It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life
The view of biology often presented to the public is oversimplified and out of date. Scientists must set the record straight, argues a new book.
Review of 2023 book: How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology Philip Ball. ISBN9781529095999
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Another metaphor that Ball criticizes is that of a protein with a fixed shape binding to its target being similar to how a key fits into a lock. Many proteins, he points out, have disordered domains — sections whose shape is not fixed, but changes constantly.
I dunno, kinda sounds to me like a good educational metaphor. Yea, not 100% accurate but good enough for high school biology. You need to make some simplifications for the sake of education. Not everyone can care about the complex intricacies of genes and proteins.
Good enough for high school biology. But not when you're doing influential cancer research. The following is from Subanima's article on the same subject:
One of the most influential papers in cancer biology published in 2000 was the "Hallmarks of cancer" by Douglas Hanahan and Robert Weinberg. It outlined six of the main capabilities of cancer and laid out a rough program for studying the disease ointo the 21st century. To date, it has over 39,000 citations which, in academia, is officially known as a shitton.
It was so successful that they released a sequel in 2011 which has over 62,000 citations - also known as a metric shitton.
But at the heart of both papers is the machine metaphor and the idea that if we just map out all the functions of proteins in one ginormous map, we'll just have to run some maths and we'll know everything we need to know to cure cancer. In 2000 they wrote:
Two decades from now, having fully charted the wiring diagrams of every cellular signalling pathway, it will be possible to lay out the complete ‘integrated circuit of the cell.’
He also notes the same thing you noted, that it's a good metaphor for high schoolers.
I still feel like he's nitpicking tbh, wiring diagrams can have devices with variable or probabilistic states and though the maths is very complex it's theoretically possible to similate and map.
This maybe true, but these states aren't being represented in the biological diagrams.
Why can't we have both?
Edit: switched what to why.
I think we will. It's still a useful analogy for initial understanding. However, I think we should be clear that it's not quite perfect. Just like we have to be careful about bringing a Newtonian understanding into quantum physics where someone might believe a photon has mass because it has momentum.
