The Semiosis of “Side Effects” in Genetic Interventions

Abstract

Genetic interventions, which include transgenic engineering, gene editing, and other forms of genome modification aimed at altering the information “in” the genetic code, are rapidly increasing in power and scale. Biosemiotics offers unique tools for understanding the nature, risks, scope, and prospects of such technologies, though few in the community have turned their attention specifically in this direction. Bruni (2003, 2008) is an important exception. In this paper, I examine how we frame the concept of “side effects” that result from genetic interventions and how the concept stands up to current perspectives of the role of organism activity in development. I propose that once the role of living systems in constructing and modifying the informational value of their various developmental resources is taken into account, the concept of a “side effect” will need to be significantly revised. Far from merely a disturbance brought about in a senseless albeit complex system, a biosemiotic view would take “side effects” as at least sometimes the organism’s active re-organization in order to accommodate or make use of novelty. This insight is nascent in the work of developmental plasticity and niche construction theory (West-Eberhard 2003; Odling-Smee et al. 2003), but it is brought into sharper focus by the explicitly interpretive perspective offered by biosemiotics. Understanding the “side effects” of genetic interventions depends in part on being able to articulate when and where unexpected consequences are a result of semiotic activity at various levels within the system. While a semiotic interpretation of “side effects” puts into question the naive attitude that would see all unintended side effects as indications of disturbance in system functionality, it certainly does not imply that such side effects are of no concern for the viability of the organisms in the system. As we shall see, the fact that such interventions do not respect the translation of information that occurs in multi-level biological systems ensures that disruption is still likely. But it does unprivilege the human agent as the sole generator of meaning and information in the products of biotechnology, with important consequences on how we understand our relationship with other species.

Genetic Engineering and Human Mental Ecology: Interlocking Effects and Educational Considerations

“…It is well-recognized that the informational value of genes is determined and continually readjusted by the organism itself, highlighting the fact that “causality” is distributed across various levels and scales in what is also a recursive system (Griffiths and Gray 1994 ; Oyama 2000 ). In other words, the informational value of genes and any other resources is determined by the ongoing semiosis of the developing organism (Bruni 2008 ; Affifi 2016 ), and ontogenetic development is itself mental in a Batesonian sense. With the discoveries of pleiotropy and epistasis, 9 cracks in the reductionist paradigm emerged even before the rise of molecular biology, but the full extent of the interdependency and flexible adaptivity of the genome has really come to light in the past 10 years, with the discovery of hundreds of modes of chromatin remodelling, alternative splicings, DNA editing, RNA censoring, complex cis-regulating feedback networks, post-translational protein modification, etc.…”

“…It is a pedagogical question how to frame genetic engineering. If educators conclude that mental ecologies require buffering of hubristic thinking, and that this can come about through acknowledging that we live in systems more complex than we conceive, then explicitly highlighting side effects of genetic engineering should be an educational priority (Affifi 2016 ). Such unintended consequences need to be brought to attention regardless of whether they are malignant or benign.…”