FEBRUARY 27, 1998 -- 1:00 to 3:00 P.M. IN THE KORN CONVOCATION HALL (C-314) ANDERSON SCHOOL
MANFRED EIGEN, Professor and Chairman, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1967 presents :
"DARWINIAN EVOLUTION AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL FITNESS LANDSCAPES "
FIELD/SUBFIELD: Biology and Chemistry/Evolutionary Biotechnology and Molecular Self-Organization
What is the distinguishing feature of a living system that singularizes it from every non-living chemical ensemble, regardless of the extent of the complexity. The differentiable characteristic of the living system is information. Information assures the controlled reproduction of all the constituents, thereby ensuring the conservation of viability. Information - unlike energy - is not subject to a conservation law. Hence the fundamental question behind the origin of life is: How can information originate?
Information theory, which was pioneered by Claude Shannon, cannot answer this question: this theory is most successful in dealing with problems of coding and transmission. In principle, the answer was formulated 130 years ago by Charles Darwin: The information that is unique for life evolves by virtue of natural selection. Today we can be more specific: Natural selection is a non-equilibrium process. It is an inherent consequence of mutagenous self-replication at several levels of organization; for instance it is evident in molecules such as nucleic acids, in molecular complexes such as viruses and in autonomous forms of life such as micro or higher organisms. New physical concepts have been introduced in order to deal quantitatively with the dynamics of the molecular generation of genetic information. They provide a physical foundation for Darwinian behaviour, yet they introduce major modifications in its classical interpretation. The lecture will deal with these physical concepts, such as sequence space, quasi-species and hypercycles and will scrutinize their adequacy for rationalizing experimental results obtained with molecular model systems and with viruses under natural conditions. Elucidating the principles of molecular self-organization has made possible to construct automated machines that make it possible for genetic information to evolve under controlled conditions in an abridged time scale.
For many years the evolution of self-organizing systems has been investigated at the Max-Planck Institute for BioPhysical Chemistry in Gottingen. Viruses that infect bacteria were used to carry out this research. Methods employing these "evolution machines" were developed by Manfred Eigen who received the Nobel Prize in 1967 for his research on very rapid chemical kinetics. Already at that time his scientific interest was focused almost exclusively on problems concerning evolution. In 1971 he published a pioneering paper dealing with two new concepts: the "self-organization of matter" and the "evolution of biological macromolecules"; these have since become classical concepts in the field of evolution. In 1992 he was awarded the prestigious Paul Ehrlich Prize for the theory presented in that paper and for its far-reaching consequences.
Eigen was born in 1927. After obtaining a Ph.D. in physics he began his scientific career in 1951 at the Institute for Physical Chemistry at the University in Gottingen. In 1953 Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer offered him a position at the Max-Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Gottingen. In 1958 he was elected a scientific member of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. He became head of the department of chemical kinetics in 1962, and a director at the institute in 1964. In 1971 the institute was substantially expanded and is called today the Max-Planck Institute for BioPhysical Chemistry.
Manfred Eigen has always captivated the attention of his contemporaries by his ability to generate scientific insights from the latest findings in physics and molecular biology; however, unlike those whose propositions border on the fanciful, his ideas never digress from sound scientific knowledge.Initially his thoughts on molecular evolution, and thus the development of life on earth, centered around self-replicating molecules that existed about 3.8 billion years ago. From the very beginning these molecules must have possessed such diverse structures that they were subject to the process of natural selection.
More recently his interest has focused on the technological utilization of ideas concerning evolution. By employing the so-called evolution machines that utilize the principles of biological evolution, new compounds can become optimally adapted for particular functions. In the late sixties, Rudolf Rigler, at present professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, worked for several years as a postdoctoral fellow with Manfred Eigen. During this time preliminary ideas for developing a new analytical method - fluorescence correlation spectrometry (FCS) - for detecting single molecules were conceived. This technology was subsequently perfected by Professor Rigler, and FCS is currently employed for studying molecular evolution. Manfred Eigen has named this new research field "evolutionary biotechnology". This includes pharmacoscreening, molecular diagnostics (e.g. of viruses) as well as the evolutionary optimization of agents.
Many honors in addition to the Nobel Prize and the Paul Ehrlich Prize already mentioned above Ñ have been conferred on him. These include thirteen honorary degrees, numerous medals and memberships in national and foreign academies. Eigen is ranked as one of the leading internationally renowned scientists studying the molecular mechanism of evolution in nature.
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