Descripción
First edition, extremely rare offprint, of this famous lecture, marking Bohr's first detailed attempt to apply concepts arising from quantum mechanics to areas outside physics. "Here, for the first time, Bohr raised a question that was to preoccupy him, off and on, until his death: Would it ever be possible to push the analysis of living processes to the limit where they can be described in terms of pure physics and chemistry?" (Pais, Niels Bohr s Times, p. 441). Bohr's lecture can be viewed as one of the foundation stones of molecular biology in that it inspired the young physicist Max Delbrück - who was in the audience when Bohr delivered it - to switch from physics to biology. "It is fair to say that with Max, Bohr found his most influential philosophical disciple outside the domain of physics, in that through Max, Bohr provided one of the intellectual fountainheads for the development of 20th century biology" (Pais, p. 442). "Bohr had a life-long interest in philosophy, publishing three volumes of philosophical essays. He was also the son of the distinguished physiologist Christian Bohr, a student of Carl Ludwig, who discovered the cooperative binding of oxygen to hemoglobin. It is therefore not entirely surprising that, when he was asked to give a lecture at the International Congress of Light Therapists in Copenhagen in August 1932, Niels Bohr chose to speak on the philosophy of biology. His lecture, the text of which was subsequently published in Nature, was entitled 'Light and Life'. In 'Light and Life,' Bohr noted that one of the fundamental tenets of quantum mechanics was the principle of complementarity. This stated that although it is possible to determine the location or the velocity of a subatomic particle such as an electron, it is not possible to determine both, because the act of measurement itself perturbs the system. Techniques that analyzed the position of an electron altered its velocity; techniques that measured the velocity altered the position. Location and velocity are therefore complementary properties of the electron. Not complementary in the ordinary sense of adding together to make a whole, but rather mutually exclusive, as these properties can only be measured in different frames of reference. Bohr saw an analogy between physicists' attempts to characterize the atom and biologists' attempt to characterize the cell. Living cells were, to be sure, made of ordinary matter, and therefore amenable to chemical analysis, but the matter was organized in a complex and particular way. To study the chemistry, the organization had to be destroyed; to study the organization, one has to operate at a level at which the chemistry is invisible. Bohr therefore proposed that the chemical basis of an organism and its organizational hierarchy are complementary properties, just as velocity and location are complementary properties of an electron. In stating that the unique characteristic of living systems was their organization or (in another passage) their teleological (functionally adapted) properties, Bohr was careful to avoid the implication that he was reviving the old vitalist doctrine that different physical laws operate in living organisms: I think we all agree with Newton that the real basis of science is the conviction that Nature under the same conditions will always exhibit the same regularities. If we were able to push the analysis of the mechanism of living organisms as far as that of atomic phenomena, we should scarcely expect to find any features differing from the properties of inorganic matter. As a result of the 'Light and Life' talk, a young theoretical physicist sitting in the audience was influenced to become a biologist. According to the Bohr biographer Abraham Pais, his role in turning Max Delbrück into a biologist was Niels Bohr's greatest contribution to biology" (Hunter, The Discovery of the Molecular Basis of Life). Large 8vo, pp. 245-250. Self-wrappers as issued (three horizontal creases). N° de ref. del artículo ABE-1488224637086
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