INFORMATION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY

这个项目导致了一本暂定名为《代码，程序，文本》的书： 信息与分子生物学的变革。 它侧重于 1953年至1973年，研究揭示了DNA的重要机制， 功能，将其表示为信息传递： 这些DNA信息被转录并翻译成蛋白质。 这些工作阐明了生命系统的关键特征：遗传 传播、突变和调节。 他们还改变了我们的基本 自然、有机体、健康、疾病和行为的概念， 基因工程技术，赋予科学家 前所未有的生命力量。 这个项目的目的是重建一个关键的历史， 遗传密码，提出了一个问题：科学家们是如何看待 生物和分子作为信息存储和检索系统; 生命是在什么过程中被概念化为文字的 自然语言;什么是认知/社会后果 这种转变。 这项工作研究概念模型，语言 工具，和代表性的策略，产生了一个话语， 遗传是以代码、程序、磁带、信息、阅读等术语为基础的- 框架、语言、信息和文本;生活中不存在的术语 1950年代以前的科学 这项研究是在一个历史的框架内进行的。 知识和技术联系起来的具体知识/权力关系 目标、话语实践和非话语实践。 它借鉴了 生物学史、控制论、通信技术、信息 理论、数字系统和西方（特别是 第二次世界大战和冷战期间的美国）文化。 因此本研究 希望表明，基于信息的分子转化 生物学是一个更广泛的文化和话语趋势的一部分， 战后的政治和科技重组

This project leads to book tentatively entitled Code, Program, Text: Information and the Transformation of Molecular Biology. It focuses on the years 1953-1973, when researches unravelled salient mechanisms of DNA function, representing it as information transfer: a genetic code in which DNA messages are transcribed and then translated into proteins. These works have elucidated key features of living systems: genetic transmission, mutation, and regulation. They have also altered our basic concepts of nature, organisms, health, disease and behavior, and through genetic engineering technologies, have endowed scientists with unprecedented power over life. The aim of this project is to reconstruct a critical history of the genetic code, posing the questions: how did scientists come to view organisms and molecules as information storage and retrieval systems; by which processes did life come to be conceptualized as a text written in a natural language; what have been the cognitive/social consequences of this transformation. The work examines conceptual models, linguistic tools, and representational strategies that produced a discourse of heredity grounded in terms such as code, program, tape, message, reading- frame, language, information and text; terms that were absent in life science before the 1950s. The study is framed within an historically specific knowledge/power nexus linked by epistemic and technological objectives, discursive and nondiscursive practices. It draws on the history of biology, cybernetics, communications technologies, information theory, digital systems, and the militarization of Western (especially American) culture during World War II and Cold War. Thus this study hopes to show that the information-based transformation of molecular biology is part of a broader cultural and discursive trend nested in postwar political and technoscientific reconfiguration.