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PARTISAN REVIEW
anew to correct all hypotheses by sense and by such outward
instruments as are proper for their particular works. By this means
they find some reason to suspect that those phenomena confessed
to
be occult are performed by the small machines of nature.
(Robert Hooke,
Micrographica,
1665)
In 2002 we explore those small machines of nature by means of imag–
ing techniques that Hooke, Boyle, and Newton, those Fellows of the
Royal Society (ER.S.), made possible.
Nullius in Verba
led the way from
Optiks to Micrographica to fluorescence spectroscopy. That in turn led
to Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (FISH), a method which permits
us to study how chromosomes are dispersed and rearranged. We learn
which genes are up- or down-regulated in any area of any tissue by
means of microchips on which many thousands of genes are displayed
-the dream of Erasmus Darwin, another ER.S. But, the revolution of
genes is not fueled by FISH and chips alone. Structural biology (X-ray
crystallography, etc.) permits us to model drug targets such as cyclooxy–
genase-1, an enzyme responsible for making our platelets clump, pre–
venting us from bleeding to death. On the other hand, if platelets clump
in vessels that feed our hearts and our brains, we succumb to heart
attacks and strokes. The discovery by John Vane (ER.S.) that aspirin
irreversibly inhibits this enzyme has been responsible for adding some
of those years to our lifespan in the Western world. The small machines
of nature are open to inspection-or duplication. We can now make tis–
sues in a dish. This reductionist dream was foreseen by Diderot in his
Reve d 'Alembert
(1769):
You can distill life in a closed vessel. Eat, digest, distill in a closed
vessel, and you have the whole art of making a man. Anyone who
wants
to
describe to the Academie the production of man or ani–
mal will need to make use of nothing but physical agencies.
Well, almost forty years ago, Alec Bangham and I, in Cambridge,
assembled lipid structures we called liposomes, artificial cell membranes
that have now been used in the clinic to deliver drugs or enzymes. By
encapsulating DNA-sometimes with enzymes with which to replicate
that DNA-in liposomes, one can introduce genes into cells by a process
called lipofection. A
reve
indeed. Diderot was not the only Enlighten–
ment scholar who correctly predicted the facts of biology in epigram–
matic form. In year 10 of the revolution, Pierre-jean-George Cabanis
suggested,
"Le cerveau secrete Ie pensee comme Ie fois secrete la bile."
(The brain secretes thoughts like the liver secretes bile.) Cabanis's for-
