5 février 2008
Michel Morange "The resurrection of life"
Themes
1. Death & resurrection of life
2. The question of life has a place in science?
3. Definition of life
1. Death & resurrection of life
1953: Watson & Crick "We have discovered the secret of life."
1962: Ernest Kahane "La vie n'existe pas!"
1970: F. Jacob "Life is no longer a question in the lab."
J. Monod "The secret of life was inaccessible, but today it has been unveiled."
1998: Stanley Shostak "Death of Life"
Reemergence of the question of life
1) fading of the informational vision
2) RNA world
2000: T. Cech, The ribosome is a ribozyme. Science 289:878
3) new researches in Science (bioinformatics, systems biology, etc)
4) rise of astrobiology
5) studies of artificial life
2000: E.F. Keller "The century of the gene"
1948: Warren Weaver, Science & complexity. American Scientist 36:536
Lynn Margulis: no satisfactory or broadly accepted definition of life
2. The question of life has a place in science?
M. Foucault: "Life itself did not exist in the 18th century."
(Les mots et les choses)
Demarcation between living and non-living is a product of human thinking rather than of evolution
2002: EF Keller, "Making sense of life"
2003: James Lovelock, Gaia: The living Earth. Nature 426:769-770
Gaia=organisms & their environment evolve as a sigle, self-regulating system
2004: Royal Society Meeting 'The molecular basis of life: is life possible without water?' Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 29 August 2004 vol. 359 no. 1448
3. Definition of life
1992: Harold J Horowitz "Beginnings of cellular life"
Gerald Joyce
Life is a self-sustaining chemical system,
with a capacity to reproduce and undergo Darwinian evolution
with a complex macromolecular structure
with internal informational representation
Exobiology, an overview on life
Alexander Oparin (1961): 6 properties
1. Capability of exchange of material with surrounding medium
2. Capability of growth
3. Capability of population growth
4. Capability of self reproduction
5. Capability of movement
6. Capability of being excited
M.Morange: It is important to think about life for attracting young people into science and for establishing the proper relation between scientists and laymen.
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