2005-2006 Colloquium Series

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NAU Physical Sciences (Bldg 19, Rm 321), Monday, October 31, 2005, 4:00 PM
(Refreshments at 3:45pm)

What Can a Physicist Contribute to Biology

Stuart Lindsay
Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University

Abstract

There is an incredible amount of physics in biology already, from the synchrotrons for x-ray studies to nuclear techniques in medicine. But I want to address the issue of whether or not there are big, basic biological questions that a physicist can address in a way that a biologist, working alone, would be unlikely to.

In my opinion, new physics is to be found in complex systems, and it may lie at the heart of many of the questions that outsiders first ask about life: How is motion generated? How do enzymes work? How do organisms recognize self? How do they learn? What is consciousness? How do species evolve? At some level, most of these questions are answered by a Darwinian mechanism. Random fluctuations generate random populations, and the fittest among them is selected.

Understanding these processes at the molecular level requires the study of individual molecules, because it is the fluctuations that matter. I will describe some of the work we have done on charge transfer in single molecules and control of gene expression. In both cases, fluctuations play a key role. I'll also describe our attempts to sequence single DNA molecules very rapidly (and why fluctuations will probably stop us from succeeding).

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