Bioscience at the Physical Science Frontier BIOSCIENCE AT THE PHYSICAL SCIENCE FRONTIER Proceedings of a Foundation Symposium on the 150th Anniversary of Alfred Nobel's Birth Edited by CLAUDIO NICOLINI Chair of Biophysics, School of Medicine, University of Genova, Genova, Italia HUMANA • CLIFTON, NEW JERSEY © 1986 The Humana Press Inc. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1986 Crescent Manor PO Box 2148 Clifton, NJ 07015 All rights reserved No part of the book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanica, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher. This volume contains the proceedings of the Symposium held to celebrate the 150 birthday of Alfred Nobel that was held in San Remo, Rome. This volume comprises volume 9 of CELL BIOPHYSICS. ISBN-13: 978-1-4612-9182-4 e-ISBN-13: 978-1-4612-4834-7 001: 10.1007/978-1-4612-4834-7 Preface Since early Greek and Roman times, atoms were assumed-after un dergoing their various interactions-to take on the stable configurations of either the living or the inanimate world. This simple and unitary theory has evolved markedly, even while maintaining its validity over several centuries of vicissitudes, and in essence constitutes the first ex ample of a synthesis between the physical and the life sciences. In modern times, a similar relationship between the structure of various macromolecules and the function of living cells has also emerged as one of the most striking findings of those scientists active at the con vergence of the physical and life sciences. This fundamental result is re ported in the first two sections of the present work, namely those on "Oncogenes and Cancer" and "Lower-to-Higher-Order DNA Struc ture," in many cases by those recent Nobelists who themselves have been major contributors to work at the intersection of these fields. Many other significant areas of forefront scientific inquiry today (for example, research on the brain and vision), as well as some of the most exciting technological developments (e.g., work on renewable fuels and materials, biotechnology, and NMR and X-ray tomography) and method ological advances (e.g., studies in the fields of statistical mechanics and cancer chemotherapy) depend on the complex but harmonious collabora tions of physicists, chemists, mathematicians, engineers, biologists, and physicians. This cooperation among scientists across a variety of disciplines not only opens exciting new frontiers, but also permits a fresh synthesis of both theoretical and empirical knowledge through its frequent intercon nection of expertises and its encouragement of role exchange among the traditionally compartmented soft and hard sciences. The Symposium on "New Frontiers at the Crossing of Life and Phys ical Sciences"-held not long ago in San Remo (a beautiful town on the Italian Riviera) to celebrate the 150th birthday of Alfred Nobel, along with four other Symposia in other scientific fields that saw the participa tion of over 30 Nobel Prize winners, all under the sponsorship of the Nobel Foundation and the City of San Remo with the patronage of the King of Sweden and the President of Italian Republic-contains their re- v vi Preface ports on many representative topics on today's new frontiers. With two exceptions (i.e., James Watson and Alexander Rich), all the lectures de livered within that Symposium-which I had the privilege to chair-have been included in the book. It has been a sometimes difficult but always exciting undertaking, and I hope that the good fruit of our symposium, now happily in hand, maintains the spirit of that unique occasion. Claudio Nicolini Contents Preface, CLAUDIO NICOLINI. ............................................ v List of Contributors .............................................. ix Introduction LINUS PAULING One Aspect of the Physical Sciences in Relation to Biology ........ 3 Section I Oncogenes and Cancer HOWARD M. TEMIN Retroviruses and Evolution .................................... 9 DAVID BALTIMORE The Beginning of the Molecular Description of a Cancer ......... 17 Section II Lower-to-Higher DNA Structure E. M. BRADBURY AND J. P. BALDWIN Neutron Scatter and Diffraction Techniques Applied to Nucleosome and Chromatin Structure ..................... 35 C. NICOLINI Nuclear Structure: From the Pores to the High-Order Gene Structure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 67 Section III Brain and Vision DAVID H. HUBEL Blobs and Color Vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 91 LEON N COOPER Neuron Learning to Brain Organization ....................... 103 DONALD GLASER A Physicist's View of Vision ................................. 145 Section IV Technological Developments A. M. CORMACK Scanning in Medicine and Other Fields ....................... 151 HARLYN O. HALVORSON Genetic Engineering: A New Biotechnology ................... 171 vii viii Contents MEL VIN CALVIN Renewable Fuels and Materials: Oil From Plants. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 189 PAUL LAUTERBUR NMR Imaging in Biomedicine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 211 Section V Methodological Developments IL YA PRIGOGINE Life and Physics: New Perspectives ........................... 217 LEO SACHS Cell Differentiation and Malignancy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 225 GIANNI BONADONNA New Strategies in Cancer Chemotherapy ...................... 243 WILLIAM F. RAUB Summary and Prospects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 257 AUTHOR INDEX .............................................. 263 SUBJECT INDEX .............................................. 265 Contributors J. P. BALDWIN • Department of Physics, Liverpool Polytechnic, Liverpool, United Kingdom DAVID BALTIMORE • Department of Biology, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts GIANNI BONADONNA· Division of Medical Oncology, Instituto Nazionale Tumori, Milan, Italy E. M. BRADBURY· Department of Biological Chemistry, School of Medicine, University of California, Davis, California MELVIN CALVIN • Department of Chemistry and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, California LEON N COOPER· Department of Physics and Center for Neural Science, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island A. M. CORMACK • Physics Department, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts DONALD GLASER • Physics Department, Tufts University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California HARLYN O. HALVORSON • Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts DAVID A. HUBEL • Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts PAUL C. LAUTERBUR • Department of Chemistry, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York C. NICOLINI • Chair of Biophysics, School of Medicine, University of Genova, Viale, Italy LINUS PAULING • Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, Palo Alto, California ILYA PRIGOGINE • Universitg Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium WILLIAM F. RAUB • National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland LEO SACHS • Department of Genetics, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Isreal HOWARD M. TEMIN· Department of Oncology, McArdle Laboratory, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin ix INTRODUCTION One Aspect of the Physical Sciences in Relation to Biology LINUS PAULING Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, Palo Alto, California 94306 About forty years ago I decided to write a book about "One Aspect of the Physical Sciences in Relation to Biology," which is the topic of this meeting. At the time, I went so far as to formulate the title "The Molecu lar Basis of Biological Specificity," later I changed the title to "The Molec ular Basis of Life," and now I have even gone so far as to write a few pages of the book. This is what I shall relate here, "One Aspect of the Physical Sciences in Relation to Biology." It represents, in part, a portion of my life for about twenty years, beginning in 1929 to 1947 or 1948, when I nearly felt satisfied; and when I say "satisfied," I mean I felt satisfied that I understood "life." It started in 1929 because it was the year when Thomas Hunt Morgan and a good number of his associates, namely, those who had been involved with him in discovering the gene (Sturtevant and Bridges), came to Pasadena to start, at the new California Institute of Technology, a division of Bio logical Sciences. I became well acquainted with these biologists, including Tyler and Emerson and other younger ones who came along as graduate students, and I found very quickly that I was puzzling over the problem of biologi cal specificity. Morgan, for example, was working on self-sterility in Ciona, which was a difficult problem to explain: How Ciona can be sterile against themselves, but fertile against nearly all other individual Ciona. Well, of course, there are many other examples of biological specificity. I do not know whether at first I had any feeling, real feeling, that I would understand biological specificity in the course of time, but then some thing happened in 1936. I had been working with Charles Coryell, one of my students, on the magnetic and other properties of hemoglobin. When I gave a seminar on that subject at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1936, Karl Landsteiner asked me to come to his laboratory, which I did the next 3