Erwin Schroedinger, Francis Crick and epigenetic stability

Schroedinger's book 'What is Life?' is widely credited for having played a crucial role in development of molecular and cellular biology. My essay revisits the issues raised by this book from the modern perspective of epigenetics and systems biology. I contrast two classes of potential mechanisms of epigenetic stability: 'epigenetic templating' and 'systems biology' approaches, and consider them from the point of view expressed by Schroedinger. I also discuss how quantum entanglement, a nonclassical feature of quantum mechanics, can help to address the 'problem of small numbers' that led Schroedinger to promote the idea of a molecular code-script for explaining the stability of biological order.

• Publication year

  2007

• Venue

  Biology Direct

• Publication date

  2007-04-30

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1186/1745-6150-3-15arXiv 0704.3957PMID 18419815PMCID 2413215
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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