February 5th marked the 70th anniversary of the first lecture of what was later to become Schrödinger’s highly influential book ‘What is life’.
While Schrödinger may be more popularised by his infamous zombie cat, it was his thinking with regards to how life can live with the laws of physics that have allowed him to transcend that major divide between the physics and biological communities.
Schrödinger’s genius insight was to see life as a system behaving and constrained by the second law of thermodynamics, in particular describing the probable nature of a hereditary crystal, which would later lead scientists including Shannon and Weaver to the discovery of DNA and the genetic code.
However what makes the story of this work more fascinating, in particular to me as I have been lucky enough to get the opportunity to give a (very) small talk in the same lecture theatre were Schrödinger gave his lectures 70 years ago, is the story of how an Austrian physicist ended up in the capital of Ireland writing some of the most important work in biology of the last century.
Schrödinger, an Austrian, fled Germany in 1933 due to his dislike of the Nazi’s anti-Semitism and became a fellow in Oxford, during which time he received a Nobel Prize with Paul Dirac. However things turned sour with Oxford due to his less then monogamous approach to the opposite sex, and the lack of acceptance towards living with his wife and mistress lead him to leave for Princeton. These problems followed him there and eventual he found himself back in Austria in 1936. The occupation of Austria by the Germans in 1938 led him to again flee, this time to Italy. But in the same year Eamon de Valera, Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister) at the time, personally invited him to Dublin were he spent the next 17 years.
It was here in Trinity College Dublin that he delivered his lecture series which were to inspire both Watson and Crick to search for the genetic molecule and which has recently seen some increased popularity due to its use by Brian Cox in his latest series What is Life. However this work came about I like to think that “What is life” found its way to Ireland through Nazis and polygamy, a story surely of the calibre for the Discovery channel, if only it had some sharks.
Author
Kevin Healy: healyk[at]tcd.ie
Photo credit
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