[Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]"What makes us human, and what makes each of us our own human, is not simply the genes we have buried in our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feedback onto our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves. Life is a dialectic. For example, the code sequence GTAAGT can either be translated as instructions for the amino acids valine and serine; or it can be read as a "spacer", a genetic pause that keeps other protein parts an appropriate distance from each other; or it can be read as a signal to cut the transcript. Our DNA is defined by its multiplicity of possible meanings; it is a code that requires context.
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The best metaphor for our DNA is literature. Like all classic literary texts, our genome is defined not by the certainty of its meaning, but by its linguistic instability, its ability to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations. What makes a novel or poem immortal is, paradoxically, its complexity, the way every reader discovers in the same words a different story. (...) The same book manages to inspire two completely different conclusions. But there is no right interpretation. Everyone is free to find their own meaning in the novel. Our genome works the same way. Life imitates art.!" (Jonah Lehrer)
(...)
The best metaphor for our DNA is literature. Like all classic literary texts, our genome is defined not by the certainty of its meaning, but by its linguistic instability, its ability to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations. What makes a novel or poem immortal is, paradoxically, its complexity, the way every reader discovers in the same words a different story. (...) The same book manages to inspire two completely different conclusions. But there is no right interpretation. Everyone is free to find their own meaning in the novel. Our genome works the same way. Life imitates art.!" (Jonah Lehrer)
