Originally published 8 February 2000
In early December [1999], the science journal Nature reported the sequencing of the first human chromosome — a complete transcription of the chemical units (nucleotides) making up the chromosomal DNA. To celebrate this important milestone, the editor’s chose as their cover art a well-known detail from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting The Creation of Adam: the almost touching fingertips of God and Adam.
In a letter to the editor of the journal, biologists Gary Harris and Martina Königer of Wellesley College take issue with the choice of illustration, saying that it adds fuel to the fire in the ongoing battle between creationists and evolutionists, including the current brouhaha over the Kansas Board of Education’s decision to remove evolution from the topics to be covered on state exams.
“Does the elucidation of the human nucleotide sequence provide us with insights into the work of the Christian God at the creation event?” they ask. And what do Christian religious symbols have to do with science?
The editor responded that the journal’s staff debated the use of the Michelangelo detail, but decided that the image “combined iconic symbolism with the science without implying that the Bible is true or that evolution is not the key to making sense of biology.”
Nature’s use of Michelangelo’s art is appropriate. Readers of that journal are not likely to take Michelangelo’s iconic image literally, nor think the editors are endorsing Genesis. And members of the Kansas Board of Education and their constituencies are not likely to be readers of Nature. The possibility of adding fuel to the fire of controversy seems remote.
More important, the image of Adam stretching out his arm to receive from God the spark of soul is one of the most recognizable and powerfully moving images from all of art. It would be a shame if we were to abandon our cultural heritage because certain parts of that heritage have been rendered un-literal by progress in science.
The image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does not belong only to Christian theists; it belongs to all of us, and it retains even in the 21st century a powerful moral significance.
Nonagenarian Erwin Chargaff is one of the great biochemists of the 20th-century. He is best known for his demonstration in the late 1940s that certain chemical components of DNA molecules always occur in constant ratios, a result that was crucial to the discovery of the DNA double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick. He was among the first to recognize that the chemical composition of DNA is species specific, another step on the way to elucidating the structure of the human genome.
In his autobiography, Chargaff says of his life: “In the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo depicts the creation of man, God’s finger and that of Adam are separated by a short space. That distance I called eternity; and there, I felt, I was sent to travel.”
Chargaff has it exactly right. It is not Adam or God that are sources of the power of Michelangelo’s painting. It is the gap between their fingers. Michelangelo could have had God touching Adam’s finger. He did not. And all these centuries later, it is the gap that draws us to the painting again and again, and compels our fascination. Although both Adam and his gray-bearded God have lost their literal significance, the gap between their fingers — between humankind and the Unnameable — remains as real and as important as ever, even to the most unmystical and atheistic scientist.
In an essay in Nature some years ago, Chargaff charged scientists to keep their eye on the gap, to spurn the notion that they know everything, or even that they should know everything. “Scientific curiosity is not an unbounded good,” he wrote; knowledge is power for both good and evil, and we must consider the moral implications of its acquisition.
This idea is deeply unpopular within much of the scientific community. Many scientists hold that knowledge itself is amoral, neither good nor evil, and that to socially restrict the acquisition of knowledge is equally fraught with dangers. Should Einstein have backed away from discovering the equivalence of matter and energy because the same knowledge that explains how stars burn can also be used to build nuclear bombs? Should Marie Curie have foregone the discovery of radium because some 21st-century terrorist might dump radioactive materials into a public water supply and sicken millions?
The elucidation of the human genome is knowledge that has staggering potential for both good and mischief. Few scientists would wish to retreat from its acquisition. But neither should we think we have bridged the gap between ourselves and the trembling power that resides in every living cell. “A balance that does not tremble cannot weigh,” wrote Chargaff; “A man who does not tremble cannot live.” And that’s why the Nature’s use of Michelangelo’s space between the fingers was entirely appropriate.
