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The subsequent emergence of molecular biology, due in large part to some of those inspired by What Is Life?, means that whether Nobel prizes get assigned to ‘chemistry’ or ‘physiology or medicine’ is now as arbitrary as whether Nobels in nuclear science in the early twentieth century were awarded in chemistry or physics. That subject, after all, is what biologists relied on mid-century to probe and better understand DNA, enzymes and cell signalling. Happily, chemistry is welcomed to this table too. The physical-sciences content of artificial intelligence and complex systems is obvious, but understanding of (say) cognitive neuroscience, learning and memory and infectious disease can also benefit from wide-ranging expertise: for example, from the study of network topologies, the thermodynamics of information, and ergodicity (how widely a dynamic system explores its available states). This cross-disciplinary relevance applies equally to the topics addressed at the Dublin meeting. And his timing was perfect: biology was already changing from a largely descriptive, historical and organismal science to a mechanistic and microscopic one. Schrödinger presented the problem of life as a puzzle posed to no single discipline. The impact of What Is Life? lies more in its spirit than its substance. As to how the genetic machinery works, Schrödinger could only point out that it seems to suspend the second law of thermodynamics, which states that total entropy must increase.
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That vision resonated with Crick and Watson as they contemplated the structure of DNA in the following decade, but it wasn’t wholly original.
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Here Schrödinger made the auspicious proposal that the genetic material is an “aperiodic crystal”: a structure with a specific but not periodic arrangement of atoms, encoding information that somehow guides the development of the organism. It limited itself mostly to a discussion of the molecular basis of inheritance through chromosomes. But can the ideas in this slim volume really supply sufficient motivation for such a diverse programme?Ĭritics have rightly argued that the book was neither particularly original nor up to date. The book attracted scientists from other fields to the study of genetics and the molecular mechanisms of life, among them physicists Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Seymour Benzer, chemist Gunther Stent and zoologist James Watson. Some consider it one of the most influential scientific books of the twentieth century. Schrödinger’s lectures were collected into what he called his “little book”, What Is Life?, published in 1944 ( see Nature 560, 548–550 2018). Schrödinger’s cat among biology’s pigeons: 75 years of What Is Life?