Lily E. Kay (1) (1947–2000)

This book is a remarkable achievement.
Kay has had the insight into the history of science and of ideas to focus on something that really surprised me once I got it: there was a time when the concept of information was not used to describe molecular biological processes, e.g., the genetic code. Most people could probably not say in a cogent way what the genetic code actually is, but they have heard of the human genome and DNA, and take for granted that the gene stores information about how the organism is put together. The fact that Lily both explains and documents is that there is a historical point in time--the late 1940s--when some molecular biologists stopped talking about organization and specificity started talking about information. She describes how they thought before this happened, and she explains the threads that led to this sea change in how people talked and thought about cellular processes. And she shows how this created the intellectual infrastructure, as it were, that made it possible to begin thinking about a "code" to explain how cells use DNA to make proteins after Watson and Crick published their model of DNA in 1953.
I could go on if I had more time, but one more thing I'd like to add is that she uses the explanatory framework of "discourse" and "texts," as popularized by Continental philosophers like Foucault and other philosophers, and shows how appropriate it is for this topic, as opposed to the "paradigm change" model of Kuhn. This will also be a revelation to many.… (más)