Autumnfire Book

Difficult, profound; worth the reader's best efforts

Time and again in this dense, intensely scientific exposition on cellular life, Professor Harold expresses his dissatisfaction with what he calls the "genocentric" view of life. Instead he would like to see a "focus on the cellular templet rather than the molecular gene." He believes this would represent "a significant divergence from the genocentric conception of life that now dominates the scientific literature and even more so, the popular press." (p. 100) Harold makes a strong case for his point of view; indeed, it is this book more than any other that has made me see the overriding influence the immediate molecular environment has on reproduction and growth.

The genome has its "recipe," its code of instructions, but what Harold is at pains to tell us is that without the four-dimensional cellular environment in which the gene's "instructions" are carried out in a step-by-step process, there would be no growth or reproduction.

What this means is that the shape and temperature, the position and abundance of the surrounding cellular elements themselves shape the genetic expression as much as or even more than the genome. All life comes from life. All cells come from cells. There is no acting out of the genetic code outside a cellular environment.

And so we see Harold's frustration and that of other molecular biologists at all the hoopla that has accompanied the sequencing of the genome when it is clear that reading the code is just a very small step toward understanding how the cell reproduces itself and grows. What we need to understand is the intricate environment of the cell and how it interacts with the code leading to the epigenetic assembly of the cell and ultimately of the organism. The complications inherent in such an enterprise are truly mind-boggling in the extreme. Analysis of the four-dimensional factors would overwhelm the fastest computers in existence--all of them at the same time--if somehow we could figure out how to employ them to aid our analysis.

These facts explain why scientists like Harold are insistent upon a holistic approach to biology and why they again and again warn about the limitations of a reductionist approach. Life is just too complicated to be understood by breaking it down into pieces and attempting to put it back together, or to reverse engineer it.

On page 213 there is an interesting comparison of E. O. Wilson's view that there is "progress" in evolution and Stephen J. Gould's emphatic view that there is not. Harold seems to be implying that because organisms have become more complex that there is indeed at least "direction" in evolution. I would go further than this and observe that the rise of complex culture-bearing organisms like humans, who may be able to protect their home planet from a death-dealing meteor, implies if not "progress" in evolution, something equally agreeable. However, I would not say that our rise was inevitable. Indeed, along with Gould I would call it a contingency.

Much of the book, especially chapters three through eight, is a technical exploration of the microbial world of the cell using concepts and terminology not readily accessible to the lay reader. Harold is aware of this, at least for Chapter 4, "Molecular Logic," where he writes on page 35, "...students of biochemistry will find little in [the chapter]...that is new to them, but for the layman it may be like sipping water from a firehose." (!) Professor Harold provides a glossary, but one suspects one is out of one's depth when the words searched for are not in the glossary, but can be found in an ordinary dictionary!

Nonetheless the broad outlines of Harold's message can be discerned without appreciating fully the intricacies of cell metabolism and development. The introductory chapters, "Schrödinger's Riddle" and "The Quality of Life" explore the question that physicist Erwin Schrödinger famously asked in his much admired little book, What Is Life? (1944), a book that very much impressed the young Franklin Harold. In the closing chapters, beginning with Chapter 9 "By Descent with Modification," and especially the engaging Chapter 10 "So What is Life?", Harold looks more generally at evolution. He touches on the new science of complexity and how it relates to biology, and on the thermodynamics of ecosystems and how that affects natural selection. His treatment of some of the controversies in evolutionary theory is both illuminating and balanced, so much so that one would like to quote whole passages. This is obviously a subject Professor Harold has thought long and hard about for many years. Here are some examples of his thought:

"...[F]orm is not directly or rigidly determined by the genotype: the genes define a range within which the phenotype falls, but forms arise epigenetically as the result of developmental processes." (p. 209)

"Organisms are historical creatures, the products of evolution; we should not expect to deduce all their properties from universal laws." (p. 218)

"What we lack is an understanding of the principles that ultimately make living organisms living, and in their absence we cannot hope to integrate the phenomenon of life into the familiar framework of physical law. I am not here to advocate a veiled vitalism, nor to sneak in a creator by the back door. But...until we have forged rational links between the several domains of science, our understanding of life will remain incomplete and even superficial." (p. 218)

"...[W]hile a machine implies a machine maker, an organism is a self-organizing entity." (p. 220)

"Organisms process matter and energy as well as information; each represents a dynamic node in a whirlpool of several currents, and self-reproduction is a property of the collective, not of genes.... DNA is a peculiar sort of software, that can only be correctly interpreted by its own unique hardware.... [S]ending aliens the genome of a cat is no substitute for sending the cat itself--complete with mice." (p. 221)

--Dennis Littrell, author of "The World Is Not as We Think It Is"