Wonders of Life. Andrew Cohen

Чтение книги онлайн.

      The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman used to tell a story about an artist friend who challenged him about the beauty of a flower. ‘You as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing’ he said. Feynman, after describing his friend as ‘kind of nutty’, went on to explain that whilst the aesthetic beauty of nature is surely open to everyone, albeit not in quite as refined a way, the world becomes more beautiful as our understanding deepens.

      The flower is made up of cells, single units with identical genes. Hidden within are a multitude of biochemical machines, each highly specialised to perform complex tasks that keep the cell alive. Some contain chloroplasts, once free-living bacteria, co-opted into capturing light from the Sun and using it to assemble food from carbon dioxide and water. There are mitochondria, factories that pump protons up energy ‘waterfalls’ and insert organic waterwheels into the ensuing cascade to assemble ATP molecules – the universal batteries of life. And there is DNA, a molecule with a code embedded in its structure that carries the instructions to assemble the flower, but also contains fragments of the story of the origin and evolution of all life on Earth, from its beginnings 3.8 billion years ago to the endless forms most beautiful that have transformed a once-sterile world into the grandest possible expression of the laws of nature. This is beauty way beyond the aesthetic that, as Feynman concluded, ‘only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understand how it subtracts.’

      I confess that, when we began thinking about filming Wonders of Life, my knowledge of biology was a little dated – I gave it up as an academic subject in 1984. As I recall, the idea for the series came from an off-hand reference I made to Andrew Cohen about a little book I had read as a physics undergraduate.

      What is Life? is an account of a series of lectures given by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, published in 1944. Schrödinger was a Nobel Prize winner, one of the founders of quantum theory, and a deep and high-precision thinker. In the book, he poses a simple yet profound question: ‘How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?’ This question is beautifully phrased. Most important is the word ‘How’ at the beginning. Without this word, the question is metaphysical, in the sense that the answer may be ‘No’ – a complete understanding of life may be forever beyond the natural sciences because there is something inherently supernatural about it. The word ‘How’ transforms it, and provides a significant and important insight into the mind of a scientist. Let us find out, by studying nature, developing theories and testing those theories against our observations of the living world, how life can be fully explained by the laws of physics and chemistry, as it surely must be. This, I submit, is an excellent description of the science of biology.

      Wonders of Life might be best described as a series exploring our current understanding of Schrodinger’s ‘How’ question. I enjoyed making the films immensely, because virtually everything in them was discovered after I gave up biology in 1984. The rate of discovery, driven by powerful new experimental techniques such as the exponentially increasing ease and decreasing cost of DNA sequencing, is quite dazzling and, Higgs Boson notwithstanding, I might be convinced that the 21st century has already become the century of the Life Sciences; but only ‘might’.

      A truly wonderful exception to the modernity is Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, published in November 1859 and spectacularly verified as a conceptual framework to understand the diversity and complexity of life on Earth. To understand СКАЧАТЬ