Biology of Wonder_ Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science ( PDFDrive.com )

law of heredity, the biological equivalent to the law of the conservation
of mass. James Watson and Francis Crick found the genetic code, the
meta-law that ordains how specific organisms are constructed. In
principle, it seems, these laws are thought to provide everything that is
needed for the universe to generate a living being — and their careful
application therefore in principle can lead us to generate organisms from
scratch (as synthetic biologists are now attempting).
Biology in the course of the 20th century became a prima donna
among the sciences. It offered, at least in principle, the knowledge
necessary to create life. At the moment, this pretension has shifted to the
field of synthetic biology, with its massive allocation of academic
research power to the material reconstruction of life forms and their
functions, and also with its potential of doing hip stuff and creating
unexpected novel life forms in makeshift kitchen labs with DIY enzyme
kits. The science of life has superseded physics as the most exciting
research frontier. This shift is also due to the fact that physics, after
centuries of technological success, has been stuck in a research morass,
trying to sort through the many unresolved enigmas left by Albert
Einstein, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, among others. Physics
stopped being only the mathematical description of a causal lawful
universe and became complicated, difficult to understand, but utterly
interesting. Biology, however, just worked. In general relativity theory,
space, time and observers are entangled, and there are no objective
points of reference any more. In quantum theory even the spatial and
temporal separations of events cease to be. Everything that is, was and
will be, is connected to everything else. In biology, however, organisms
have become as predictable as atoms had been in an outdated physics,
guided by eternal and external laws.
Even though biology has triumphed as the preeminent science of the
second half of the 20th and the first decades of the 21st centuries, it has
not yet hosted any really important theoretical or empirical revolutions,
as the physical sciences did. That is not to deny that biologists have
amassed a mountain of knowledge enabling them to probe deeply into
the inner functioning of organisms. With startling speed, researchers
have now decoded genomes for everything from E. coli and barley to
mice and mammoths to man. Unfortunately, they are still imprisoned in
the Newtonian frame of mind. In the course of their translation frenzy,