About & Syllabus
Physical Biology of the Cell
Summary
It is a wonderful time to be thinking about the workings of the living world. Historic advances ranging from the use of satellites and drones to track animals to the use of biophysical techniques such as optical traps to measure the forces applied by molecular motors have provided an unprecedented window on the living. The aim of this course is to take a broad view of the use of quantitative thinking to query the nature of the living with emphasis on a panoply of problems such as the herding of wildebeest, how to think about transcriptomes and how living organisms perform tasks that seem to contradict the increase of entropy. We will study these problems using whatever tools we need in order to make quantitative and predictive statements about life. The main intellectual thread of the course will be the idea that the type of quantitative data which is becoming routine in biology calls for a corresponding quantitative modeling framework. The plan of this course is to elucidate general principles with exciting case studies and to include abundant opportunities to turn our models into computer code using Python that will help us develop our intuition.
Syllabus
| Day | Date | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 10/14/2024 | A feeling for the organism. What sets the scale of X? Order of magnitude thinking as a tool for understanding the world. Examples from the energy scale to form a spindle to the amount of poop created per year by whales. |
| Tuesday | 10/15/2024 | Stuff of t and biology’s unique laws of dynamics. Dynamical phenomena in both the nonliving and the living. The great principles of dynamics and their biological consequences. Biology’s unique answer to purposeful dynamics. |
| Wednesday | 10/16/2024 | Making our guesses precise—null hypotheses. When guesses become probability distributions. The great distributions—binomial, Poisson, exponential and their important biological consequences. |
| Thursday | 10/17/2024 | What is life? Various musings on the secret of life. Defiance as the secret of life. Biological batteries and paying for the processes of life. Setting up membrane gradients. Biological fidelity. |
| Friday | 10/18/2024 | Representing and Approximating Life. Rethinking the idea of a vector—from Descartes (x,y) to ChatGPT. Weird vectors, from personality type to cell shape to fluorescence recovery after photobleaching experiments. The Value and Values of Science. The mystery of the world and the value of wonder. Loving the questions. Research as exploratory dynamics. |