Bioscience at the Physical Science Frontier: Proceedings of a Foundation Symposium on the 150th Anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s Birth

265 Pages·1987·6.52 MB·English

by  Linus Pauling (auth.)

Bioscience
at the
Physical Science Frontier
BIOSCIENCE
AT THE
PHYSICAL SCIENCE FRONTIER
Proceedings of a Foundation
Symposium on the 150th Anniversary
of Alfred Nobel's Birth
Edited by
CLAUDIO NICOLINI
Chair of Biophysics, School of Medicine,
University of Genova, Genova, Italia
HUMANA • CLIFTON, NEW JERSEY
© 1986 The Humana Press Inc.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1986
Crescent Manor
PO Box 2148
Clifton, NJ 07015
All rights reserved
No part of the book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanica, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise
without written permission from the Publisher.
This volume contains the proceedings of the
Symposium held to celebrate the 150 birthday
of Alfred Nobel that was held
in San Remo, Rome.
This volume comprises volume 9 of CELL BIOPHYSICS.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4612-9182-4 e-ISBN-13: 978-1-4612-4834-7
001: 10.1007/978-1-4612-4834-7
Preface
Since early Greek and Roman times, atoms were assumed-after un
dergoing their various interactions-to take on the stable configurations
of either the living or the inanimate world. This simple and unitary
theory has evolved markedly, even while maintaining its validity over
several centuries of vicissitudes, and in essence constitutes the first ex
ample of a synthesis between the physical and the life sciences.
In modern times, a similar relationship between the structure of
various macromolecules and the function of living cells has also emerged
as one of the most striking findings of those scientists active at the con
vergence of the physical and life sciences. This fundamental result is re
ported in the first two sections of the present work, namely those on
"Oncogenes and Cancer" and "Lower-to-Higher-Order DNA Struc
ture," in many cases by those recent Nobelists who themselves have
been major contributors to work at the intersection of these fields.
Many other significant areas of forefront scientific inquiry today (for
example, research on the brain and vision), as well as some of the most
exciting technological developments (e.g., work on renewable fuels and
materials, biotechnology, and NMR and X-ray tomography) and method
ological advances (e.g., studies in the fields of statistical mechanics and
cancer chemotherapy) depend on the complex but harmonious collabora
tions of physicists, chemists, mathematicians, engineers, biologists, and
physicians.
This cooperation among scientists across a variety of disciplines not
only opens exciting new frontiers, but also permits a fresh synthesis of
both theoretical and empirical knowledge through its frequent intercon
nection of expertises and its encouragement of role exchange among the
traditionally compartmented soft and hard sciences.
The Symposium on "New Frontiers at the Crossing of Life and Phys
ical Sciences"-held not long ago in San Remo (a beautiful town on the
Italian Riviera) to celebrate the 150th birthday of Alfred Nobel, along
with four other Symposia in other scientific fields that saw the participa
tion of over 30 Nobel Prize winners, all under the sponsorship of the
Nobel Foundation and the City of San Remo with the patronage of the
King of Sweden and the President of Italian Republic-contains their re-
v
vi Preface
ports on many representative topics on today's new frontiers. With two
exceptions (i.e., James Watson and Alexander Rich), all the lectures de
livered within that Symposium-which I had the privilege to chair-have
been included in the book. It has been a sometimes difficult but always
exciting undertaking, and I hope that the good fruit of our symposium,
now happily in hand, maintains the spirit of that unique occasion.
Claudio Nicolini
Contents
Preface, CLAUDIO NICOLINI. ............................................ v
List of Contributors .............................................. ix
Introduction
LINUS PAULING
One Aspect of the Physical Sciences in Relation to Biology ........ 3
Section I Oncogenes and Cancer
HOWARD M. TEMIN
Retroviruses and Evolution .................................... 9
DAVID BALTIMORE
The Beginning of the Molecular Description of a Cancer ......... 17
Section II Lower-to-Higher DNA Structure
E. M. BRADBURY AND J. P. BALDWIN
Neutron Scatter and Diffraction Techniques Applied to
Nucleosome and Chromatin Structure ..................... 35
C. NICOLINI
Nuclear Structure: From the Pores to the High-Order Gene
Structure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 67
Section III Brain and Vision
DAVID H. HUBEL
Blobs and Color Vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 91
LEON N COOPER
Neuron Learning to Brain Organization ....................... 103
DONALD GLASER
A Physicist's View of Vision ................................. 145
Section IV Technological Developments
A. M. CORMACK
Scanning in Medicine and Other Fields ....................... 151
HARLYN O. HALVORSON
Genetic Engineering: A New Biotechnology ................... 171
vii
viii Contents
MEL VIN CALVIN
Renewable Fuels and Materials: Oil From Plants. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 189
PAUL LAUTERBUR
NMR Imaging in Biomedicine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 211
Section V Methodological Developments
IL YA PRIGOGINE
Life and Physics: New Perspectives ........................... 217
LEO SACHS
Cell Differentiation and Malignancy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 225
GIANNI BONADONNA
New Strategies in Cancer Chemotherapy ...................... 243
WILLIAM F. RAUB
Summary and Prospects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 257
AUTHOR INDEX .............................................. 263
SUBJECT INDEX .............................................. 265
Contributors
J. P. BALDWIN • Department of Physics, Liverpool Polytechnic,
Liverpool, United Kingdom
DAVID BALTIMORE • Department of Biology, Whitehead Institute for
Biomedical Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
GIANNI BONADONNA· Division of Medical Oncology, Instituto
Nazionale Tumori, Milan, Italy
E. M. BRADBURY· Department of Biological Chemistry, School of
Medicine, University of California, Davis, California
MELVIN CALVIN • Department of Chemistry and Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, California
LEON N COOPER· Department of Physics and Center for Neural
Science, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
A. M. CORMACK • Physics Department, Tufts University, Medford,
Massachusetts
DONALD GLASER • Physics Department, Tufts University of California
at Berkeley, Berkeley, California
HARLYN O. HALVORSON • Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research
Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
DAVID A. HUBEL • Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical
School, Boston, Massachusetts
PAUL C. LAUTERBUR • Department of Chemistry, State University of
New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York
C. NICOLINI • Chair of Biophysics, School of Medicine, University of
Genova, Viale, Italy
LINUS PAULING • Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine,
Palo Alto, California
ILYA PRIGOGINE • Universitg Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
WILLIAM F. RAUB • National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
LEO SACHS • Department of Genetics, The Weizmann Institute of
Science, Rehovot, Isreal
HOWARD M. TEMIN· Department of Oncology, McArdle Laboratory,
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
ix
INTRODUCTION
One Aspect of the Physical Sciences in
Relation to Biology
LINUS PAULING
Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine,
Palo Alto, California 94306
About forty years ago I decided to write a book about "One Aspect
of the Physical Sciences in Relation to Biology," which is the topic of this
meeting. At the time, I went so far as to formulate the title "The Molecu
lar Basis of Biological Specificity," later I changed the title to "The Molec
ular Basis of Life," and now I have even gone so far as to write a few
pages of the book. This is what I shall relate here, "One Aspect of the
Physical Sciences in Relation to Biology."
It represents, in part, a portion of my life for about twenty years,
beginning in 1929 to 1947 or 1948, when I nearly felt satisfied; and when I
say "satisfied," I mean I felt satisfied that I understood "life." It started
in 1929 because it was the year when Thomas Hunt Morgan and a good
number of his associates, namely, those who had been involved with
him in discovering the gene (Sturtevant and Bridges), came to Pasadena
to start, at the new California Institute of Technology, a division of Bio
logical Sciences.
I became well acquainted with these biologists, including Tyler and
Emerson and other younger ones who came along as graduate students,
and I found very quickly that I was puzzling over the problem of biologi
cal specificity. Morgan, for example, was working on self-sterility in
Ciona, which was a difficult problem to explain: How Ciona can be sterile
against themselves, but fertile against nearly all other individual Ciona.
Well, of course, there are many other examples of biological specificity. I
do not know whether at first I had any feeling, real feeling, that I would
understand biological specificity in the course of time, but then some
thing happened in 1936.
I had been working with Charles Coryell, one of my students, on the
magnetic and other properties of hemoglobin. When I gave a seminar on
that subject at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1936, Karl
Landsteiner asked me to come to his laboratory, which I did the next
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