Interviewing a master human biologist

Philosophy of a Biologist *

A quarter century is, indeed, a rather brief period to allow for the development of a philosopher, and yet, though I make no claim to such a title, I choose to preface the little I have to say by stating that it might be termed the "philosophy of a biologist." Perhaps I should also add that I can hardly qualify as a biologist, since my activities throughout the period in question have been-conf...

The Journey of a Biologist

Yeast becomes a cell biologist

JCB • VOLUME 171 • NUMBER 3 • 2005 408 Yeast becomes a cell biologist ummer research collaborations at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory have a magical way of unveiling cellular secrets. In 1982, when Alison Adams, her graduate advisor John Pringle, and John Kilmartin met up, little did they know that their attempts to visualize actin and tubulin would transform yeast from a genetics-...

Can a Systems Biologist Fix a Tamagotchi?

We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size [...]. We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we wil...

Claude Shannon : Biologist :

Claude Shannon founded information theory in the 1940s. The theory has long been known to be closely related to thermodynamics and physics through the similarity of Shannon's uncertainty measure to the entropy function. Recent work using information theory to understand molecular biology has unearthed a curious fact: Shannon's channel capacity theorem only applies to living organisms and their ...