Lectures and seminars What is life? The Future of Biology: How Life Works: The New Biology

Followed by discussion 15.00 – 17.00 in Ragnar Granit meeting room, just opposite to the lecture hall at Biomedicum

Abstract

Over the past several decades, biology has been undergoing a quiet revolution. As the molecular mechanisms in between the notion of an organism’s “genetic blueprint” and the organism itself have come ever more into focus, it has become increasingly clear that the blueprint metaphor is the wrong one anyway. We are not mere readouts of some genetically encoded instructions. Rather, every level of the biological hierarchy, from genes to proteins to cells and tissues, has its own set of operational rules, and there is a constant flow of information between all the levels. In this talk I will discuss this new view of life, which appears to be more dynamic, adaptive, and innovative than the old view of a DNA-based program implies. The new picture reveals that life is better understood not through metaphors of machines or computation but as a question about agency.

Bio

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and author, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H₂O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and most recently, How Life Works. We can also recommend his book Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different (2018). His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books, and he was the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy or social roles of science.