Secrecy, transparency and opacity in biology.

In biology, the molecular biology revolution lead to the prevalence of a linguistic metaphor in the second half of the twentieth century. This metaphor led to a double perspective on secrecy: biologists aimed to unravel the secrets of the living, which would be revealed by reading and decoding DNA, and the secrecy between researchers competing to decode the same "information". This framework is now outdated, both for the understanding of life and in social practice. Biology seems to hesitate between imposing transparency, on both its practices and its objects, and recognizing the existence of several opacities.