What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Based on Lectures Delivered Under the Auspices of the Institute at Trinity College, Dublin, in February 1943

SCHRÖDINGER, Erwin

Published by at the University Press, Cambridge, 1944

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INTRODUCED THE CONCEPT OF A GENETIC CODE. First edition, first impression, of Schrödinger's famous and influential series of lectures on the physical basis of life. Even Schrödinger himself did not suspect that "the book would introduce a new concept to biology, that of a genetic code, and also be considered the most significant cause of an intellectual migration, from physics to biology, that would fully establish the emerging discipline of molecular biology" (Sarkar, p. 631)." "Even during wartime in England Schrödinger's lectures gained enough publicity to be reported on in the April 5, 1943, issue of Time magazine. The lectures were published as a small book in 1944 by Cambridge University Press. In this form they profoundly influencedJames D. Watson and others, such as Francis Crick, whose background was in physics. Watson wrote: "From the moment I read Schrödinger's What is Life I became polarized toward finding out the secret of the gene" (Watson in Cairns, Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, 239)" (). "In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic crystal" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds. In the 1950s, this idea stimulated enthusiasm for discovering the chemical basis of genetic inheritance. Although the existence of some form of hereditary information had been hypothesized since 1869, its role in reproduction and its helical shape were still unknown at the time of Schrödinger's lecture. In retrospect, Schrödinger's aperiodic crystal can be viewed as a well-reasoned theoretical prediction of what biologists should have been looking for during their search for genetic material" (Wikipedia). "In What Is Life? (1944), Austrian physicist and Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger used that (still-unresolved) question to frame a more specific but equally provocative one. What is it about living systems, he asked, that seems to put them at odds with the known laws of physics? The answer he offered looks prescient now: life is distinguished by a 'code-script' that directs cellular organization and heredity, while apparently enabling organisms to suspend the second law of thermodynamics. These ideas inspired the public and a number of scientific luminaries, but exasperated others. Although their elements were not original, the formulation brilliantly anticipated Francis Crick and James Watson's discovery in 1953 of how DNA's double helix encodes genes. As Crick wrote to Schrödinger that year, he and Watson had 'both been influenced by your little book'" (Ball, p. 548). Provenance: Signature of former owner dated February 1945 on front free endpaper. In March 1943, "at the height of World War II, the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger delivered a series of lectures at Trinity College Dublin with the ambitious title 'What is Life?'. While most prominent theoretical physicists outside the Nazi ambit were working feverishly on the atom bomb, Schrödinger was speculating instead on the physical basis for life. He had just been 'honoured,' in his own words, by the Nazi government with pensionless dismissal, without notice, from his academic chair in Austria. He had then settled in Dublin as a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies, newly founded by Éamon de Valera, the Irish premier, who had a lifelong fascination with mathematics. "The lectures were in a statutory responsibility. The intended audience was not limited to scientists. It was expected that most of Dublin's intellectual elite would attend. Perhaps because of this, Schrödinger turned to a favourite hobby - biology - rather than his professional work in physics. It appears that he intended the lectures to be published as a book, even as he completed them" (Sarkar, p. 631). "Mostly through research with maize and with the fruit fly Drosophila, the foundations of genetics were firmly established by 1940. It was known that heredity was determined by genes located on chromosomes, and that each of th. Seller Inventory # 6230

Bibliographic Details

Title: What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the ...

Publisher: at the University Press, Cambridge

Publication Date: 1944

Edition: First edition.