The Tracker’s head hurts. After reading through the several stories and poring over mesmerizing graphics of a staggeringly ambitious package entitled “Beyond the Gene” in Science Times, I may have absorbed some epi-information. The result for me is either wise confusion or confused wisdom, and that’s not bad. The section’s editors, with four byline pieces and well-organized and labyrinthine graphic illustrations by Jonathan Corum, dove headfirst into the ferment of modern genomics. Another graphic artist, Julian Honore, produced the precisely-drawn theme matrix of genomic motifs for the section’s top front page (to the right) plus, in stylistic contrast, a set of slyly crude, scribbly, line drawings of many of the stories’ primary sources. This issue clearly has been in the works for awhile.

Most everybody who covers modern biology or follows the news of it knows the essence of the new epi-genetics.

This package serves to reinforce a more important thing to know – neither the astounded researchers nor journalists who interview them yet make sense of the info exploding from molecular biogenetics labs. The newly appreciated elements controlling heredity are diverse, complicated, and net even yet all cataloged. The classic genes remain vital actors in our DNA. But the term genetics is bursting the bounds of any narrow class of molecule. Plus, there’s RNA.Rather than waterboy for DNA, it is starting look like its multiply permuted kingmaker. The articles indicate the field’s breadth and depth mainly by failing, in part due to the constraints of a few pages, to go much beyond teasing readers with lists of brain-flummoxing topics and terms.

I yellow-marked all sorts of pithy phrases as I read through it. But one stands out. Wouldn’t you know it, it’s from Natalie Angier in her meditation on the multiple new meanings of gene. She provides it by a small quote . One of her sources declares it possible that biology, and the machinery of heredity, will turn out to be “irreducibly complex.”  That’s a strong term. It merits recapture for general use. It reinforces evolution’s grand power as easily as it does its more common and recent deistic application in the minor philosophy of intelligent design. (Angier, by the way, to make her point probably overstates the demotion of classic genes. They still surely have an essential, maybe even irreducible, centrality. Don’t they?)

No sense trying to extensively summarize Angier’s or these other, three byline pieces:

• Andrew Pollack – The Promise and Power of RNA ;
• Carl Zimmer – Now: The Rest of the Genome ;
• Benedict Carey – In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents’ Genes Are in Competition ; (Not a meta-topic story like the others, but focussed on a specific way that the new epigenetics helps to organize and classify observations) ;
• Jonathan Corum – Graphic artist has two bi-i-ig productions. Mapping the Epigenome and A Bestiary of RNA.

There remains the back of the section, mainly on health. There is good stuff here. While the section front deals with the diverse vitality of evolution and its live inventions, the back by contrast provides a dose of what we all have in common – mortality. Samples include:

• Jane Gross – Landscape Evolves for Assisted Suicide ;
• Karen Barrow – Speaking Out for a Group Once Unheard-Of: Aging With AIDS ;
• Ellen D. Feld, MD – Keeping a Promise When a Life is Near Its End ;
• Jane E. Brody – When Families Take Care of Their Own ;

There’s even more. Whole section here.

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