She Says, He Says: “What Do You Mean?”

“She Says, He Says” is a rumination on some of the words that have dominated the conversation on the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It begins with a personal essay that interrogates different ways of reading, starting with biological “success” and ranging to the language of DNA. This first point of view, from a humanist, focuses on how scientists and social scientists appropriate and redeploy words. A second perspective, from a scientist, reconsiders the usages and purposes from both a personal and professional point of view. Both sections address metaphors, or models as metaphors, to represent what and how words may mean. modèles

Twenty-five years ago, I argued with a colleague in biology about his use of the word "success." "Success," he said, refers to reproduction, a species' survival. The word choice, I said, was telling: it reflected a particular attitude to reproduction, and to those responsible for it, namely women. "It's just what it means," he countered. "There is no 'just what it means,'" I growled.
2 Biologists name things in Latin, a language few of them now study. Blame it on Linnaeus who ordered the world in Latin binomials. Modern scientists, however, no longer have a classical education; they are not usually trained for the Church. Not surprisingly, their pronunciation of the species they name can be head-turning to those who have studied the language, for being not quite classical Latin and not at all Medieval Latin.
3 "Success" is derived from Latin in pronounceable modern English; the word appears in the 16 th century during what was once called the English Renaissance, where Latin would be "reborn" in a putative return to the classical forms that would increasingly limit its use. 4 "Coronavirus" is another word derived from the Latin, coined much later, in 1968, with charming self-consciousness: "In the opinion of the eight virologists, these viruses are members of a previously unrecognized group which they suggest should be called the coronaviruses" (OED). "Suggest" and "should" -quite a juxtaposition to characterize the appellation: insinuation with necessity, Latin and Middle English. The virologists' reasoning is based, as the quotation continues, on the virus's "characteristic appearance," namely of the "solar corona." Metaphors are dangerous. Latin is not a dead language.

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The coronavirus has been extraordinarily successful. It doesn't breed like the creatures understood by Linnaeus and Darwin. Neither did they imagine it. Not Linnaeus in his "Paradoxa," not Darwin in his evolutionary tree. New pictures and graphs and models now give the word, coronavirus, authority.

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It all begins with letters -DNA and RNA, signifying Deoxyribonucleic Acid and Ribonucleic Acid -their transcription and translation, mutations: litterae, transcriptio, translatio, mutatio. The coronavirus is relentless in its replication: A, C, G, T into A, C, G, U, color coded, not quite 30,000 of them copied over and over. A reading that reads itself, its microscopic text barely legible. Only a select few can see what can't be seen and understand what they do see. Metaphors mean something to those who make them: to Jacob and Monod, for two, who explained, "A gene participates in two distinct chemical processes. In the first, for which the term replication should be reserved, […] an identical sequence or replica of the original sequence [is formed]" (Jacob & Monod 1961: 193). "Replica," also Latin, is literal, to the letter. The letters in "the second process, which we shall call transcription, [allow] the gene to perform its physiological function" (OED). The process does the work; the scientists provided a name for it. Were I a scientist, I might know, and could say, "The way the coronavirus copies its genome challenges and stretches these definitions -Jacob and Monod didn't account for RNA as possible genetic material." But those are not my words, they are Bryan Wang's, another biologist who checks my accuracy, adds meaning I wouldn't, couldn't, make. I only transcribe his words, copy and paste, wonder at biologists as lexicographers.

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Translation is an older word than transcription, one more intimate, or confident, with language. Translation converts letters -whether Arabic alefto "A" -or ‫)ا(‬ combinations of symbols, whether words or, starting in the 1950s, DNA or RNA, into another language or state. Bryan tries to make me understand the usage as biological process. He says, "The code in nucleic acids is 'read' to generate proteins, which enact the function of the gene. Thus is the gene 'expressed.'" He has used these words in class, and each time he does I think about the words while our students absorb the lesson without dwelling on expression; his efforts to draw their attention to the word wink at me, the English teacher, but are obviously not the point. I dwell on the word, "expressed," a term of alchemy, here an extraction by my hand from his keypad into the margins of my manuscript, letters added to letters, transcriptions to transcriptions, translation to translation. But "mutation"? The Anglo-Norman word "change" might be more to the purpose. The translation comes weighted like "success," no matter the intended literal meaning. The success of the virus is in how its characteristics differ from its "parents" or in the marked alteration of its genome and its translation. But to refer to those changes as mutations conjures the related word "mutant," with all its sci-fi negative connotations, as if there were an ideal original, a perfect, intended, First Being. Change is never welcome.

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"Mutation" is, or was, a term in linguistics. Even so, when it comes to the metaphor introduced with the letters of DNA, I prefer scribal error, a literal wandering by the transcriber from the text, perhaps as a misreading that, in turn, compensates for what the illegible or smudged letter must be, or, perhaps, presumes, a "better" one based on a problematic reading. Mutation shifts the focus from the elegant metaphors of language, transcription and translation, to a process eluding control. Mutability herself is a figure who when "she at first her selfe began to reare, / Gainst all the Gods, and th'empire sought from them to beare" (Spenser,FQ.VII.vi.1.9). She embodied disruptive She Says, He Says: "What Do You Mean?" Angles, 12 | 2020 powers well before Linnaeus imposed order and Darwin explained it. The poet Spenser is unequivocal: For, she the face of earthly things so changed, That all which Nature had establisht first In good estate, and in meet order ranged, She did pervert, and all their statues burst: And all the worlds faire frame (which one yet durst Of Gods or men to alter or misguide) She alter'd quite, and made them all accurst […]. (Spenser,FQ.VII.vi.5 * 16 As a graduate student in biochemistry in the 90s, I studied proteins, the molecules that provide much of the form and the function necessary for living things (and almostliving things, like viruses) to go about the business of life (and near-life). Two problems fascinated me. First, I wondered how the proteins observed in nature came to be -I say "observed" and not "seen" because the molecules are too small to be analyzed except by indirect means. Second, I wanted to explore the possibility of creating new proteins for new practical applications. Without belaboring the training or the anxiety and heartache that attended those long years, my project eventually "succeeded." By generating a large population of potential proteins, selecting those few individuals endowed with a desired trait, subjecting the survivors to mutation, and preferentially replicating descendants with even higher fitness -that is, by rudimentarily mimicking evolutionary processes on the molecular scale, I created (or found) a set of completely new proteins, a half dozen in all.
17 When scientists discover something new, they name it. The biologist Michael Ohl says, "It is through its name that the individual is bestowed with meaning, and it is through its naming that it becomes a part of our perception of nature" (2018: vii). And, on a more basic level, a name lets us speak about it.
18 "My" new proteins worked in concert with a class of proteins called zinc fingers -so named because they contain the metal zinc along with multiple appendage-like regions She Says, He Says: "What Do You Mean?" Angles, 12 | 2020 linked in tandem, like the fingers of a hand. What I had engineered were smallish protein bits (or peptides) that induce zinc finger proteins to pair up, or dimerize. Unimaginative but sensible, I proposed naming them simply "zinc finger dimerizing peptides": ZFDP1, ZFDP2, etc.
19 My thesis advisor, however, disagreed, and he suggested we instead name them peptide 1, peptide 2, and so on. Although I felt his nomenclature unimaginative and insensible (how could others refer to what we'd discovered?), I didn't protest. Unlike Linnaeus, who not only named multitudes of organisms but also sorted each into its own cell within a grid of neatly nested taxonomic boxes, my advisor apparently didn't want to stake a claim, and I guessed there was a reason behind his reluctance. Perhaps he felt this territory insignificant, undeserving of title. Perhaps he saw arrogance in the very act of naming and the assumption of ownership it implied. Perhaps he was trying to avoid inadvertent implications. 20 A name makes sense. Like a metaphor, it carries meaning, establishes connections from the named object to the word that is the name. A name may be more descriptive, or less (at least at first), but in either case, the name eventually promotes associations, further discussion, and inquiry. When virologists named the coronaviruses (Almeida et al. 1968), they were emphasizing an aspect of viral morphology as determined by electron microscopy: the fringe of 200-angstrom-long projections that to them resembled the solar corona. Scientists now refer to those projections as the spike protein, and in current models of the virus's lifecycle, the spike protein mediates entry of the virus into host cells, where it replicates and causes disease.
21 Scientific names may describe more than outward appearances. When applied to an organism, a name indicates all sorts of features shared with other kinds of organisms while also locating that organism within the hierarchical categories of Linnaean classifications. The same is true for viruses. Biologists categorize coronaviruses in the taxonomic family Coronaviridae, within the order Nidovirales, in the class Pisoniviricetes, the phylum Pisuviricota, the kingdom Orthornavirae, the realm Riboviria. These identifiers describe the genetic material of the viruses, how they replicate, the hosts that unwittingly help them reproduce. The agents responsible for COVID-19, the SARS outbreak of 2003, and the MERS epidemic of 2012 are all named as coronaviruses, implying similarity in these essential facets of their biology. Since the time of Darwin, taxonomic names also have indicated presumed evolutionary kinship: COVID-19, SARS, and MERS viruses likely derive from an ancestral lineage whose offspring mutated over generations to yield these three distinct types of successful pathogens -each of which represents its own lineage subject to further mutation as the populations grow and spread, yielding distinct strains that may ultimately prove more (or less) durable, infectious, deadly.
22 Scientific models are like scientific names. They're metaphorical; they embody and describe; they establish connections and carry meaning. Models may take the form of images, graphs, abstract diagrams -of data, ideas, objects -and communicate information, efficiently and (sometimes) elegantly. A phylogeny sketches the evolutionary history of viral strains as the branches of a finely detailed tree. One may assert that a curve has been flattened (or not); an accompanying plot of the daily death rate over the course of a pandemic event shows it. It's one thing to allude to the sun's corona; it's another to sculpt the molecular surface of the pyramidal spike protein, the She Says, He Says: "What Do You Mean?" Angles, 12 | 2020 protrusions to which protective antibodies might attach, the clefts and cavities in which therapeutic drugs might nestle.
23 Models don't merely communicate meaning; as Theodore L. Brown (2003: 26) says, they are "extended metaphors that have the potential to guide thinking about a system under investigation, suggesting new directions for research." They can be used to construct meaning. Models provoke questions. Regarding the coronaviruses' evolutionary history, what types of mutations in the viral genome correlate with changes in host susceptibility? Models provide tentative explanations. Changes mapping to the surface of the spike protein, as indicated by the graphical rendering of the virus particle, may permit the virus to switch from one host (say, a bat, or a pangolin, or a mink) to another (say, a human). Models are structures upon which to design and build experiments. Let's alter the spike protein and see if the resultant virus retains the ability to infect human cells; let's engineer an agent that occludes the spike protein and determine if that agent ameliorates the viral disease; let's use genetic material encoding the spike protein to stimulate the production of antibodies that may prevent an invading virus from infecting cells in the host -that is, let's try to make a vaccine.
24 Models simplify communication and enable thinking, but they are approximations. As early as 1666, Margaret Cavendish warned how microscopy and its images distort our perception of the natural world. Today, when we look at structures of the coronavirus and its molecular components, we're not seeing the things themselves. "What does seeing mean to you?" interrupts my coauthor (and sometime co-teacher) Sandy Feinstein, an English professor. I find the question both penetrating and unsettling. I understand that light rearranges cellular proteins in the eye, that those movements produce nerve impulses that the brain processes as vision. I understand that this doesn't adequately explain what seeing is. But I also know that the molecular representations of coronavirus are reconstructions assembled by means even less direct than those that concerned Cavendish. They're models built from the detection of electrons or X-rays, beams of radiation human eyes cannot behold. They're calculated models, not sights, models with descriptive and explanatory power, but models that nevertheless are approximations, incomplete.