As is seen in ‘From Buzz to Fuzz: the Dangers of the Unclear and Metaphorical Use of ‘Life’’, an evaluation of the metaphorical speech of ‘life’ as disturbing, risky, dangerous, inadequate and/or ideological mystification has a long tradition in the contempt and criticism of metaphors in science. In order to prepare the ethical arguments in ‘From Buzz to False Alarm: Fallacies Regarding the Normative Effects of a Fabrication of ‘Life’’ and to further emphasise the epistemological aspects summarised in ‘
From Buzz to Boost: Naturalisation of Life and Its Methodological Reduction in Synthetic Biology’, we will now focus on another side of the use of metaphors in synthetic biology: the methodological benefit in the context of cognitive and innovative functions, non-propositional truth criteria, paradigmatic changes of research approaches, theories and terminology. Metaphors play an important role for the inherent dynamics of research and development insofar as they can also be seen as driving forces in epistemic boundary crossing (
Burstword II, ‘
Reveal the Revolution: Methodologically Controlled use of Metaphors as Metaphors’). We briefly reframe these issues with respect to the metaphor of the ‘genetic code’ in ‘
Reveal a Scriptorium 4.0: Linguistic and Biological Innovations of the ‘Genetic Code’ Metaphor’. Here also, the need to explicate metaphors
as metaphors is accentuated—this time with a focus on a reductionist naturalisation and self-explication that is already inherently included in IT vocabulary.
Reveal the Revolution: Methodologically Controlled Use of Metaphors as Metaphors
Against the background of the ideal of a deductive logic of explanation, metaphors as well as models, the scientific counterpart of metaphors, were rejected as mere ornamental and heuristic aids rather than rational instruments of theoretical explanation [
42,
65]. But with the crisis of such a rationalistic ideal, as it has been postulated and introduced by philosophers of science like Kuhn, metaphorical terms and model explanations were also reevaluated and rehabilitated [
76]. Authors like Black and Hesse argued for a constitutive role and cognitive content of metaphors and models in scientific explanation and paradigm shifts [
15,
65]. According to Black, theoretical models in science, understood as ‘explicit metaphors’ [
16], introduce a new perspective and new vocabulary to speak about things. They initiate an analogical transfer of isomorphic relations from an already known and familiar domain to a new and unknown domain of scientific investigation on a rational basis ([
15], pp. 238–239).
Hesse calls this function the ‘redescription of the domain of the explanandum’ ([
65], p. 157). In this process of redescription, metaphors and models are closely linked and serve as a constitutive base and driving force on the level of scientific paradigms and research programs: ‘Scientific revolutions are, in fact, metaphoric revolutions, and theoretical explanation should be seen as metaphoric redescription of the domain of phenomena’ ([
5], p. 156). Therefore, metaphors are not mere ornamental and irrational epiphenomena of research but rather can be seen as an inevitable condition and rationale of scientific innovation and progress with a specific cognitive function [
26,
78,
83]. Zwart discusses the imaginative function of the metaphorical analogy ‘between synthetic cell diagrams and mandalas [which] not only pertain to the role of the object […], but also to the subject pole (the researcher […]).’ ([
118], p. 14). However, this fundamental epistemic function of metaphors does not imply that they are infallible and innocuous at all. Metaphorical shifts and transfer processes, although they are based on cognitive and rational analogies, are not deductive and fully controllable [
42]. They serve as non-propositional criterion of ‘rightness’ [
57], which Arbib and Hesse call a ‘‘pragmatic criterion’ plus ‘ideology’’ ([
5], p. 159). Furthermore, due to the selective ‘highlighting and hiding’ function [
77], they also carry the risk of mythification and misuse [
11,
12,
112] (see ‘
What Is the Meta for? Risks of Technomorphic Metaphors in Uncertain Situations’). At this point, the need for a methodologically controlled reflection on metaphors
as metaphors in scientific inquiry as well as in public debates is evident, but it is still a controversial and challenging task ([
42]; [
69], pp. 106–112).
Besides critical aspects and risks, one can also figure out an innovative, creative, pragmatically useful and even revolutionary function [
41,
72] and epistemic normativity of metaphors as conditions and driving forces of scientific inquiry, technological progress and societal discourses. Metaphors (and models) in this perspective appear as constitutive moments of paradigm shifts in the research process on all levels of theory building; practical norms of science; technological development; and the accompanying political, social and ethical discourses. In the current debate, for example, Szymanski has opened up the opportunity to replace passive machine metaphors in synthetic biology by more active descriptions of microorganisms as ‘participators’. This might open up new experimental directions [
108]. Generally, a metaphorological analysis of synthetic biology has to include the diachronic-historical perspective on the genealogy of a metaphor as well as the synchronic dimension of the systematic-ethical consequences—as has been emphasised, e.g. by Blumenberg [
17] and Weinrich [
114]. The diachronic-historical perspective often includes one or both of the two lines of conflict we introduced with respect to Aristotle in ‘
Life Is Not Life: Aristotle’s Wide Concept of Life and the Current Condensation of Modern Thinking in Synthetic Biology’. For instance, in their recent study, Matern et al. [
84] provide such a metaphorological attempt on the genesis and systematic implications of ‘living machine’ as a leading metaphor of synthetic biology. They locate the historical origin of this metaphor in Kant’s conception of life, which contains an epistemological and ontological reflection on the line between organism and machine and marks ‘a point of condensation where the shifting of boundaries, the eruption of the previous distinction becomes observable and processable’.
1 According to the authors, this metaphorically generated tension which bears the gap and undissolvable ‘surplus’ that differentiates living organisms from artificial machines is still present in the use of the metaphor ‘living machine’ in synthetic biology. Furthermore, it also carries some ethical challenges:
For ethical research, the dealing with the ambiguity of this metaphor allows on the one hand to try to get to the bottom of the determination of boundaries between a mechanization of life and a vitalization of the machine, on the other hand it allows to examine the relation of such an ethical determination of boundaries to the self-concept of the researchers in synthetic biology […]. (ibid., p. 57)
Besides the innovative function and epistemic normativity, two more functions can be differentiated as well. A reflexive critical function of metaphors lies in its potential to open up new perspectives by introducing alternative description languages that can correct established theoretical concepts. Thirdly, an argumentative function relates to ‘metaphors as truth-apt statements’ in the praxis of social reasoning ([
50], p. 258, p. 263). Function two and three can be seen as concrete facets of the overarching innovative function. Metaphors also have important didactic functions when it comes to the popularisation of sophisticated scientific concepts. For instance, the metaphor of a ‘genetic program’ or ‘receipt’ is useful for this purpose—even if there still remains a lot of inaccuracy in the details ([
101], pp. 60–61; see also [
37] and [
40], pp. 581–582). Another example is the interface between science and the public or developers and users in manuals and technical documentation [
54].
Reveal a Scriptorium 4.0: Linguistic and Biological Innovations of the ‘Genetic Code’ Metaphor
Another influential metaphor in synthetic biology is the ‘genetic code’, respectively ‘DNA as the software of life’ and the accompanied semantic fields of ‘reading’, ‘writing’ and ‘information’. If one is willing to relate it to the nowadays often-used ‘industry 4.0’ phrase, it might also be possible to talk about a biological ‘scriptorium 4.0’. However, from a metaphorological perspective, the story, from the discovery of DNA in the middle of the twentieth century to the synthesis of a whole bacterial genome by the Venter team, is also the success story of a metaphor. It is the story from
reading the genetic code to
writing DNA in digital code of bits and bytes (‘scriptorium 4.0’). Keller and Kay both point out that it is not only the metaphor of the ‘book of nature’ that sets the background concept for reading and writing the genetic code but also the technological and practical dimensions of research, the information discourse in computer science and cybernetics and finally the political and social context of the cold war and the human genome project, which strongly influenced the history of biology in the middle of the twentieth century—and are contained, one could say
encoded, in the metaphor of the genetic code [
71,
73].
The historical origin of the genetic code metaphor is Schrödinger’s influential book
What is life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, dating back to a homonymic series of lectures in Dublin and published in 1944 [
103]. With his pioneering work, Schrödinger introduced the metaphor of the ‘genetic code’ and thereby significantly influenced the further history of modern molecular biology and genetics [
52]. Blumenberg describes Schrödinger’s metaphorical invention as an episode within a metaphorological history of the legibility of the world ([
18], pp. 372–409). The genetic code, descended from the old script metaphor of the ‘book of nature’—and today turning into a ‘scriptorium 4.0’—here fulfils the function of closing the gap between metaphor and model, i.e. the transition from initially struggling with different metaphorical models of explanation to a hypothetical scheme that drives scientific research and initiates a paradigm shift. According to Blumenberg, biochemistry and genetics were successful not least because Schrödinger’s metaphorical idea was taken
literally (ibid., pp. 376–379). This is obviously true for synthetic biology. Seventy years later, Venter held an anniversary lecture in Dublin with the title
What is life? He described the conceptual background of his view of synthetic biology and what he thought he was actually doing by creating a bacterial cell: ‘I describe DNA as the software of life and when we activate a synthetic genome in a recipient cell I describe it as booting up a genome, the same way we talk about booting up a software in a computer’ [
113]. Venter refers directly to Schrödinger’s metaphor and reformulates it into computer terminology. In his view, he takes the metaphor of the genetic code literally and does not only see DNA as the software of life but also actually (re)writes this code. Based on his perspective on telling the story from reading to writing the genetic code, one could say that Venter’s experiments are a demonstration of the innovative and revolutionary power of metaphors in scientific inquiry and technological developments—the genetic code metaphor was literally brought to life.
As we have illustrated throughout this paper so far, the technomorphic metaphors in the debate about life receive some criticism due to the risks of mystification, misuse or nonsense (‘
What Is the Meta for? Risks of Technomorphic Metaphors in Uncertain Situations’). Furthermore, the reductionist explanations of synthetic biology have been criticised insofar as they need to be substantially complemented if the aim is to grasp a more holistic understanding of life (‘
From Holism to Reduction and Far Beyond: Wide and Narrow Understandings of Life’). But what also often remains overlooked in the debate on ‘life’ is the other side of the coin: the naturalisation and reductionism that is already inherent to information technological speech. Even before any IT metaphor is applied to ‘life’, the IT-traversed terminology of ‘booting’, ‘reading’ or ‘writing a code’ contains a peculiar naturalisation of human communication which is criticised for instance by Janich from a language-critical and culturalistic point of view. In a misleading way, the relations between information and life are turned upside down when it is argued that phrases like ‘genetic information’ are not anthropomorphic metaphors but rather realistic object-related descriptions—as in the aforementioned case of Venter. Here, not only is the term life used in a reductionist way; the computer scientific side of the coin—the terms ‘information’ or ‘code’—also receives an inadequately naturalised connotation. In a strong naturalistic sense, information appears
as if it were the object of natural history and therefore the object of biology, physics or chemistry ([
69], pp. 106–107).
This misleading development overlooks the reality that information is not a natural fact. Information is rooted in the cultural praxis of communication and rests on human interactions such as dialogical speech. Talk about ‘genetic information’, and beliefs that information is the result of a natural process of evolution, run into a tension: How do you explain the fact that humans refer to ‘life’ or ‘information’ meaningfully in a social context, if information or life as such is only the result of natural history and therefore only a matter of natural facts? And this tension applies to the scientist herself: She would have to explain her own speech act of explaining the overarching naturalisation as an incident of natural evolution and not as an argument within the debates within a scientific community. Here, a critical perspective on the self-understanding of the researcher opens up also from a methodological point of view. (From a different point of view, in ‘From (Proto)Type to Hype: an Argument for and Against the Pedagogical Side Effect of ‘Living Machines’’, some critical ethical remarks on the
pedagogical self-explication will be added as well.) Yet, as long as the metaphorical speech is made explicit and treated in a methodically adequate way, there remains no need to ban metaphorical speech about life or information in scientific engagement (ibid., pp. 111–112; [
70], p. 610).
In a more traditional formulation, ethical problems arise at the related cutting edge between ‘life’/‘information’ as descriptive terms and ‘life’/‘information’ as value-laden reflexive concepts. Here the short-sighted jump from matters of fact to matters of human autonomy, morality or social practices can only be realised for the sake of Hume’s Law ([
68] Book 3, Part I, Section 1) or the so-called naturalistic fallacy [
88]. The confrontation of ‘life’ and IT-traversed terminology on the other hand also makes an unexpected point, since it illustrates the power of ‘life’ as
Burstword II. Here ‘life’ in its obviously wide meaning bursts the inadequate narrow understanding of information as a natural incident. IT-oriented terms are part of the technomorphic metaphors of life. Vice versa, ‘life’ can also be seen as a part of the anthropomorphic metaphors of information and therefore detonate the conceptual and disciplinary narrowing of information technologies, where its link to the human lifestyle of communication has been lost.
In the sense of methodologically controlled use, the innovative, paradigm-changing power of metaphors, combined with their critical and argumentative functions, relates exactly to the positive side of the story (which finds its negative counterpart in ‘From Buzz to Fuzz: the Dangers of the Unclear and Metaphorical Use of ‘Life’’). Whereas in a methodologically non-controlled way, metaphors quickly turn into fuzzy, foggy and buzzy clouds of ideological misuse, or everything and nothing (Burstword I), in a methodologically considered way they also support important inherent dynamics of processes of scientific investigation (Burstword II). What remains an open issue, which cannot be answered in this paper, is the question of the concrete ways in which the innovative use of metaphors can be methodologically controlled in all respects. Nor can we address the methodological and epistemological issue of investigating life in transdisciplinary research groups (with and without using fuzzy and folk concepts, buzzwords, metaphors of life or life as metaphor).
We now turn to the ethical aspect of discourses of life within and about synthetic biology. Several links to genuine ethical problems have been mentioned already, especially the conflict between matter of fact (empirical-descriptive speech about life) and ‘matter of ought’ (normative-reflexive speech about life) that follows from the amalgamation between nature and culture in synthetic biology. This conflict might be avoided with a strict reductionist usage of ‘life’ (narrow understanding) in biology or an explicitly wide usage that is widespread in ethics, where life as a moral way of life is the genuine object of investigation. The crucial question is: Are we aware that ‘living machines’, ‘artificial life’ or ‘genetic information’ are metaphors for a limited treatment of life, which cannot be applied to human ways of life? After having emphasised the opportunities and pitfalls of reductionist and naturalised speech in synthetic biology, we turn to a self-critical view of ethics as well. Therefore, in the following section, we present some arguments related to ethical fallacies regarding a misleading ethical fundamentalism and even ethical pseudo-problems.