An Introduction to Molecular Linguistics

An introduction to molecular linguistics Biology is filled with linguistic metaphors.The punctuated yet commaless genetic code is transcribed and translated.Gene transcripts are edited, and cells are said to communicate.Recently the newspapers carried the story of the discovery of a gene, a "molecular spell checker," whose malfunction causes colon cancer (Saltus 1994).Immunologist NeilsJerne in his 1984 Nobel Prize acceptance speech suggested that the variable region of an antibody might correspond to a sentence or phrase and the vast repertoire of immune response might be considered a vocabulary of sentences (Jerne 1988).Why afe there so many metaphors?Is there more here than analogy?This article addresses two questions: How deeply does the biological-linguistic analogy run, and to what uses can it be put today?One discovers that historically the analogy keeps reemerging: from Darwin's (1859) comparison of a species to a natural language to Gamov's (1954) suggestion that the synthesis of proteins from DNA be considered a problem in coding.To Gamov, DNA was a long, four-digital number that had been translated into words spelled from the 20-letter amino acid alphabet.Crick (1959) viewed the genetic coding problem as that of "translating one language to another."The idea of the analogical use of language, letters, and translation, which may now seem useful but hardly profound, was stimulating and controversial when first proposed.It formed the basis of the theory driving early experiments deciphering the genetic code.Today, techniques from formal language theory are used to analyze the data from genome sequencing by Patricia Bralley 146The general goal of structural linguisticsdistinguishing how differences in syntactic structure reflect differences in meaningaddresses the same problems facing molecular biologists projects, while the analogy suggests that new ways of understanding the evolution of complex systems await discovery.