THE SPATIAL TOPOLOGY OF LIFE: FRANKLIN, CRICK, WATSON AND ARCHITECTURE ORGANIZED SPACE

If the structure of life was established by inference rather than observation, what exactly do we know when we claim to know how something is organized in space? The answer turns out to depend on a distinction that biology has been careless about for seventy years: the difference between what an instrument reports, what a model asserts, and what a name merely implies. Following that distinction upward from the double helix through chromatin, chromosomes, and the architecture of the nucleus, this book finds a strange landscape. Some levels of organization are as solid as arithmetic. One entire structural level, printed in every textbook for three decades, was an artifact of a test tube. Another is called topological and is nothing of the kind. And the so-called junk that makes up most of the human genome turns out to permit structure without determining it, much as the inert bulk of an enzyme holds an active site in place without ever touching the reaction. Along the way, three scientists serve as archetypes of three ways of knowing. Rosalind Franklin measured, and refused to guess. Francis Crick supplied the mathematics that turned her measurements into evidence. James Watson guessed, and was right. Their names appear here in that order for reasons of accuracy rather than apology. >Keywords: DNA, chromatin, topology, Rosalind Franklin, scientific method, molecular biology, philosophy of science