THE NARRATIVES OF SCIENCE: LITERARY THEORY AND DISCOVERY IN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
PRIYA VENKATESAN
In 1953 in England James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in the now-famous scientific narrative known as the “race towards the double helix”. Meanwhile in France, Roland Barthes published his first book, Writing Degree Zero, on literary theory, which became the intellectual precursor for the new human sciences that were developing based on Saussurean linguistics. The discovery by Watson and Crick of the double helix marked a definitive turning point in the development of the life sciences, paving the way for the articulation of the genetic code and the emergence of molecular biology. The publication by Barthes was no less significant, since it served as an exemplar for elucidating how literary narratives are structured and for formulating how textual material is constructed. As Françoise Dosse notes, Writing Degree Zero “received unanimous acclaim and quickly became a symptom of new literary demands, a break with tradition”.1 Both the work of Roland Barthes and Watson and Crick served as paradigms in their respective fields. Semiotics, the field of textual analysis as developed by Barthes in Writing Degree Zero, offered a new direction in the structuring of narrative whereby each distinct unit in a story formed a “code” or “isotopy” that categorizes the formal elements of the story. The historical concurrence of the discovery of the double helix and the publication of Writing Degree Zero may be mere coincidence, but this essay is an exploration of the intellectual influence that both events may have had on each other, since both the discovery of the double helix and Barthes’ publication gave expression to the new forms of knowledge
1 Françoise Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966, trans. Deborah Glassman, Minneapolis, 1997, 71.
430 Priya Venkatesan that were emerging and gaining ascendancy during that particular period. While not explicitly offering an historical explanation, I will propose that a dialectic emerged between twentieth-century Continental literary theory and molecular biology, and it was not mere coincidence that both fields, Continental philosophy and molecular biology, underwent enormous development at the same time. Each impacted on the other, maybe not directly but implicitly; and the philosophical tenets widely espoused by structuralism and post-structuralism were reflected in the paradigmatic shifts and in the narratives of momentous discoveries of molecular biology. This essay will take into account both the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953 and that of the lac operon of gene regulation in bacteria by François Jacob and Jacques Monod in 1968.2 As I will argue, the discovery of the double helix corresponds to the structuralist response to phenomenology. By examining the narrative by James Watson, The Double Helix, I will show how phenomenological distinctions of perception and intentionality are replaced by the structuralist paradigm of a differential system of language. Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity reflects the corresponding turn from structuralism to post-structuralism whereby a philosophy expressing acausality, decentredness, and chance as driving forces behind life replaces structuralism and its conception of centre and of a revealing internal structure behind cultural entities. What I would like to argue is that the textual accounts the discoverers revealed in the narrative telling of their scientific discoveries reflected the philosophical turn of events in Continental literary theory. The narrative of The Double Helix shows the tenets of the structuralist philosophy at work, while that of Chance and Necessity, which articulated an early version of a philosophy of biology, displayed facets of post-structuralism and offered a deconstructive vision of the life sciences. Structuralism entailed a method of organizing the elements of language into rules and reduced social phenomena into discrete units that
2 The lac operon is a set of regulatory elements, or sequences of DNA, that regulates whether genes are off or on, in bacteria, and controls the metabolism of the molecule lactose, a derivative of glucose. The lac operon can sense whether lactose is in the cell or not, and turn on the genes of lactose degradation. In other words, if lactose is present, the lac operon begins synthesizing the gene products to metabolize the lactose in the bacterial cell. If lactose is absent, the lac operon stops the production of these gene products.