"Scale shifts" vs. "conceptual shifts"- Professor Sid Mukherjee (#54)
The oncologist and Pulitzer prize winner on how technology and science make leaps over time
In the 1970s, “aside from a few notable exceptions, the genetic basis of human disease was largely unknown.”
Those exceptions—diseases like sickle-cell anemia— had been mapped to the gene that caused them. But, for the most part, scientists were blind when it came to what genes contributed to which illness. And, even if they did find out, there was very little they could do about it.
The prospect of changing an organisms genome by introducing foreign genes, or by deliberately mutating its native genes, was far outside the reach of any technology. The world biotechnology did not exist in the dictionary.
But a couple decades years later, with the invention of things like recombinant DNA1, reverse transcriptase, and genetic engineering, two massive shifts happened. Dr. Mukherjee argues, in his book The Gene: An Intimate History, these shift seem to occur in all great technological advances.
He calls them “scale shifts” and “conceptual shifts,” and the difference between them is subject of today’s OGT.
Scale shift or Conceptual shift?
In the history of science and technology too, breakthroughs seem to come in two fundamental forms. There are scale shifts - where the crucial advance emerges as a result of an alteration of size or scales alone (the moon rocket, as one engineer famously pointed out, was just a massive jet plane pointed vertically at the moon). And there are conceptual shifts - in which the advance arises because of the emergence of a radical new concept or idea.
The scale shift has to do with people, size, time, and power of a project, where as the conceptual shift opens a new door, a new method through which to deploy that scale a new perspective. In that way, the two often work together.
In truth, the two modes are not mutually exclusive, but reinforcing. Scale shifts enable conceptual shifts, and new concepts, in turn, demand new scales. The microscope opened a door to a subvisual world. Cells and intracellular organelles were revealed, raising questions about the inner anatomy and physiology of a cell, and demanding yet more powerful microscopes to understand the structures and functions of these subcellular compartments.2
So how did scale and concept impact the massive advances in genetics in the 80s and 90s? As Dr. M writes, much of it started with concept. But there was one massive project—mapping the genome— that would take more than technology. It would take size and power—scale.
Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, genetics had witnessed many conceptual shifts - gene cloning, gene mapping, split genes, genetic engineering, and new modes of gene regulation - but no radical shifts in scale. Over the decade, hundreds of individual genes had been isolated, sequenced, and cloned by virtue of functional characteristics - but no comprehensive catalog of all genes of a cellular organism existed.
In principle, the technology to sequence an entire organismal genome had been invented, but the sheer size of the effort had made scientists balk. In 1977, when Fred Sanger had sequenced the genome of the phiX virus, with 5,386 bases of DNA, that number represented the outer limit of gene-sequencing capability. The human genome contains 3,095,677,412 base pairs - representing a scale shift of 574,000-fold.
This realization spurred what is still the largest international scientific collaboration in history: The Human Genome Project. The $3 Billion, 13 year, global project began in 1990, and was completed in 2003.
Perhaps the biggest “scale shift” in scientific history.
The OGT - Scale or concept?
Since being introduced to this dichtomy, I find myself wondering: do we need a shift in scale here, or concept? Do we need more of the same work, or do we need to be doing smarter or different work?
Often, as Dr. M found, they’re both needed.
Think about Henry Ford. The Ford Motor Company was opened in 1903, the Model T came out in 1908, but Ford had the conceptual technology at least 10 years before that—he needed to implement scale. But with that scale, didn’t he have to change the concept of manufacturing? It seems to me he did.
Or think about how Haruki Murakami became a writer. As in the case of the Human Genome Project, his initial change was in concept. He changed how he lived— stopped smoking, started running, went from going to bed at 5am to waking up at 5am. But then, in order to write his 500 and 1000 page novels, he had to implement change of scale. Not an hour per day of writing, but eight straight.
Hormozi’s “Rule of 100” is all about scale, where as Felix Dennis’ change in perspective about failure—that’s concept. But if you think about Cheryl Strayed learning how to be resilient, maybe that’s a hybrid.
Because while, it was the external scale—the massive ranges of the Cascade and Sierras—that slowed her down, and calmed her personal problems, it was ultimately the internal, conceptual change that allowed her to shout to the trees: “who is tougher than me?” and reply, eventually with honesty— “no one.”
Where pieces of DNA from different chromosomes (as in an individual) or different organisms (as in the lab) are fused together to create a hybrid. This happens with maternal and paternal DNA at birth, it happens when our own bodies repair damaged DNA, and it happens now in the lab, where pieces of DNA are manipulated, and then sent into an organism to influence its genes.
“It is the impulse of science to try to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it. Recombinant DNA had pushed genetics from the realm of science into the realm of technology.”
Dr. Mukherjee also gives the example of transoceanic exploration resulting in the discovery of the New World in the late 1400s. Was it the large new ships that were able to make the journey (scale) or more a credit to the new navigational technologies (concept).