title: Doing justice to allosteric regulation.
abstract: Jacques Monod gave us not only our first regulatory system, but also our first smart molecules - i.e., he gave us allosteric proteins. But both of these contributions hung in a certain tension with his primary commitments. In particular, I focus here on the ways in which his ontological commitments constrained his thinking about the power of allostery. Although he wrote that "so far as regulation through allosteric interaction is concerned, everything is possible", for him, not everything was conceivable. In particular, what was not conceivable was a challenge to the primacy of DNA.
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, STS program, Room E38-094, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139-430, USA. Electronic address: efkeller@mit.edu.
authors.forename: Evelyn Fox
authors.initials: EF
authors.lastname: Keller
mesh_terms: D000494:Allosteric Regulation; D004247:DNA / Q000502:physiology*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008967:Molecular Biology / Q000266:history*; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins; D004247:DNA
keywords: Allostery; Allostérie; Engagement ontologique; Invariance; Ontological commitment; Teleonomy; Téléonomie