Jeremy England remembers learning about proteins and protein folding in high school and being struck by how biology works at the molecular level, where biology, chemistry, and physics intersect. England graduated from Harvard University with a degree in biochemical sciences in 2003, then received a Rhodes Scholarship and studied physics at the University of Oxford. He then completed a PhD in physics at Stanford University in 2009 and worked as a postdoc at Princeton University before joining the faculty at MIT. There, he set his mind on studying self-copying and self-replication of cells and organisms, aiming to derive rules that constrain when those processes can or should happen. From this research, he pieced together a theory to explain the spontaneous emergence of life based on how collections of molecules learn to obtain and use energy more efficiently—a process he calls dissipative adaptation.
“Once you study life as a physicist and ...
