Brenner, von Neumann and Schrödinger

Erwin Schrödinger's book, "What is Life"?, inspired many scientists like Crick, Watson and Perutz to go into molecular biology. While many of the details in the book were wrong, the book's central message that the time was ripe for a concerted attack on the structure of the genes based on physical principles strongly resonated.

However, influence and importance are two things, and unfortunately the two aren't always correlated. As Sydney Brenner recounts in detail here, the founding script for molecular biology should really have been John von Neumann's 1948 talk at Caltech as part of the Hixon Symposium, titled "The General and Logical Theory of Automata". In retrospect this talk was seminal and far-reaching. Brenner is one of the very few scientists who seems to have appreciated that von Neumann's influence on biology was greater than Schrödinger's and that von Neumann was right and Schrödinger wrong. Part of the reason was that while many biologists like Crick and Watson had read Schrödinger's "What is Life?", almost nobody had read von Neumann's "General and Logical Theory of Automata".

As Brenner puts it, Schrödinger postulated that the machinery for replication (chromosomes) also included the means of reproducing it. Von Neumann realized that the machinery did not include the means themselves but only the *instructions* for those means.

That's a big difference; the instructions are genes, the means are proteins. In fact as Freeman Dyson says in his "Origins of Life", von Neumann was the first to clearly realize the distinction between software (genes) and hardware (proteins). Why? Because as a mathematician and a generalist (and pioneer of computer science), he had a vantage point that was unavailable to specialist biologists and chemists in the field.

Unfortunately abstract generalists are often not recognized as the true originators of an idea. It's worth noting that in his lecture, von Neumann laid out an entire general program for what we now call translation, five years before Watson, Crick, Franklin and others even solved the structure of DNA. The wages of the theoretician are sparse, especially those of the one, as mathematician John Casti put it, who solves "only" the general case.

Uncle Syd's idea for funding new assistant professors

I was leafing (virtually of course) through old issues of "Current Biology" when I came across a thought-provoking, slightly tongue-in-cheek essay by Sydney Brenner in an issue from 1994. Brenner used to write a regular column for the magazine and his thoughts ranged from improving lab conditions to junk DNA; as is characteristic of Brenner's incisive mind, almost all the columns give you something new to think about. 

It was Brenner's ("Uncle Syd") fictitious letter to an assistant professor ("Dear Willie") just starting out in his new career that caught my eye. Perhaps the column can offer some ideas to assistant professors floundering in this gloomy age of funding crunches and declining job prospects. After acknowledging the fundamental and paradoxical difficulty that new professors who need funding the most don't have any experience in getting it, Brenner comes up with a framework - the BISCUIT:

"I have for long entertained an elegant solution to this difficulty, and that is to found a bank, BISCUIT (Bank of International Scientific Capital and Unpublished Information and Techniques), that will lend scientific capital to first-time grant applicants and others in need. It will not only lend ideas for research but also loan experiments that have been carried out but have not been published. We have to be careful with the latter, because although such holdings are of high value they could undergo instant depreciation if someone else does the experiment and publishes the result. Where, you ask, does the bank get its capital? No problem. I know a number ofscientists who have a surplus of scientific ideas and lots of experiments that they find too boring to write up and these 'wealthy' individuals would be the first investors. The bank would also continue to receive deposits. Once we got going, everything would be fine, because the borrowers would not only have to pay back capital but we would charge interest so that our holdings grew. And, of course, if any depositor were to suffer a catastrophic career collapse, he could withdraw all of his capital and start again. The beauty of it is that he would get new, up-to-date ideas and experiments and, in this way, his original deposit, although used a long time ago, will have retained its value and will not have been corroded by time. I am amazed that in these times ofhigh-powered service industries nobody has thought of doing this before, but perhaps that's because it is only scientists who will profit from the BISCUIT bank."

Reference: Current Biology, 1994, 4, 10, 956