Is It Imperative in the G Nome?

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Is it really that even in principle, you couldn't look at the g nome and figure out what the animal is going to be? Well, that's a great question. So in a certain molecular sense, if you were to simply a absolutely model the lowest level of physics, yes, its its its in there. But we would like to do something better than that. We would like to understand the incoding. And so what you get in the genome is the description of a very important and very interesting machine which is able to generate and process information,. exploiting various laws of physics and computation to make certain outcomes.

As a semi-outsider, it’s fun for me to watch as a new era dawns in biology: one that adds ideas from physics, big data, computer science, and information theory to the usual biological toolkit. One of the big areas of study in this burgeoning field is the relationship between the basic bioinformatic building blocks (genes and proteins) to the macroscopic organism that eventually results. That relationship is not a simple one, as we’re discovering. Standard metaphors notwithstanding, an organism is not a machine based on genetic blueprints. I talk with biologist and information scientist Michael Levin about how information and physical constraints come together to make organisms and selves.

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Michael Levin received his Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University. He is currently Distinguished Professor and Vannevar Bush Chair in the Biology department at Tufts University, and serves as director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. His work on left-right asymmetric body structures is on Nature’s list of 100 Milestones of Developmental Biology of the Century.

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