Waiting for the Paradox

 
John Dennehy's citation classic for this week is Gunther Stent's Molecular Biology of Bacterial Viruses [This Week's Citation Classic]. This reminds me of the time when I was an undergraduate in 1966 and I first read about the Phage Group in Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology (1966). The book was a collection of articles by workers who had been influenced by Max Delbrück, on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

A few years later I got to meet most of them at the annual phage meetings in Cold Spring Harbor. It was an exciting time. I remember Stent as one of those people who is so smart it's scary. Little did I know at the time that I was witnessing the end of an era.

Stent's contribution to Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology was an essay with the cryptic title "Waiting for the Paradox." He describes some of the early history of the phage group and Delbrück's attempts to define the gene in 1940. This influenced the physicist Erwin Shrödinger who wrote a famous little book called What is Life?. It stimulated many physicists to enter biology—including Francis Crick.

The key passage from Shrödinger's book is described by Stent. Schrödinger defines an important credo (quoted by Stent) ...

In fact, this credo was probably the most important psychological incentive for physicists to turn to biology in the first place: "From Delbrück's general picture of the hereditary substance it emerges that living matter, while not eluding the 'laws of physics' as established up to date, is likely to involve 'other laws of physics' hitherto unknown which, however, once they have been revealed will form just as integral part of this science as the former." Thus it was the romantic idea that 'other laws of physics' might be discovered by studying the gene that really fascinated the physicists. This search for the physical paradox, this quixotic hope that genetics would prove incomprehensible within the framework of conventional physical knowledge, remained an important element of the psychological infrastructure of the creators of molecular biology. [my emphasis - LAM]

By 1966 it was clear that no new laws were going to be discovered although there was still the hope that something mysterious was going on inside the brain. Some people were still waiting for the paradox.

Today we teach our students that the most remarkable thing about biology is that life obeys the laws of physics and chemistry.

---

[Photo Credit: The book cover shows the 1992 expanded edition of Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology. A new Centennial Edition is due out next month.]