LNCS 2950 - Aspects of Molecular Computing (Frontmatter Pages)

The Duality of Patterning in Molecular Genetics
Solomon Marcus
Romanian Academy, Mathematics
Calea Victoriei 125
Bucuresti, Romania
solomon.marcus@imar.ro
The first time I met Professor Tom Head, just in the year 1971, was when
I became interested in the triangle linguistics-molecular genetics-mathematics.
Tom Head is a pioneer in the theory of splicing, which became an important
component of the new domain of DNA computing ([5,14,7]). It is nice for me to
remember that in December 1971 I had the chance to be invited by Professor
Head at the University of Alaska, where I gave a series of lectures. A few months
earlier, in July-August 1971, I organized within the framework of the Linguistic
Institute of America (at State University of New York at Buffalo, under the
direction of Professor David Hays) a research seminar on the above mentioned
triangle. My starting point for the seminar was a book by Professor Z. Pawlak,
a famous Polish computer scientist, and the writings of Roman Jakobson on the
link between linguistics and molecular genetics. One of the participants at this
Seminar was Bernard Vauquois, one of the initiators of ALGOL 60. As a result of
this seminar, I published the article [10] and much later [11], where the interplay
nucleotide bases-codons-amino acids-proteins is analyzed in the perspective of
structural linguistics and of formal language theory.
In a retrospect, the notion of splicing was in the immediate neighbourhood
of the ideas investigated there, but we were not able to invent it and to give it an
explicit status. It was the privilege of Tom Head [5,6] to identify it and to show its
generative capacity. In a further steps, [14,7,16,4] developed a comprehensive theory
of DNA computing, based on the splicing operation. However, concomitantly
there was another line of development where splicing was not involved, although
potentially it is implied and its relevance can be shown: the Human Genome
Project (HGP). It started around 1990 and was directed towards sequencing the
DNA, identifying the genes and establishing the gene-protein function correlation.
This line of research brings to the center of attention the analytic aspects
related to DNA, genes and codons. Obviously, in the context of Watson-Crick
double strand organization, splicing, as a purely combinatorial-sequential operation
related to DNA, finds its natural place and should be involved in the
gene-protein interaction. But the aim of this note is more modest and of a very
preliminary nature in respect to the problem we just mentioned. We have in
view the so-called duality of patterning principle and its possible relevance for
molecular genetics. This aspect is not without relation with the gene-protein
interaction, because the duality is in strong relation with the arbitrariness of the
genetic sign, a genetic equivalent of the problem of arbitrariness of the linguistic
sign, discussed by Ferdinand de Saussure.
N. Jonoska et al. (Eds.): Molecular Computing (Head Festschrift), LNCS 2950, pp. 318–321, 2004.
c○ Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004