Information seen as an authentic currency of reality triggers a revolution in biology

Science was created in Greece with a significant contribution from Egypt

Oὐδὲν χρῆμα μάτην γίνεται ἀλλα πάντα ἐκ λόγου τε καὶ ὑπ᾽ ἀνάγκης

Will we reconstruct and synthesize life?

Out of the box questions and some answers

Key functions for life

Any form of knowledge requires a lot of reading. This site is not meant for cursory reading; explore it via a computer screen, a tablet, but hardly from a mobile phone

Do protein agents « animate » biological chemistry?

ANTOINE DANCHIN

唐善 • 安東

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We perceive the world through four categories of objective being: space, time, mass and energy. To this list, physics adds information as an essential component. The involvement of information resolves the conflicts between classical and quantum physics. From a heuristic point of view alone, information is a genuine category of reality. Accumulation of information is the consequence of a concrete substantiation, an incarnation into matter endowed with mass of those agents that James Clerk Maxwell invented in 1871, known today as « Maxwell's demons ».

Here, we develop the consequences of the principle discovered by Rolf Landauer in 1961, and which has taken decades to understand. Reflecting on what common sense calls information - with the connotation of what might be « useful » information, or information with contextual value - Landauer demonstrated that the creation of information, contrary to popular belief, is reversible, it does not dissipate energy. What does consume energy is the process of resetting the agents that generate information to their ground state, enabling them to perform their function once again. If we think of living organisms as analog (rather than digital) computers capable of generating computers we need to include the presence of agents that drive and control the assembly line of the machine's offspring. These energy-dissipating agents are absent from the standard vision of computing. If we then explore the functions of the cell that seem to dissipate energy for no apparent reason, analysis of the genome sequence reveals numerous genes that code for these functions. This discovery sheds light on the heart of what makes biological chemistry seem 'animate', a feature of life that has always remained elusive.

+ Caveat : The epilogue to The Delphic Boat. Harvard University Press, 2003. Scientists should have no name...

"Here this text comes to an end. In our time, now that the written word has lost the almost sacred status it had for so long, I wonder about its significance. Should I have written it? Or indeed, what place is there for scientific writing? This is a minor work; what benefit can it bring? Choose a major work, such as the 1905 article in which Einstein explicitly sets out the foundations of the theory of relativity, and compare it, with its enormously destructive consequences – do you remember Nagasaki? – with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with Mickiewicz’s love poetry, or Michelangelo’s Pietà. Ask yourself which you would destroy, if fate allowed you to save only three of these works. Science is, and remains, anonymous. Anyone might rediscover Einstein’s findings, one fine day. Science is anonymous, and this is probably why it is both feared and disdained. What ambition, what mad hope drove me to dedicate my days and nights to thinking through what is set down in black and white in this bundle of pages? Astonishment, no doubt. Astonishment at finding myself one of the billions of human beings taking part in the last doubling of the population of humanity, at a time when we can all look around us at this planet we have devastated. At having witnessed the destruction of all my hopes and all my beliefs, and yet finding myself still standing on this transient earth. At knowing that a day will come, not for me but for others, when a new form of creation will replace what we have destroyed, only to disappear in its turn into the night of Oblivion. I wanted to leave some signs of this new hope of an impossible future, to help those mysterious Others who will one day give it birth, to help them find their way, or rather to know that the way exists, without me. "

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SCIENCE ON THE MOVE

ANTOINE DANCHIN

唐善 • 安東