Molecular being – philosophy between genes and proteins

I have had a paper accepted for the annual joint conference of the Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy. Here is the abstract:
Molecular being – philosophy between genes and proteins
In this paper, I will attempt to connect the sparking wires of post-genomic molecular biology and new materialist philosophy, particularly the so-called object-oriented ontology.
Life is changing. The gene has, as historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller wrote some years ago, “had a glorious run in the twentieth century.” Since the publication of the working draft of the human genome in 2000 and the completed genome in 2003, however, it seems that the life sciences are at a juncture, requiring new concepts, terms and metaphors to grasp life in productive ways. It is increasingly being suggested that a straightforward relation between genes and their expressions is not tenable. The faith in the genome as the key with which to understand, decipher and decode ‘life itself’ is changing, partly due to the realisation that the translation process from gene to cell is a world unto itself. In other words, the list of parts that the Human Genome Project revealed turned out not to be a complete wiring diagram.
Post-genomic biomedicine is increasingly turning to the study of proteins for new concepts, terms and metaphors. In the hands of 21^st century biomedical scientists, ‘life itself’ is taking on new forms. The understanding of life is shifting towards ideas of a multidimensional material body, made up of a complex system of proteins, where molecular structures, movements and interactions carry out the regulated work of the cell. Post-genomic researchers are no longer satisfied reducing the organism to the informational logic of coding system embedded in biological software (DNA); rather, the organism is now increasingly seen as a substantive, material architecture, filled to the brim with three-dimensional protein interactions.
Molecular biology, then, seems to be reconfiguring its underlying conception of life. And philosophy is similarly finding itself “in the middle of time and in the middle of objects, with a desire to become part of this material world,” as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht writes. The change from a genetic to a protein-based understanding of life in molecular biology runs in an interesting parallel, I will argue, to the attempts to develop new material and object-oriented ontologies. Using empirical examples from the world of molecular biology and protein research, I will argue that understanding what takes place within molecular biology and its changing conceptions of life can be fruitfully accomplished at the intersections of philosophy, genes and proteins.