids threaten human ascendancy. An even more fantasmatic version of the dangers of clones is Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), in which a massive army of clones fights for the evil side against those who defend the Republic. Gattaca (1997) takes on another aspect of genetic manipulation. Set in a future in which opportunities and careers are defined by one’s enhanced DNA, the film follows the successful attempt of its protagonist, who is not genetically gifted, to masquerade his identity by using someone else’s DNA. Suggesting that DNA does not define everything, Gattaca is critical of any equation between DNA and human spirit and capability.
Genes depicted as a site for ultimate truth offer rich figurations for generation, alteration, and relationships. Genetics plays through literary and cultural criticism as both the object of analysis, insofar as genetics is a subject or theme of literary and film texts, and as an analogy for understanding everything from origins to evolutions to histories. Critics such as Stephanie Turner (2002) examine the narratives associated with genetics itself, looking at narratives of the extinction of species and the ways narratives of cloning such as Jurassic Park bring together the imaginary logics of DNA and bioinformatics. Others, such as Robert Mitchell (2007), analyze issues related to biocommerce, while Jay Clayton and Priscilla Wald (2007) examine what literature and language can bring to the study of genetics.
Literary critics consider how genetics works as a trope in various literary and filmic texts. Scholars of Shakespeare, for example, have linked race and genetics in an analysis of The Merchant of Venice. Some critics have examined the way that ideas associated with genetics inform various texts from Melville’s Billy Budd to All the King’s Men to Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. Film critics have also examined genetic tropes: Patrick Gonder (2003) looks at the relation between genetics and race in 1950s horror films; Jackie Stacey examines the ways cinema has deployed genetics in The Cinematic Life of the Gene (2010); and David Kirby and Laura Gaither (2005) analyze genetic modification and identity in The Island of Dr. Moreau and Gattaca.
While autobiographers think about the ways genes and genetic tropes define individuality and self, and art and theatre critics consider the relation between genetic tropes and the body, linguists use a genetic analogy to understand the spread of languages. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza’s Genes, Peoples, and Languages (2000) posits that the dissemination and evolution of languages follows the model of genetic distribution. Finally, genetics as a model of derivation and recombination helps literary scholars determine the interrelationship of texts. In many ways, then, our conceptions of genetics align with our understandings of both language and information technologies. Working as a trope of origin, identity, change, and truth, genetics has become a figure for mechanisms of change in literature and film, while metaphors from literature have been adopted as ways of understanding and disseminating information about genetics. If, as many pundits suggest, the human genome is “the book of life,” books, narratives, languages, and histories have become equally attached to our renditions of genetics.
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