Physical Biology of the Cell
Rob Phillips
Summary
Many of the most mysterious phenomena in the known universe center broadly on the nature of life. Similarly, many of our greatest engineering challenges related to human well being demand better command of the underlying biology. Over the last several decades, our ability to query living matter with a host of ingenious experimental techniques such as DNA sequencing and various kinds of fluorescence microscopies has resulted in a deluge of quantitative data. This data is often presented in the traditional form of graphs showing the relation between two biological variables. The central idea of this course is that if people are going to go to all the trouble to discover these kinds of quantitative insights into the living, then our scientific description of these phenomena must follow suit. Stated simply, quantitative data demands quantitative models. This course takes that mantra completely seriously. In this course, we will put that philosophy to the test by considering a myriad of case studies from across the living world at a wide variety of temporal, spatial and energetic scales. In particular, the course will begin with a discussion of how to develop a feeling for the living through simple order-of-magnitude estimates, considering questions such as what sets the rate of cell division to what is the power of cells and what is it used for to how far animals can migrate and what it implies about their consumption of fat stores during such travel to the nature of transcriptomes. Once we have developed the quantitative habit of mind, we will then focus on the laws of biological dynamics, the great probability distributions and how they serve as a null hypothesis for many biological problems and the role of energy consumption in driving process such as high-fidelity biological polymerization (i.e. proofreading) or the transport of nutrients up their concentration gradient. In all of these contexts, we will spend much time focused on what the right degrees of freedom are to describe a given biological system and in light of this, how we can construct “collective coordinates.” Our journey will draw from a hugely diverse collection of problems ranging from the motility of photosynthetic eukaryotes to embryonic development to the swimming of whales. This course is meant to be fun and inspiring. Though we will freely use biology, physics, mathematics and computation, all scientifically engaged participants should find many new and interesting ideas to consider.
Dates
From Monday 17th of August 2026 to Saturday the 22nd of August 2026.