Evelyn Fox Keller

Resumo A entrevista aborda a trajetória de Evelyn Fox Keller, professora emérita de história e filosofia das ciências do Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Keller reflete sobre seu percurso e sobre os desafios que precisou enfrentar para expandir as fronteiras dos estudos de ciências com seu trabalho pioneiro relacionando linguagem, gênero e ciências, que tem sido muito influente em mudar a visão da história das ciências.

For well over a century, temporality has played little more than a fleeting role in most of our biological sciences, and perhaps especially in genetics. For too long we have tried to build our understanding of genetic processes out of nouns, around entities. Perhaps it is time for a science constructed in and around the dynamics of biological processes, a genetics built not from nouns but from verbs. Perhaps the term gene itself can be revived for the twenty-first century by refiguring it as a verb. Would this be possible? Certainly our commitment to a noun-based science, to entity realism, runs deep, perhaps as deep as our understanding of science itself. Yet this article puts forward the suggestion that alternative linguistic traditions—rooted more in verbs than in nouns—might help us to develop a lexicon more suited to the dynamic interactivity of living systems to which current research in systems biology introduces us.

First and foremost I would like to express my gratitude to both the organizers of and participants on this panel. I am grateful for their attention, for the seriousness of their comments, and for their criticism. One criticism in particular recurs in several of these articles—namely, of the paucity of empirical evidence supporting my “position.” Let me say from the start that this criticism is clearly warranted. Before my article might even be considered to constitute an argument, or to elaborate a “position,” it would definitely require more evidence, more specificity, and better grounding in concrete examples. I readily grant all this. But I would like to suggest that my article is intended more as a provocation than as an argument. I do, of course, have positions—positions for which I have elsewhere argued extensively and that clearly motivate this attempt to provoke, all concerning the history of developmental biology. But my aim here is not so much to extend or repeat these arguments as it is to raise a kind of question not often considered in the conventional literature of the history and philosophy of science: How might the study of biological development have proceeded differently?

Historically, living was divided from dead, inert matter by its autonomous activity. Today, a number of materials not themselves alive are characterized as having inherent activity, and this activity has become the subject of a hot new field of physics, “Active Matter”, or “Soft matter become alive.” For active matter scientists, the relation of physics to biology is guaranteed in one direction by the assertion that the cell is a material, and hence its study can be considered a branch of material science, and in the other direction, by the claim that the physical dynamics of this material IS what brings the cell to life, and therefore its study is a proper branch of biology. I will examine these claims in relation to the concerns of nineteenth century scientists on the one hand, and on the other, in relation to future prospects of the division between animate and inanimate.

Jacques Monod gave us not only our first regulatory system, but also our first smart molecules – i.e., he gave us allosteric proteins. But both of these contributions hung in a certain tension with his primary commitments. In particular, I focus here on the ways in which his ontological commitments constrained his thinking about the power of allostery. Although he wrote that “so far as regulation through allosteric interaction is concerned, e verything is possible ”, for him, not everything was conceivable. In particular, what was not conceivable was a challenge to the primacy of DNA.

Poised at a critical turning point in the history of genetics, recent work (e.g. in genomics, epigenetics, genomic plasticity) obliges us to critically reexamine many of our most basic concepts. For example, I argue that genomic research supports a radical transformation in our understanding of the genome – a shift from an earlier conception of that entity as an effectively static collection of active genes to that of a dynamic and reactive system dedicated to the context specific regulation of protein‐coding sequences.