Greg wrote:@ Pulikeshi (re: Schrodinger's "what is life")
After reading this book, I had a chat about it with a very close friend who is a Professor of Neurobiology and found out that although physicists often refer to this book as the basis for discovery of genes, it is patently false.
The structure not genes themselves. Schrödinger's brilliance was in seeing that life - has negative entropy! Perhaps, it was all thanks to Roaslind Franklin. But, let the religious debate continue.
Before Watson and Crick
Some excerpts:
In 1943, another scientist at one remove from the world conflict (because he had been offered a haven in neutral Ireland) gave a series of lectures in Dublin, called provocatively "What is Life?" An audience of 400 for every lecture suggested that his supposedly difficult subject was of great general interest.
Erwin Schrödinger, a Viennese, had shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1933 for laying the foundations of wave mechanics. That same year he left Berlin, where he had been working, because, although not himself Jewish, he would not remain in Germany when persecution of the Jews became national policy. A long odyssey through Europe brought him, in 1940, to Dublin at the invitation of Eamon de Valera, Ireland's premier. De Valera had been a mathematician before he became a revolutionary, then a politician; in 1940 he set up the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. Schrödinger found Ireland "paradise," not least because it allowed him the detachment to think about a very big question.
In his Dublin lectures, Schrödinger addressed what puzzled many students—why biology was treated as a subject completely separate from physics and chemistry: frogs, fruit flies, and cells on one side, atoms and molecules, electricity and magnetism, on the other. The time had come, Schrödinger declared from his Irish platform, to think of living organisms in terms of their molecular and atomic structure. There was no great divide between the living and nonliving; they all obey the same laws of physics and chemistry.
He put a physicist's question to biology. If entropy is (according to the second law of thermodynamics) things falling apart, the natural disintegration of order into disorder,
why don't genes decay? Why are they instead passed intact from generation to generation?
What Is Life? was the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of biology—a small book that started a revolution.
He gave his own answer. "Life" is matter that is doing something. The technical term is metabolism—"eating, drinking, breathing, assimilating, replicating, avoiding entropy." To Schrödinger, life could be defined as "negative entropy"—something not falling into chaos and approaching "the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death." Genes preserve their structure because the chromosome that carries them is an irregular crystal. The arrangement of units within the crystal constitutes the hereditary code.
The lectures were published as a book the following year, ready for physicists to read as the war ended and they looked for new frontiers to explore. To the molecular biologist and scientific historian Gunther Stent of the University of California at Berkeley, What Is Life? was the Uncle Tom's Cabin of biology—a small book that started a revolution. For post-war physicists, suffering from professional malaise, "When one of the inventors of quantum mechanics [could] ask 'What is life?,'" Stent declared, "they were confronted with a fundamental problem worthy of their mettle." Biological problems could now be tackled with their own language, physics.
Research into the new field of biophysics inched forward in the late 1940s. In 1949 another Austrian refugee scientist, Erwin Chargaff, working at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, was one of the very few who took Avery's results to heart and changed his research program in consequence. He analyzed the proportions of the four bases of DNA and found a curious correspondence. The numbers of molecules present of the two bases, adenine and guanine, called purines, were always equal to the total amount of thymine and cytosine, the other two bases, called pyrimidines. This neat ratio, found in all forms of DNA, cried out for explanation, but Chargaff could not think what it might be.
That is where things stood when Rosalind Franklin arrived at King's College London on 5 January 1951. Leaving coal research to work on DNA, moving from the crystal structure of inanimate substances to that of biological molecules, she had crossed the border between nonliving and living.
Coal does not make more coal, but genes make more gene