Genetic Analysis 297and catalyzed, actors and ‘reacting substances’” [Keller, 1995, 15-16]. However,
to the “American geneticist” Sturtevant’s rephrasing of the problems in terms of
”chain of reactions into their individual links”, had an immense appeal, because,
as Keller says, “Once the problem of development is translated into the question of
how genes produce their effects, the task is immediately — and almost miraculously
— simplified” [Keller, 1995, 16]. The problem was not that of switching the notion
from “gene action” to that of “gene activation”. It was one of overcoming the
reductionist paradigm of genetic analysis that was immanent to the genetic theory
of inheritance for de Vries, but largely pragmatic and instrumental to Morgan and
his associates.
If genetic determinism became stereotypic, this was to a large extent due to
its experimental success. But genetic analysis advanced toward a system’s per-
spective from within. To a large extent, the sheer amount of reductionist data
that needed integration led to the sublimation of instrumental reductionism of
genetic analysis. Methods were developed toward the beginning of the twenty-first
century in relation to the sequencing effort of the complete human genome (see,
e.g., Sulston and Ferry [2002]). Many were based on the principles of analysis of
the hybridability of nucleotide sequences. The price for such collections of huge
amounts of data was inevitably the reduced reliability of individual data. This
was overcome in the genome sequencing effort by repeatedly sequencing of any
segment. However, for other purposes, like that of building “proteomes” (the total
yield of proteins synthesized by cells) or the “interactome” (the total pattern of
protein-interactions in given cells) (see, e.g., Perkel [2004]) the lack of accuracy of
individual data was often amply compensated for by the algorithms developed for
looking for bulk-effects (based on tens of thousands of individual data) of patterns
of production and interaction.
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