In the future living things will be designed from first principles, much like motor cars," suggests researcher and doctor-turned-author Adrian Woolfson. "And we will not be restricted to using DNA, RNA and protein technologies, but will instead be able to explore the possibilities inherent in other chemistries," he adds. "Once we have sequenced the genomes of all known and perhaps some extinct living things, we will be able to use this information to design algorithms that will allow us to navigate ‘DNA Sequence Space’ and to locate the genomes of possible creatures, which have not yet been discovered by history."

His book Life Without Genes – published earlier this year by HarperCollins – examines the origin, structure and future of life. It provides a fascinating narrative, adorned with fantastical imagery, and examines the central questions: What is life? How did life evolve, what are genes and might the very earliest forms of life have originated without them?

"You can think of a gene in many different ways," says Dr Woolfson. "Many people think of genes and DNA as being synonymous. But when you study DNA you soon realise that, from both a technological and information encoding and processing point of view, it is extremely sophisticated." Dr Woolfson argues that both the technological basis of modern life and its ‘computational style’ have evolved from qualitatively different antecedents.

He prefers to consider a gene from a computational perspective: "A gene is a highly compressed digital store of codified information for the construction and operation of a living thing. But it’s very complex. You need a genetic code and a machine to translate the information into a secondary language and this includes a complex host of enzymes both to repair and maintain the integrity of the information and to copy it with a defined degree of fidelity."

But this may not always have been the case: "The very first living organisms – our most distant ancestors – might not have stored their information in a digital, codified manner." He argues instead for a primordial ‘geneless world’, in which organisms with only a limited capacity for heredity utilised analogue strategies of information representation. These geneless organisms were eventually ousted by digital organisms. "I looked for mechanisms by which order can be created spontaneously without genes. Indeed there is a natural order in the non-linearity of complex, far-from-equilibrium, and highly interconnected physical and chemical systems, that can generate information in the absence of genes."

But the phrase ‘life without genes’ also has other meanings. "Although dodos are extinct," says Dr Woolfson, "we can imagine them as having a timeless mathematical existence in what we could call the ‘Information Zoo’. Thus even if a dodo had never existed, the mathematical possibility for a dodo has, in a very real sense, always been there."

"The book starts in a toyshop, and provides an analogy between ‘model aeroplane kits’ and the ‘gene kits’ that provide the informational specifications for living things," explains Dr Woolfson. "The full description of a living thing, however, encompasses several other dimensions of information, which include development, learning and culture."

The preparation of Life Without Genes has been a labour of love. "It took about a year to do the background reading and nearly three years to finish – mostly at weekends and late at night – whilst doing full-time research." The book was inspired by an essay he wrote while at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was undertaking his clinical medical training at the John Radcliffe Hospital. The subject of his essay later arose as a topic of conversation at a ‘dragonfly’ party held by the entomologist Miriam Rothschild at a dragonfly reserve in Peterborough. As luck would have it, a literary agent was at the same party and persuaded him to convert his thoughts into a book.

"I had to write a chapter-by-chapter summary of my ideas," explains Dr Woolfson, "so I went on holiday and sat in a jacuzzi for two weeks typing a proposal on a laptop." Back in the UK and four days before his departure on a Wellcome Trust Elective Prize to Zambia – where he documented the incidence of antibiotic resistance in pneumococci – the success of the proposal led to interviews with various publishers.

Writing has been a major focus throughout Dr Woolfson’s academic career, and among many other things, he was the founding editor of the Oxford and Cambridge May Anthology of Poetry and Short Stories, which itself has proved to be the starting point for several successful new authors. He completed the book during medical and surgical house jobs and while working as a Wellcome Trust Clinical Training Fellow in Cambridge, where he studied chaperone-assisted protein folding.

Scientific theories are communicated through colourful analogies and enigmas drawn from the world around us. The book’s mathematical nature has fostered comparisons to Lewis Carroll. "My aim was to write a book that was both accessible and which made a serious theoretical contribution," he says. "I have attempted to introduce a literary dimension into the writing, so as to produce a new genre that is based on hard science fact."

Adrian Woolfson was a Wellcome Clinical Training Fellow and a Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. Life Without Genes is published by HarperCollins. At time of this article (6/2000) Adrian Woolfson was at the Intensive Care Unit at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge

External links

• Life Without Genes: Amazon book review