Yesterday morning I was packing for a holiday and briefly listened to the Today programme on Radio 4, just at the time that Pallab Ghosh was talking about a new initiative funded by the Wellcome Trust, namely a new Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project. I didn’t really have time to listen or read about it but just posted a link to the BBC website.

Fortunately, Philip Ball was already on the case on Bluesky and so was the Science Media Centre. So, while on the move, I managed to access both the BBC announcement and the announcement by the Wellcome Trust entitled “New project to pioneer the principles of human genome synthesis”. This project is important because while scientists have successfully synthesised microbial genomes like E. coli, current technology cannot handle the complexity of human-scale genomes.

In this post, I don’t want to go into the science on which that project builds and the science that it wants to achieve. I leave that to people like Robin Lovell-Badge – read this to get a real sense of the project and its complexities.

I want to focus, of course, on rhetorical framing, in particular the use of hyperbole and metaphors (but this is really rushed!).

Genomic rhetoric

I have been looking at the rhetoric surrounding the Human Genome Project or HGP since the sequencing of the Human Genome was announced in 2001, including the mega-metaphor of reading and later annotating, editing, and writing the book of life.

Way back in 2003, Iina Hellsten and I observed shifts in the metaphorical landscape between 2001 and 2003 and noticed that people were talking more and more about complexity.

We wrote that “complexity became the focus of debate in 2001. The old metaphors of unambiguous information transmission began to be questioned more directly, using what some saw as new scientific evidence. The dogma of genetic determinism, of the one‐to‐one mapping between gene and protein, of the genome as the essence of humanity, of the blueprint that prefigures or predetermines the building of a human, was seriously challenged. But did this spell the end of the old metaphors and the end of the old genomic paradigm?” We concluded that this was not the case.

Since then a lot has happened and a lot has changed, as documented in Philip Ball’s book How Life Works. But… from what I can see after a quick look at the metaphors used in the announcement of the SynHG project, many old tropes are still there. They seem to be really difficult to shift in the absence of new ones.

Metaphors and hyperbole in the Wellcome Trust announcement

I don’t have time for a full analysis but here is just a list of the metaphors and hyperboles that I found. I should stress that this type of hype is what I call ‘honest hype‘, almost unavoidable in press releases and when talking about new or promised advances in science.

Hyperbole: “profound impacts on biotechnology”; “profoundly alter the horizons of biotechnology and medicine”; “major milestone in modern biology”; “transformative discoveries”; “transform our understanding of life and wellbeing”; “revolutionise biotechnology and medicine” (used twice); “one of the most exciting areas of scientific research”; “cutting-edge generative AI”.

Metaphors: The article uses quite a few general science metaphors which are almost impossible to avoid: “unlock a deeper understanding” and “unlocks new approaches”, where knowledge/possibilities are conceptualised as something locked away; whereas “opens up brand new areas” and “opening entire new fields” portrays research areas as physical spaces to be opened. There is also talk of “horizons of biotechnology”, where scientific possibilities are seen as a distant landscape; and “catalyse new technologies”, talking about research as a chemical catalyst.

There were fewer genome-specific metaphors than I expected. The central metaphor was “write our genome from scratch” which treats DNA, as always, as text, with the ‘from scratch’ phrase having originally been made famous by Craig Venter’s attempt at creating/writing/programming ‘synthetic life’ in around 2010.

By contrast, the long-standing building or construction metaphor – think ‘building blocks of life’ – is used quite frequently: “building the tools,” “reliably building a complete synthetic human genome,” “designing and building safe and effective cell-based therapies”. Here scientists are positioned as master builders. This implies, however, a kind of mechanical assembly that doesn’t really capture the complexity of biological systems, as was already evident in 2003.

Metaphors and hyperbole in the BBC announcement

Hyperbole: In the BBC article, the use of hyperbole, mainly in quotes from Julian Sale of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, is slightly different. The announcement uses phrases like “The sky is the limit”, which might be exaggerating future possibilities; “next giant leap in biology”, which overstates what might be possible in the future using a journey or path metaphor of progress as physical movement; and “unprecedented control”. This hyperbolic expression might evoke the image of technology as a tool for power and with it the ubiquitous cliché of scientists ‘playing God’ or of ‘rogue scientists’…

Metaphors: Surprisingly, the BBC article does not use the writing metaphor, but stays more with the metaphor of DNA as readable text or code, as in “read all human genes like a barcode” and “not just to read a molecule of DNA”. In the spoken version of the announcement Ghosh also speaks of DNA as a code “that makes us us”, which is sounds a bit like old-fashioned genetic determinism.

Construction, design and building metaphors are more in evidence, as in “create the building blocks of human life”, where DNA components are framed as construction materials; “building ever larger blocks of human DNA”, where synthesis is construction work. And of course “building DNA from scratch”, which apparently goes beyond just “tweaking DNA”, another long-standing metaphor in genetics and genomics discourse.

A critic of the project uses the metaphor “The genie is out of the bottle”, a ubiquitous metaphor akin to “opening Pandora’s box” which has accompanied every advance in genetics and genomics.

New metaphors needed?

Overall, the BBC article uses slightly more dramatic language than the Wellcome Trust press release, which reflects typical news media style when it comes to announcing advances in science. Both the press release and the BBC article use mundane hyperbole and metaphors and don’t introduce any new metaphors, which is a shame, especially since, unlike in the early 2000s, generative AI is now part of of this genomic project. Might this undersell the novelty of the project, as the language is so familiar and unremarkable? There is a missed opportunity, perhaps, to use this project to introduce more modern metaphors and narratives.

But I only looked at two texts. While I was doing that, I came across a first article on this topic in a traditional newspaper. This was the Daily Mirror, which had the sensationalist headline “‘Super humans’ fears as scientists aim to create first human genome in a lab”. However, this sensationalism too is rather familiar, as covered in Philip Ball’s book from 2011 Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People. 

During the holiday, I’ll have to wait and see how this all plays out in the news and then do a thorough analysis. At the moment such fears seem, as Philip Ball has pointed out, somewhat “fantastical“. As Lovell-Badge has stressed, the SynHG project might create synthetic human chromosomes and perhaps even cells, but “there is no suggestion to make synthetic humans”.

One should also compare the coverage now with that in 2015, when similar announcements were made in the context of earlier advancements in synthetic genomics (see my post here) and when people speculated about rewriting the “blueprint of life”, an evergreen but contested metaphor that is unfortunately still used today, 

(The post was proof-read by Claude, as I was in a hurry)

P.S.  2 July: A good explanation of what the project is about and some ethical reflections by Michael Reiss for the Nuffield Foundation.

Image: Pixabay