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President's Dream Colloquium on Emergence and Complexity of Life
Connecting Chemistry to Biology
Watch the Recorded Web Stream
Recorded on October 1, 2012
Lecture Abstract
Life is axiomatically a chemical phenomenon, involving the rearrangement of atoms and bonds of structures and energies that fall within this "central science".
However, life's complexity has allowed entire fields of biology to intercede between what we observe and biomolecular reality, seeking to describe the behavior of cells, organisms, and even consciousness without ever reducing these phenomena to their underlying molecular details.
This creates a problem for those seeking to understand life as a fundamental and universal phenomenon. Will the failure of any non-chemical "metalanguage" to accurately reflect underlying molecular reality prevent it from ever conferring predictive and manipulative power upon biological systems?
Conversely, will the complexity of the molecular phenomena behind biology forever defeat reductionist attempts to predictively manipulate biological systems?
This talk will offer two approaches to resolve this conundrum. The first approach works backwards in time, exploring molecular descriptions of genes and proteins and the magic of biotechnology to connect chemistry to the evolution that has produced modern biology. The second approach works forward in time, were where chemists are challenged to create in the laboratory artificial chemical systems that reproduce behavior that is generally seen only in living systems.
Lecture Topics
About the Speaker
Steven Benner is a Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. His research group initiated the field of synthetic biology, invented dynamic combinatorial chemistry and established the field of paleomolecular biology, where researchers resurrect ancestral proteins from extinct organisms for study in the laboratory.
His groundbreaking research on the origins of life extend into his current work on astrobiology, and his group has also been involved with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Michigan to design Mars probes.