Nobel laureate Paul Nurse featured at Albert Einstein Memorial Lecture.
By: Gwen McNamara
Biology is on the verge of a revolution at least according to Paul Nurse, a Nobel laureate and the featured speaker at Thursday’s Albert Einstein Memorial Lecture, presented by the Princeton Regional Chamber Commerce.
In a talk titled "The Great Ideas of Biology," Dr. Nurse told an audience of close to 200 people in Robertson Hall’s Dodds Auditorium at Princeton University that just as physics has been revolutionized by the ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics, "biological organization" will do the same for biology.
"Pre-1900s physics occupied a commonsense world, in which we experience the world in terms of three dimensions and time," he said. "Now physics has been hit by two revolutionary ideas relativity, which is just beyond our normal visualization, and quantum mechanics, an Alice in Wonderland world we cannot imagine.
"I believe biology may go in this same direction in the next decade or two," he continued. "Biologists need help from particle physicists, theorists and mathematicians to get away from chemistry and really get into the organization that is the basis of life. That is the next ‘great idea’ in biology’s storied history."
Dr. Nurse, who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology in 2001 with Leland H. Hartwell and R. Timothy Hunt for advancing scientific understanding of the cell cycle, or the process by which cells make copies of themselves, began his talk by taking a historical tour of biology’s greatest ideas namely the cell, the gene, evolution and describing life through chemistry.
"Many people think biology has hardly had any ideas at all," he said. "But there are some great ones, some important theories, that put ideas together to bring us closer to understanding what the nature of life really is."
He began with the cell doctrine or simply that all life is composed of cells and cells are the simplest unit exhibiting the characteristics of life.
The doctrine stems from research in the 17th century when the first microscopes were used to peer into a previously unseen world. Examinations of plant life led to work with bacteria and blood cells and eventually, after 100 years, "cells were found everywhere," Dr. Nurse said.
"By the turn of the 19th century, scientists turned their attention to the idea that the cells could be the basic unit of life," he said. "Theodor Schwann, a zoologist, concluded that all organisms were composed of like parts, namely cells, but it took another 20 years or more to figure out how they came about."
It was Rudolf Virchow who got it right when he concluded that existing cells must come from pre-existing cells, that they divide in two, he said.
"This was a major milestone," said Dr. Nurse. "Understanding that cells and cell growth and division was responsible for the basic growth and development of every living thing."
The theory of genes began in the second part of the 19th century with Gregor Mendel, a monk trained as a physicist who "had a real aptitude for experiments," Dr. Nurse said.
Using plants from his greenhouse, he uncovered the secrets of heredity that unchanging "particles" handed off to the offspring were responsible for generational similarities.
But despite his brilliant reasoning, his discovery was largely ignored until advances in cell biology led to the discovery of the chromosome, Dr. Nurse said.
"This formed the basis of the greatest biological discovery in the 20th century genes and how they work," he said. "It gave rise to the discovery of DNA in 1944 and the work of Jim Watson and Francis Crick, who worked out the double helix the structure of DNA in 1953."
Evolution and the process of natural selection are perhaps the most well-known, and still controversial, ideas in biology, Dr. Nurse said.
Published by Charles Darwin in an 1859 publication, the idea of evolution raised more than a few eyebrows early on.
"Darwin knew some people would not like the idea of evolving from some lower life form," Dr. Nurse said. "But the idea wasn’t entirely new. Aristotle had a crude idea of evolution and Darwin’s grandfather also presented a theory of evolution. Still, it’s Charles who we’re familiar with."
Discovering that living things evolve because of variations determined by their genes and that the characteristics that better enable an organism to survive and reproduce will be passed on to future generations "brought cells, genes, everything together," said Dr. Nurse.
The one thing biologists were still missing was a satisfactory way to tell why life really is the way it is why do we breathe? Why do we look like this? That’s where chemistry comes into play, Dr. Nurse said.
Starting with fermentation research by French scientists and ending with the discovery of enzymes by Germans, biologists found that life’s processes could be reduced to chemistry.
"If a living thing contained enzymes that were causing chemical reactions, then chemistry was the key to life," said Dr. Nurse. "Finally, there was a straightforward way to understand the processes of the living cell."
In the future, he is hopeful biologists will continue to look outside the box, beyond chemistry, to delve into the organization of life.
Dr. Nurse, who grew up in England, is currently president of Rockefeller University in New York City. He took the post in September 2003. In addition to leading the university, he heads one of its major laboratories the Laboratory of Yeast Genetics and Cell Biology. It is the third new research facility established at the university this year.
Previous to his appointment at Rockefeller University, Dr. Nurse served as chief executive of Cancer Research UK, the world’s largest cancer research organization outside the United States.