(p. 13) Martinez Arias, a developmental biologist, has lived and breathed the cell’s struggle to be heard over a career spanning 40-odd years. His story is one of DNA elites against hardworking, blue-collar cells. Cells, not DNA, Martinez Arias points out, determine the ripples of our fingerprints and the texture of our irises.
Martinez Arias builds his argument against the supremacy of DNA around Frankenstein-like experiments that involve borrowing a gene from one organism and dropping it into another. Take, for instance, the fruit fly PAX6 gene. When this gene is mutated, flies develop without eyes. Yet when a human version of PAX6 is swapped in for the fly gene, it makes a fly with fly eyes, not a fly with human eyes.
This is because fly cells are doing the work. Living things are much more fluid, Martinez Arias argues, than the concept of a DNA instruction manual would have us believe. An organism is less like a car, built according to a precise blueprint, he suggests, than a hobbyist’s renovation project, where the cells who live there build a deck or replace a light fixture based on the tools that happen to be lying around in the garage and whatever lumber is on sale at the store. Many of the differences between you and me are the result of accidents in time, enacted by our cells.
For the full review, see:
Alex Johnson. “Going Viral.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, September 17, 2023): 13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 15, 2023, and has the title “A Reason to Cheer for Cells and the Viruses That Feed on Them.”)
The book under review is:
Arias, Alfonso Martinez. The Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life. New York: Basic Books, 2023.