I would make metaphors for you until I became almost clear. Words are fairy tale, not a court transcript. They are those PA announcements on public trans where all you can make out is the irrelevant filler. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We're experiencing severe sdklh dhfj hryu e ahj ajd astue for alarm." Words are those slides they constantly fed you in art history, the blurred, color-poor angels of annunciation meant to stand in for the trip to Bruges. But I have no other means to tell it to you.
Ressler, when all molecular inheritance took shape in outline before him, saw it: the closest he would ever get is simile, literature in translation, the thing by another name, and never what the tag stood for. The dream that base-pair sequences might talk about themselves in high-level grammar vanished in the synthesized organism. Science remains at best a marvelous mine, not a replacement for the shattered Tower. Even at his death, despite the unstoppable advances in the state of decoding art, the human genome defies interpretation.
And yet, a man's speech should exceed his lapse, else what's a meta for? The manufacture of these working terms, names and the rules for manipulating them, the accuracy of their fit as fired in îhe crucible of environment, gave him a way in that mere possession of the thing never would have allotted. Names let him toss arrangements around, examine the implications of the message from angles that did not exist in negotiable reality. There is, in this Universe, a Stair.
If I have read the texts correctly — and who knows how wide of the mark my grasp of the blurry words is — then the grand synthesis that ten years ago today pulled all biology into a single tenet is this: a living thing is a postulate about where it finds itself. But that living thing postulates, deep in its cells, in a language that is itself also just a rough guess, a running, revisable analogy. The intermediary of language alone makes it possible to run trials, load experiment. Only by splitting the name from the thing it stands for can tinkering take place. Language, however faulty a direct describer, can get to the place, even change it, by strange ability to simulate, to suppose, to say something else than what is.
A given stretch of the epic verse, the sequence AACGCTA, may start life as a part of speech, emblem noun or imperative verb; "add this, then a bond, then another." By fault in the sentence-making system, the original utterance becomes AACGCGTA. Not much, I hear you dismiss. So what? So everything; you must see it. The whole parade depends on seizing mistakes. The accidental change of a single base pair can ripple through the reading process, accounting, after eons of accretion, for every implicit structure never mentioned in the string: stems, leaves, hair, hands, and— most hypothetical — brain. Evolution, the first arrangement of living things that doesn't commit the post hoc fallacy, lays it out: invention mothers necessity.
The feasibility of each inherited variation — theme elaborated by mutation — breeds out until there is no more single epic but four million variant variorum editions, each matched to the shelf where it finds itself. Yet the code, the language life writes itself in, is universal for every living thing, taking hold once and spinning, telling in all places at all times an eerie, inconceivably implausible story of how in the beginning there was a little water, ammonia, and methane, all trapped by trivial rules, and at the end, this woman saying over and over to herself, I want to tell you, I want to tell.
The scrim lifted, this is what Dr. Ressler saw. The text of a living thing, the tender, delicate, unlikely apparatus for unfolding it, does not stand for or represent or disfigure the shape of the world; it is just a set of possible, implementable maybes about what one might do about it. Nature seems to favor the what-if. Once over the complexity barrier, the simple account promotes itself to simulation. That is the magic of language: every word waits to come true. Description gives way to postulate, is refined by experiment into singing celebration. The same opaque, heavy-handed system that kept him one step away from what those emblems stand for permits this. No saying how; I've been in molecular linguistics long enough to know that language, like economics and love, is wonderful in practice, but just won't work out in theory.
The notebooks I've been keeping for you, friend, if they go on long enough, might become something new, not the thing I wanted to get at, but a live thing all the same, a living thing's living offspring. Would you approve of them? Could all this stuff still move you? To think so has become my life, what all this science writing hopes for. Every sentence ever written down is sent into the world to be winnowed or thrive according to the same accountability principle as those cistrons and their experimental apparatus. Does a given combination of words push close? Do they resonate? Or are they more noise, divorcibles, permutations to dispense with? Does the line shout out, beat around the edges of something real? Do the words make sense? Do we find ourselves arriving back at them late one surprise night, after years of traveling, thinking them dead? Is this phrase worth the ink it expends? Is it what I mean, something I need? Unshakable bits of the original Question Board. Months after quitting, I'm still working on the thing. Still pasting together. I have something almost right, something to say for no one's but your ears, if I could only reach you.
But it's stupid, to write as if he could read this. How could he know what has happened, how far I have come, how I would share him now with anyone, under any conditions, so long as I had a fraction of him to converse with? He couldn't, can't, doesn't, won't: choose your modality. Last he heard, I crossed him off, cut the tin-can string. "It has been so long since he has heard from me that he might easily conclude that I too am dead."
But I know something of him. He is here. Beached on the same island I am. I could walk to him overland if I had a map, an X to mark his spot, that Flemish, reflexive construction he once wrote me: "You Find Yourself Here." Frank, there is no other way to you but this.
The man you wanted me to name for you: his metaphors, too, were from the start just genes, as "gene" is the most successful metaphor his science has yet made to name life's notes toward a theory of experience. Dozens of words he scattered on us while alive still live. See? They keep me up at night, typing. This is what one woman might do with them. Todd, my mate, my husband, could I reach you, I would tell you how I have discovered what he was after — the secret subjunctive — and what discovery did to him. I would say how I have heard him, alone in this laboratory, his school, singing to himself. How I have made out, at last, what tune he wanted to pass on, the tune I want to sing you, the only notes worth moving mouth to mimic, and what the snippet means in our vocabulary. Franklin, just as you asked me: I have identified your friend.
Nomenclature
By spring, Ressler's trio has the kinks in cell-free synthesis ironed out. Uncanny: they can fractionate the inanimate building blocks, assemble them under controlled conditions, add a coded messenger, slip in the distilled adaptor, and — the nearest thing to golem-making to date—manufacture proteins, bring into being the plaintext product of the cell. It is not yet creating life. But their procedure is a close functional simulation.
They can take a chaotic soup of free aminos and arrange them, from out of a staggering number of linear permutations, into a sequence that gives them enzymatic sense. Granted, the information they introduce is not theirs, nor can they read it either before or after translation. They cannot compare the bit they submit and the batch output. The text is too complex, the print too fine.