Schrodinger's "What is Life" At 75: The Physical Aspects of the Living Cell Revisited

Abstract

In this talk, after a brief review of Schrodinger's essay as a historical document in the rise of modern molecular biology, I will take a different tack and ask to what extent instead his short piece should be seen as a manifesto for the future of physical biology. Schrodinger mused about the need for new ideas from physics to describe biological systems with two primary sets of questions to focus the discussion: how is genetic information transferred from one generation to the next and what gives rise to the reproducible physical structures seen within cells, tissues and organisms? I will argue that to a large extent, these questions remain unanswered from a physics perspective and will describe our own efforts as well as those of many others to understand the rules governing how genomes are regulated and how active matter structures such as the mitotic spindle are organized.

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