Physicist to ponder nature and origins of life in Bethe lectures at Cornell

By Susan S. Lang

Albert Libchaber, the Detlev W. Bronk Professor at Rockefeller University, will explore the nature and possible origins of life with the tools and perspective of experimental physics when he delivers three Hans A. Bethe Lectures, all in Schwartz Auditorium of Rockefeller Hall at Cornell, Oct 18, 20 and 25.

Libchaber examines life as an effort to sustain computations and communication at the level of intracellular processes such as molecular proofreading of gene sequences, single artificial cells in the pursuit of synthetic life and multicellular systems such as neural computing networks. His lectures on campus are free and open to the public.

His lecture for the general public is "The Dawn of Theoretical Biology: A Physics Approach to Information and Computation in Living Matter,'' beginning Wednesday, Oct. 20, at 7:30 p.m. He will argue that descriptions of information content that have been successfully applied to inanimate matter are now of use in biology. He will also assert that the theories of networking that are useful for telecommunications can be used to understand the flow of vital information in living systems.

The other talks by Libchaber in the Bethe Lecture series will be physics colloquia. On Monday, Oct. 18, at 4:30 p.m., his talk, "Some Physical Aspects of the Origin of Life and of Artificial Cells," will cover the experimental evidence for how an early stage of life on Earth might have relied on nonequilibrium thermodynamics to maintain its genetic information by means of chemical copy operations. He will also show how artificial cells can be micro-assembled in order to perform vital biochemical reactions in protected environments, the reproduction of another possible step in the origin of life.

His final talk, "From Physics Techniques to Biological Observation," is slated for Monday, Oct. 25, at 4:30 p.m.; Libchaber will explain how two optical tools are providing new opportunities for biological research. In the first technique, resonances of light can enable a biosensor made from a tiny glass microsphere to detect as little as a few biomolecules. In the second example, he will explain how nanoparticles formed from a semiconductor compound can serve as fluorescent markers for cell identification. They can be used to follow the mother-daughter relationships between dividing cells in a developing organism.

"Albert Libchaber has an exciting track record as a scientist giving new reach to physics," says Associate Professor Carl Franck, who is his primary host. "Readers of James Gleick's book, Chaos: Making a New Science, will recognize him as one of the heroes that brought unanticipated precision to hydrodynamic experiments and thereby helped establish the validity of an elegant theory of turbulence in confined systems."

Following his work as director of research in France's National Center for Scientific Research, Libchaber served as a professor at the University of Chicago and later at Princeton University and as a fellow at the NEC Research Institute. Presently, he is the head of the Laboratory of Condensed Matter Physics at Rockefeller University.

The Bethe Lectures, established by the Cornell physics department and the College of Arts and Sciences in 1977, honor Bethe, who joined Cornell's faculty in 1936 and won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967 for his description of the nuclear processes that power the sun.