July 25, 2012
What is Life? A 21st Century Perspective
J. Craig Venter on the 70th Anniversary of Schroedinger's Lecture at Trinity College, over at Edge:
As you all know, Schrödinger's book was published in 1944 and it was based on a series of three lectures here, starting in February of 1943. And he had to repeat the lectures, I read, on the following Monday because the room on the other side of campus was too small, and I understand people were turned away tonight, but we're grateful for Internet streaming, so I don't have to do this twice.
Also, due clearly to his historical role, and it's interesting to be sharing this event with Jim Watson, who I've known and had multiple interactions with over the last 25 years, including most recently sharing the Double Helix Prize for Human Genome Sequencing with him from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory a few years ago.
Schrödinger started his lecture with a key question and an interesting insight on it. The question was "How can the events in space and time, which take place within the boundaries of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?" It's a pretty straightforward, simple question. Then he answered what he could at the time, "The obvious inability of present-day physics and chemistry to account for such events is no reason at all for doubting that they will be accounted for by those sciences." While I only have around 40 minutes, not three lectures, I hope to convince you that there has been substantial progress in the last nearly 70 years since Schrödinger initially asked that question, to the point where the answer is at least nearly at hand, if not in hand.
I view that we're now in what I'm calling "The Digital Age of Biology". My teams work on synthesizing genomes based on digital code in the computer, and four bottles of chemicals illustrates the ultimate link between the computer code and the digital code.
Life is code, as you heard in the introduction, was very clearly articulated by Schrodinger as code script. Perhaps even more importantly, and something I missed on the first few readings of his book earlier in my career, was as far as I could tell, it's the first mention that this code could be as simple as a binary code.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 08:54 AM | Permalink
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Time and space coordinates are the orientational techniques of sentient entities, are conceptual in origin, and are inherently irrelevant in a universe devoid of living systems. The relationship between life and these coordinates can be best parsed by comprehending their necessary use in living systems and by incorporating consciousness and the cognitive dimension into our reality equations. We cannot contextualize time and space from within a physicalist paradigm (physicalism assumes these conceptual coordinates to be a part of the ‘out-there’ world rather than a part of our cognizing/disambiguating processes -- merely the preferred perceptual modes of beings like us). A broader interrelational version of reality that includes the observer and the observed will allows us to comprehend our own deep-seated reliance on time and space concepts and will allow us to begin understanding ourselves and the cosmos in an entirely new way.
Posted by: Christopher Holvenstot | Jul 25, 2012 12:13:38 PM
That's a pretty serious case of word-salad there. I'd suggest cutting back on the Deepak Chopra pulp fantasy.
Posted by: Bruce | Jul 25, 2012 3:42:47 PM
“Otto Warburg Cell Physiologist Biochemist and Eccentric” by Hans Krebs, M.D. and Roswitha Schmid, Ph.D., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981.
Whatever life is or is not, it most certainly is not just a collection of DNA and RNA molecules in isolation without regard to the energy producing processes necessary for life. The genius in Germany Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph.D., was one of the pioneers in the elucidation and experimental understanding of such energy producing processes; at the bottom was the most fundamental molecule and element giving energy for life: Oxygen.
Here are a few brief quotes from the above enlightening book by the Nobel Prize winning pupil of Otto Warburg, Hans Krebs:
Quotes from pages 3-6:
“In 1901, Warburg began his studies of chemistry at the University of Freiburg….he completed his studies (Berlin) with a doctoral thesis under Emil Fischer in 1906.”
“It was his interest in medical problems which prompted him, after the completion of his doctoral thesis, to study medicine at Heidelberg. In his spare time he worked in the laboratory of the Department of Internal Medicine. Under Ludolf Krehl-a distinguished physician and author of a standard book, Pathological Physiology- this was a great centre of medical research where the relevance of the basic sciences to clinical medicine was appreciated.”
“Warburg obtained his MD degree in 1911 and remained at Heidelberg until 1914, spending occasional periods at the Naples Zoological Station. During these eight years at Heidelberg, he published some 30 major papers. His research students and collaborators during this period included Otto Meyerhof and Julian Huxley.”
“His first major independent work, published in 1908, concerned the energetics of growth. It dealt with the changes in the oxygen consumption which take place when a sea urchin egg begins to grow after fertilization. These experiments led to the important discovery that on fertilization the rate of oxygen consumption rises up to sixfold…”
“The link between this work and the later investigations on cancer is obvious; when a normal cell becomes cancerous, it grows excessively, and in 1922 Warburg set out to test whether cancer cells have an increased oxygen consumption…”
“Warburg’s approach was guided by the conviction that all processes in living matter obey the laws of physics and chemistry, a view now taken for granted but not generally accepted when he entered the field. In 1897 Buchner had succeeded in extracting yeast fermentation from the cell and thus obtaining fermentation in solution. At the time it was held that chemical processes cannot be studied in the solid or semi-solid state (in which they take place in vivo) and that it was necessary, as a first step, to bring them into solution and secondly to isolate the components and prepare them in a pure state. When attempting to solubilize ‘respiration’, i.e., the oxidation of normal cell constituents by molecular oxygen, Warburg found that the main oxidative processes were always attached to insoluble particles, to what he called ‘structures’. In 1913, he described ‘grana’ from liver cells as the structures to which respiration is bound. We now know that these ‘grana’ were mitochondria, but it took another 30 years before, in the hands of Claude, Hogeboom, Hotchkiss and Schneider, the morphological structure described in the 1890s as mitochondria were shown to be identical with Warburg’s grana and constituted the ‘power plant’ of the cell….” The next two pages discuss details of these developments and their relation to life.
Obviously life is much more than just double helix molecules. I wonder if Craig Venter ever read about these seminal discoveries by Otto Warburg decades earlier?
Otto Warburg was the pioneer here, who spent the greater part of his research career, some 60 years, proving that life, whatever it may be, follows the laws of physics and chemistry, based on experiments and facts from very precise and careful laboratory experiments, not genetic speculations.
Otto Warburg was nominated for three solo Nobel Prizes in Medicine for three different original discoveries:
1926, Cancer, prize not awarded, but awarded to Fibiger whose work was later shown to be wrong.
1931; Cell respiration, actually awarded.
Dr. Warburg, although having been nominated for 3 Nobel Prizes in Medicine, was never actually awarded more than the one in 1931. Many books and references falsely state he received two Nobel prizes.
1944; not awarded due to Hitler’s decree prohibiting German citizens from receiving Nobel prizes. Dr. Warburg published over 500 scientific papers and books in his lifetime, listed in the above book by Krebs.
Three of his pupils were also awarded shared Nobel prizes in Medicine: Otto Meyerhof, Hugo Theorell and Hans Krebs.
Dr. Warburg (1883-1970) has been described as the greatest biochemist of the twentieth century. His Father Emil was a distinguished physicist and held the Chair of Physics at Berlin and produced great physicists as James Franck, a Nobel Prize winner in physics.
Quote from page 70:
“…In all this experimentation it was always our aim to simplify techniques and to attain a speed and precision comparable to the methods of volumetric chemical analysis. With complicated methods we have never discovered anything significant.” Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph.D.
Posted by: W.J.Abbe | Jul 26, 2012 12:50:01 AM
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