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Organization becomes cause in the matter

Nature Biotechnology volume 18, pages 575–576 (2000)Cite this article

The commentary last month from Huang1 and two recent reviews from physicists Laughlin2 and Pines and colleagues3 offer a view of how experimental biology might address the problems of complexity that have been revealed (but as yet unsolved) by 50 years of otherwise unprecedented progress in molecular biology.

In physics, this view is now referred to as “the middle way,” or the search for laws operating at levels and scales of organization (mesoscopic realms) intermediate between the microscopic state of fundamental particles and the macroscopic state of higher levels of organization2. According to Laughlin2 and Pines and coworkers3, the mesoscopic world is abstracted away from our concept of complex matter by a reductionist view that attempts to derive (unsuccessfully) macroscopic behavior in the world of everyday life from a consideration merely of the microscopic details obeying a “theory of everything”2.

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  1. emeritus professor, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, 94720–3206, CA

    Richard C. Strohman

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Strohman, R. Organization becomes cause in the matter. Nat Biotechnol 18, 575–576 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/76317

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