We need new metaphors that put life at the centre of biology | Aeon Essays
is a British science writer, whose work appears in Nature, New Scientist and Prospect, among others. His latest books are How Life Works (2023) and Beautiful Experiments (2023). He lives in London. Edited bySam Dresser You could be forgiven for thinking that the turn of the millennium was a golden age for the life sciences. After the halcyon days of the 1950s and ’60s when the structure of DNA, the true nature of genes and the genetic code itself were discovered, the Human Genome Project, launched in 1990 and culminating with a preliminary announcement of the entire genome sequence in 2000, looked like – and was presented as – a comparably dramatic leap forward in our understanding of the basis of life itself. As Bill Clinton put it when the draft sequence was unveiled: ‘Today we are learning the language in which God created life.’ Portentous stuff. The genome sequence reveals the order in which the chemical building blocks (of which there are four distinct types) that make up our DNA
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