Philip Ball How Life Works

Lecture by science writer Philip Ball, at the Molecular Frontiers Symposium "Frontiers of New Knowledge in Science" in Hong Kong, Nov 15-17, 2024. ABSTRACT Over the past several decades, biology has been undergoing a quiet revolution. As the molecular mechanisms in between the notion of an organism’s “genetic blueprint” and the organism itself have come ever more into focus, it has become increasingly clear that the blueprint metaphor is the wrong one anyway. We are not mere readouts of some genetically encoded instructions. Rather, every level of the biological hierarchy, from genes to proteins to cells and tissues, has its own set of operational rules, and there is a constant flow of information between all the levels. In this talk I will discuss this new view of life, which appears to be more dynamic, adaptive, and innovative than the old view of a DNAbased program implies. It embraces the idea that the agency of living organisms is what truly distinguishes them from non-living matter.