It is perhaps very fitting that my first-ever post for this blog is about “a time when I got carried away by a completely useless question.” That is, after all, a 12-word description of my entire career in science journalism.
On Tuesday, October 21, at the Knight program’s weekly science seminar, we had the privilege of hearing from Dr. Phil Sharp, Institute Professor at MIT and a 1993 Nobel Laureate whose official list of achievements is longer than this entire post.
Dr. Sharp’s talk was, in short, about all the things we have found and understood about RNA; the things we have found but not really understood; and the things have not even discovered. And as he kept talking about all those tiny bits of genetic and transcriptional information that are apparently there for a reason we could not even fathom 10 or 20 years ago, I kept thinking one thought. Granted, it would almost assuredly not sound original at all to Dr. Sharp, but that’s one perk of being a young science journalist: I get to be unashamedly super excited by both cutting-edge research and the things scientists are already rather bored with.
The thought went like this: Wow, this whole process of discovery sounds sort of like trying to reverse engineer both a computer program and a computer in a world without the benefit of a manual.
Now, in part that may have been because Dr. Sharp made multiple references to my iPad and recent progress in information technology — and even used a quote from former MIT president Susan Hockfield in which she likens the cooperation between biologists and engineers to that of physicists and engineers creating the IT revolution. But I also have long been fascinated by this chicken and egg question of the language of modern biology and programming.
Both fields, as I understand them, started out more or less around the same time, somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, and have been developing side by side — sometimes, in the case of MIT, quite literally. So the question is, when I hear about some viruses bringing a chunk of messenger RNA into the cell to first synthesize the specific RNA-polymerase they need to self-replicate — BYOP, as Professor Eric Lander so elegantly put it in my biology class — and I immediately think of self-extracting archives and Flash projector files, why is that?
Is it because the language we now use to think of and explain genetic matters is inspired by or directly borrowed from computer science? Or is it because DNA and RNA are the ultimate programming language that we have simply been mimicking with varying success? Or am I just terminally nerdy? (Not really a question, though, that last one).
Who thought of the word ‘coding’ first?
Mind you, I am not a biologist or a programmer (a Python 101 certificate from Coursera does not count), so neither of the two fields wins automatically in my mind. But it definitely can’t just be me: there’s no way I am the only science writer in the world whose genetics stories sometimes look eerily like those in the IT section. That adds one more question to the pile: is it smug to think that this mess comes from exactly that, science writing? Journalists are always on the lookout for a catchier metaphor that also won’t get them forever banned from labs — could our profession have massively cross-contaminated the language in both fields?
As you can imagine, this does not exactly make for an easy Google search. Probably even a harder one than last week’s great adventure of trying to Google the English name for an activity I now know is called “blowing raspberries.” And, of course, it’s not like there’s a definitive answer out there somewhere, just waiting for the magical search query. But some answer is still important to me. For most of us, the way we talk defines the way we think about things, and if I am indeed helping to raise a whole new generation of future biologists thoroughly infected with programming metaphors, I want to be absolutely sure it’s benign or even beneficial and current biologists are okay with this.
This week’s episode, for me, perfectly represents the unique beauty of the Knight Science Journalism fellowship: it gives you the time to think about questions like this, puts you in a place that literally shoves these questions in your face, every day, and puts you together with people who you can ask — in plain English and not some arcane query language. And those people can give you words and names and book titles, something to build your own answer upon. But even more importantly, some of them, like Dr. Sharp, were actually firsthand witnesses and even perpetrators of the things that now fascinate you so much.
That “bring your own polymerase” case from Lander’s 7.012 happened a week or two ago, and so far I have already successfully managed to bug the hell out of some of my friends and bring home Making Truth: Metaphor in Science by Theodore L. Brown, a book that’s been on my reading list since forever. So I am working on that answer. And now you are all in on this too — I’ll let you know how it goes.
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