Presentation
My plan for the great privilege of teaching at the College de France is to develop several key themes in Physical Biology. Specifically, 1 plan to have an opening lecture on biology by the numbers, followed in turn by three lectures showing how the physical biology approach plays out in the context of specific case studies in: signaling and regulation, biological shape and biological fidelity. The "by the numbers" approach is modeled on so-called Fermi problems, named in honor of Enrico Fermi who could find numerical answers to problems of all kinds in short order. Examples of our use of this approach include attacking questions such as how much body mass is lost by bar-tailed godwits in their 10,000 km migration (without stopping) from Alaska to New Zealand, what is the mass of ATP synthesized in our bodies every day, and how much force is involved in the budding of a virus from the cell membrane. The three proposed thrusts of my College de France lectures will focus on the search for far-reaching principles that describe how signaling and regulation work, with special emphasis on allostery, how shape is determined by mechanisms such as differential growth and mechanical instability and finally, on topics such as how energy consumption determines the fidelity of biological copying in examples such as DNA replication.
All lectures are in English.
