November 1, 2024, by Brigitte Nerlich
Gunfight at the O.K Corral; or how bacteria interact in popular science writing
For many years, I have been fascinated by war metaphors that people use to talk about bacteria, especially in the context of antimicrobial resistance, the microbiome and microbiology itself.
I am not the only one, of course. There is a thriving literature on war metaphors relating to bacteria that started to expand after Joshua Lederberg made the case in the year 2000 for a more ecologically informed metaphor to replace the war metaphor and advocated ‘ending the war metaphor’ at a 2005 workshop.
In a 2006 article, making reference to these milestones and detailing the rise and fall of the war metaphor in microbiology, the authors, like so many others including myself, focus mainly on the ‘war’ between microbes and host, or ‘them’ and ‘us’. However, in one section they also home in on the “complex web of interactions that must occur among the denizens of the gut” and point out that this “is even less well studied than those that take place between microbe and host, but undoubtedly no less important to gut function and development.”
So, how are these ‘interactions’ conceptualised? It turns out that the war metaphor is not dead in this context. On the contrary, it thrives, it seems, in some niches of scientific writing about how microbes ‘behave’ and it is still used when popularising scientific articles that stay relatively clear of war metaphors.
Victor de Lorenzo, a microbiologist and synthetic biologist, has been keeping an eye on the proliferation of such metaphors and last week he alerted me to an article in New Scientist that just brimmed with war metaphors.
Understanding science…or not
Before we get to analyse the New Scientist article, let’s take a look at the original article by Madeline Sheahan, Katia Flores, Michael J. Coyne, Leonor García-Bayona, Maria Chatzidaki-Livanis, Andrea Q. Holst, Rita C. Smith, Anitha Sundararajan, Blanca Barquera, and Laurie E. Comstock published in Science and entitled “A ubiquitous mobile genetic element disarms a bacterial antagonist of the gut microbiota”. I have to confess the topic was a bit out of my reach…
So I looked at the press release announcing the article which was slightly clearer. It seems to be about “how common gut bacteria tame their antagonistic neighbors by transferring genes that change their weapon systems”. That gives us some insight into what might have triggered the explosion of war metaphors in the New Scientist article. War metaphors are not easy to avoid. What about the original article (we’ll get to the title in a minute)?
The Editor’s summary that precedes the article proper, starts with this sentence: “Gut bacteria have many mechanisms for positive and negative interactions, and the trade among them is vigorous.” That sounds good to me – no war there! The rest of the summary is pretty incomprehensible to me apart from the second sentence which contains a war metaphor (“weaponised injection system”).
I did not fare much better with the abstract. It seems to be about bacterial DNA transfer and Type VI secretion systems (T6SS) in the gut microbiome, with a focus on Bacteroides fragilis – whatever that may mean. The last sentence contains some war metaphors: “Despite inactivating this T6SS, ICE acquisition increases the fitness of the B. fragilis transconjugant over its progenitor by arming it with the new T6SS. DNA transfer causes the strain to change allegiances so that it no longer targets ecosystem members with the same element yet is armed for communal defense.” I was a bit at a loss, as the only ICE I know is a train….
Understanding popular science… really?
In contrast to the original article, I did understand the article in New Scientist written by Michael Le Page. That’s good, isn’t it? The ‘translation’ from the technical to the non-technical, from the expert to the lay domain, seems to have worked. But, oh dear, in the process the science has been turned into “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral”. That might be slightly too much, some might argue.
What happened in this process of ‘translation’? In this case, the ‘translation’ relied heavily on metaphors, which is not surprising. Metaphors work by mapping something familiar onto something unfamiliar to make it more understandable, that is, they map from what is called the source domain (in our case warfare) onto the target domain (in this case the science of bacteria).
For understanding to emerge from such mappings one normally has to know something about the source domain (the familiar), but one also has to know a little bit about the target domain (the relatively unfamiliar). If I say ‘genes are blueprints’ and I know nothing much about genes then hearing about blueprints doesn’t help much and if I don’t know what a blueprint is that doesn’t help either.
In our case, my knowledge of gut microbiology is virtually zero. So my understanding relies quite heavily on my cultural (and so far fortunately not actual) knowledge of ‘war’. (I know a bit about the gut and the microbiome but in the case of this article that didn’t seem to help)
To bridge this gap, that is to help in the mapping process between source and target, I talked to Claude, who, as a pattern matching machine based on gazillions of datapoints, can match patterns of established scientific gut microbe discourse onto patterns of established popular war metaphor discourse.
Understanding titles… perhaps
Before we scrutinise source-domain mappings in the New Scientist article, let’s have a quick look at the titles, just to set the scene.
The article in Science is entitled “A ubiquitous mobile genetic element disarms a bacterial antagonist of the gut microbiota”. Despite the article itself being quite light on war metaphors (war = 0; fight = 0; enemy = 0; battle = 1; arming =1; weapon = 3), this title contains two: disarm and antagonist, although antagonist is very conventionalised in this type of scientific discourse.
What about the New Scientist title? Here we go: “Your gut bacteria are at war – and force their enemies to switch sides”. War metaphors are out in force here. The subtitle or lede is even more explicitly war oriented: “Rival tribes of bacteria armed with poison darts are fighting it out in your gut, with armies of traitors often winning the day” – rival, tribes, armed, poison darts, fighting, armies, traitors, winning… But this is just the prelude for the Western that follows.
Understanding through metaphor scenarios… one can only hope
How does the Western play out? That is to say, how do metaphors tell the story of the advance in science announced in the Science article so that idiots like me might understand what’s going on?
To find out, we examined what cognitive linguists like Andreas Musolff have called metaphor scenarios. That is to say, we sorted “source concepts into mininarratives or ‘scenarios’ that dominate the discourse manifestations of source domains”.
In our case, the overarching source domain scenario is that of war and it has various subplots. We found scenarios of military/warfare; of military weaponry; of military espionage and political alliances; and finally of disputed territory.
The scenario of military/warfare: Here bacterial interactions, the target domain, become, ‘battles’ and ‘fights’. Competitive interactions become ‘fighting for territory’. Bacterial groups become ‘tribes’ and ‘armies’. The gut becomes a ‘battleground’ (see also the territory scenario). Increases in fitness become ‘traitor armies usually win these battles’. Competition becomes ‘battle’ or ‘fighting for resources’ or trying to ‘get the upper hand’. Overall, we have entered, it seems, a ‘bug-shoot-bug world’.
The scenario of military weapons: Here things become tense. The abstract technical term and acronym T6SS, or type VI secretion system, becomes ‘dart guns’, ‘poison darts’ and ‘high-speed syringes’. T6SS activity becomes ‘guns blazing’. Technical toxins become ‘poisons’. ‘Antidotes’ is introduced as a way to explain immunity. The energetic/metabolic cost of T6SS production is explained through the metaphor of “going around with guns blazing”.
Interestingly, the press release for the article, which is generally less overloaded with military metaphors, calls the mechanism that TS66 uses to inject toxins, “a spring-loaded, poison-tipped spear” (TS66 itself is called a ‘nanomachine’). (Interestingly, when you put type 6 secretion system into Google images, what you see is a sort of harpoon, and one image leads you to an article by the American Society for Microbiology no less that calls T6SS ‘weapons of bacterial destruction’!)
The scenario of political allegiance/espionage: The abstract’s “change allegiances” is expanded into a full narrative about ‘traitors’ and ‘switching sides’. Bacterial groups become ‘tribes’ with distinct identities. DNA transfer becomes recruitment of ‘traitors’. Bacterial reproduction becomes forming ‘armies of traitors’. Bacterial groups that take up the DNA become ‘traitor armies’. The concepts of friends and foes and loyalty and betrayal are also introduced. Horizontal gene transfer becomes ‘side switching’. Overall, bacterial populations become opposing sides in a conflict.
The scenario of military territory/territorial control: The abstract’s ecological concepts are translated into spatial/territorial terms. Competition for resources becomes ‘fighting for territory’. Complex ecological interactions become “There’s so many different things to consider in these battles”.
Lederberg’s wish to replace war metaphors with ecological ones in science communication about bacteria has certainly not been fulfilled.
There is however, one aspect in this bug-shoot-bug world painted by the metaphor scenarios, that doesn’t come across so well in my metaphor dissection, namely a certain level of complexity described in the New Scientist article: “Crucially, however, the genetic instructions for making a specific kind of dart gun always come with the instructions for making the antidote to the poison in the darts fired by that gun. When a bacterium is hit by darts from a member of its own tribe, it isn’t harmed. Put another way, in this world of poison darts and antidotes, what side a bacterium is on is determined by what dart gun and antidote it manufactures.”
Insight or illusion?**
Having dissected and sorted the metaphors used in the New Scientist article into scenarios, I began to wonder what this can tell us about science communication and public understanding of science.
One thing this highlighted for me is that all the negative and positive interactions between bacteria in the gut can now be visualised by a lay person like me in terms of a rather tense and complex movie playing out in front of one’s inner eye. That’s more than what my inner eye saw when trying to read the scientific article. But I am left with an uneasy feeling.
The metaphorical scenarios, while effective at making the content more vivid and engaging for a general audience, might also risk creating an ‘illusion of understanding’ rather than true comprehension of the underlying science. Is that good or bad for science communication and public understanding of science?
What better metaphors can one use if one really wants to put an end to war metaphors in talk about bacteria? Terry Pratchett once wrote that “A metaphor is a kind o’lie to help people understand what’s true”. Are there metaphors/lies that can create more insight than illusion?
Footnotes:
*On nanomachines and militaristic metaphors, see my slightly old reflections here (disregard the photo!)
** This section title is an allusion to Peter Hacker’s seminal book on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, entitled Insight and Illusion.
Image: Pixabay
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