CROWN, JULY 2015Why is life so different from the inanimate stuff all around us? An early idea called vitalism posited that life was animated by forces not found in nonliving matter. But the discovery that biomolecules were just complex organic chemicals pretty much discredited this notion. By the 20th century, most scientists agreed that life was just a system of extraordinarily complex chemical reactions operating according to thermodynamical principles. The same mechanisms that drove steam trains sustained life.
When Newtonian mechanics was upturned by the new quantum mechanics, a powerful set of mathematical rules and ideas describing the behavior of atoms and smaller particles, most biologists continued to cling solely to classical physics to describe processes at the molecular level. Two of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, Pascual Jordan and Erwin Schrödinger, weren’t convinced that thermodynamics could account for life. Jordan claimed that life’s dynamics are unique, directed by a small number of particles subject to quantum laws. And, in his 1944 book, What is Life?, Schrödinger proposed that genes had an organized molecular structure, which he called an aperiodic crystal, and were therefore subject to quantum laws.
But were they right? When Watson and Crick uncovered the basic structure of genes, ...
