Geography is the gene (1)

The discourse of “modern science,” formulated in the 19th century, had several characteristic claims. The first was that knowledge in the universe, nature, matter, and humans could only be pursued empirically—that is, through experiment and observation. The second claim was that knowledge obtained empirically was universal and objective. In other words, knowledge gained through experimentation had to be identical, regardless of where or by whom it was produced. Another key claim was determinism—that everything must follow universal laws, and if we could decode these laws, we would be able to predict what coming next. The final claim I want to emphasize here is reductionism: the idea that in order to understand something, one must break it down into its smallest components, and by understanding these elementary parts in a deterministic way, arrive at a comprehension of the whole.

Reductionist approaches proved highly successful in the physical sciences, particularly in physics and chemistry. All identifiable matter—whether solid, liquid, or gas—could be modeled as combinations of roughly a hundred atoms. The periodic table, which categorized these atoms according to their shared properties, served as a schematic representation of all known substances. Yet even a century ago, we were far from achieving a similar reductionist model in biology. In fact, during that period, “science” largely referred to physics and chemistry; it took much longer for biology to be widely accepted as a true scientific discipline.

Even in the first half of the 20th century, studying life in a reductionist framework was extremely difficult. Although cell structures had been observed as early as 350 years ago thanks to early lens-based research, no two cells looked alike. If we attempted to create a table of cells similar to the periodic table of elements, even with billions of cell types labeled, we would not have achieved comparable success. The elusive and variable nature of life, which seemed to communicate different insights to each experimenter, was a daunting prospect for scientists.

What has always struck me is that by the 1930s, the quantum model of the atom had already reached a form close to what we understand today. Atoms—structures far too small to be seen with any optical microscope—had been largely characterized some 90 years ago. In contrast, despite being optically visible with just a few lenses and vastly larger than atoms, we knew less than 1% of what we now know about living cells in the 1930s. Inorganic matter tends to resemble itself, exhibiting repeating patterns. Living organisms, on the other hand, display tremendous diversity—even at the cellular level.

The discovery of DNA’s structure in the 1950s and the subsequent unraveling of fundamental intracellular molecular processes between the 1960s and 1980s gave rise to the belief that a reductionist biology might finally be possible. The cell was not an ideal unit of reductionism, and so the concept of the “gene” was adopted in its place. Although the terms “gene” and “genetics” were already in use, these discoveries grounded the gene in a molecular context. The term began to be applied to functionally related segments of DNA. Similar genes were thought to perform similar roles across different organisms. Thus, in a reductionist biology, genes were to be the building blocks of life. One gene coded for one protein, and that protein carried out a specific function. This molecular framework was dubbed the “central dogma,” and the fields of molecular biology and genetics were built entirely upon it. Evolutionary theory was revised accordingly, with molecular mechanisms of evolution entering the scientific literature during this period.

By the 1990s, “genetic engineering” was being heralded as the profession of the future. Even in Turkey, universities such as Boğaziçi, METU, and Bilkent replaced their traditional biology departments with molecular biology and genetics programs to keep up with this shift. Led by the U.S. and the U.K., multinational consortia launched the Human Genome Project also in the 90s. For the first time, the entire DNA sequence of a human (or an average human) was to be read in its entirety—a project that would span years, involve hundreds of laboratories, and cost billions of dollars. Perhaps a million genes would be identified for the first time. Although we would not be able to summarize all living organisms with just a few hundred genes—unlike the periodic table’s 100+ elements—there was still great hope in reductionist biology. We would cure cancer, extend the human lifespan; everything was thought to have a corresponding gene, and the code of life was finally being deciphered.

Following the success of modern science in the 19th century and the technological advancements that came with victories in physics and chemistry, positivism began to emerge as an ideology. For positivism—a materialist and atheist ideology—empirical science was sacred, and randomness had to be capable of explaining everything. For this to be possible, reductionism was indispensable. The delayed development of a reductionist foundation for biology constituted the ideological weak spot for this worldview. Gene-centered, reductionist biology, which peaked in the 1990s, became a kind of rebirth for the adherents of materialist, atheist, and hard positivist ideologies. It was no coincidence that this era coincided with the rise of Richard Dawkins as the fervent preacher of the new atheist religion. He didn’t write The Selfish Gene for nothing. Now, under pressure from this ideology—or rather, this belief system—all of biology and medicine were compelled to proceed from a gene-centric perspective. Any alternative would open a gray area of uncertainty or incompleteness, which would weaken the position of that ideological bloc. Genetic determinism was thus made a scientific necessity, built into the central dogma. Yet science need not be turned into an ideological dogma; alternative theorems could have been constructed. But the imperative of this ideology was marketed as the imperative of science itself, thereby silencing those who sought answers through different approaches.

When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2001, it became a global spectacle, featured in prime-time news broadcasts and announced at a joint press conference by U.S. President Bill Clinton and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. But its results were far from what had been promised.