![]() ![]() How, in that case, can a specific macroscopic outcome - a phenotype, an organism’s observable inherited traits - arise from an individual genetic mutation at the molecular level? Here, perhaps, is a ghost of Schrödinger’s cat, formulated in 1935, whose macroscopic life or death hinges on a single quantum event. Precise, robust physical laws, such as those linking the temperature, pressure and volume of a gas, emerge from the average behaviour of countless atoms. In the classical molecular physics of James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, atomic motions are random (see E. The puzzle in the title stemmed from how physicists and chemists then thought of the molecular world, as wholly governed by statistical behaviour. Arguably, that naivety is the source of the book’s strengths as well as its weaknesses. His work on quantum mechanics had earned him a Nobel prize in 1933, but that was hardly qualification for commenting on biology, in which Schrödinger had previously shown little interest beyond forays into the physiology of vision. He declares himself a “naive physicist”, pondering how life sustains itself and transmits genetic mutations stably across generations. Schrödinger steps into these cross-disciplinary waters cautiously. Thus, What Is Life? dropped into a tumultuous time for science as well as for sociopolitics. However, even as Schrödinger was preparing his lectures, the microbiologist Oswald Avery was finding evidence that they were nucleic acids. Thanks to studies such as those by geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan on fruit flies, researchers were starting to understand heredity in terms of the transmission of genes, envisaged as large molecules arranged on chromosomes. Since the 1930s, biology had been turning from a largely descriptive science into one concerned with mechanism. (This September, Trinity will mark the lectures’ anniversary with a conference called Schrödinger at 75 - The Future of Biology.) Exiled from Austria when it was annexed by Nazi Germany, Schrödinger had been invited to Ireland to help establish the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. ![]() As Crick wrote to Schrödinger that year, he and Watson had “both been influenced by your little book”.Įlegant and accessible, What Is Life? grew from a series of enormously popular public lectures that Schrödinger gave at Trinity College Dublin in 1943, in the depths of the Second World War. ![]() ![]() Although their elements were not original, the formulation brilliantly anticipated Francis Crick and James Watson’s discovery in 1953 of how DNA’s double helix encodes genes. These ideas inspired the public and a number of scientific luminaries, but exasperated others. What is it about living systems, he asked, that seems to put them at odds with the known laws of physics? The answer he offered looks prescient now: life is distinguished by a “code-script” that directs cellular organization and heredity, while apparently enabling organisms to suspend the second law of thermodynamics. In What Is Life? (1944), Austrian physicist and Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger used that (still-unresolved) question to frame a more specific but equally provocative one. What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell Erwin Schrödinger Cambridge University Press (1944) Physicist Erwin Schrödinger also probed questions of molecular biology. ![]()
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