Racker lecturer shares 'Great Ideas in Biology' with Cornell community

By Sarah Davidson

Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel laureate and this year's Efraim Racker lecturer, presented the major paradigm shifts in biology -- what he collectively called the "great ideas of biology" -- and challenged the Cornell community to pursue "clever ideas that will help us understand the world around us" in his public lecture Nov. 4 in Kennedy Hall's Call Alumni Auditorium.

Taking the audience from the 19th-century idea of the cell as the basic unit of life, Nurse progressed through the discovery of the gene, evolution through natural selection, the chemical nature of life and the complexity of biological organization. He spoke of the importance of relating science and society and maintaining a two-way dialogue between scientists and their "paymasters" -- the public.

"There is a real danger that scientists will become separate from the public," he warned. "We need to keep our license to operate and can only do that if we keep the trust of the public. We must have a dialogue and respond to them."

Nurse also addressed the political implications of science: "Science is truly revolutionary ... many of our beliefs are based on ideas that are millennia old, and science acts to overturn them," Nurse said. "We must have sensible unpolarized debates about them that are decided by a reasonable consensus ... since science has so much to contribute culturally, and to the improvement of health and the environment."

Nurse sought to inspire students and young scientists by posing important questions in biology for the future, which he said should be aimed at "the crucial quest of understanding biological organization at all levels."

"In my research, I have focused on the cell, but the same sorts of questions can be asked at different levels of organization," he said. "All have a similar basis for how information is being dealt with. There are many questions to answer in biology, and I think that the next half century is going to be as exciting as the last."

During a second lecture, on "Cell Cycle Control," Nurse presented an autobiographical survey of more than 25 years of work from his laboratories that have contributed to the idea that proteins called cyclin-dependent protein kinases are major regulators of the lifecycle of a cell. The significance of his work was recognized in 2001, when he shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

The series is organized by the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and honors Efraim "Ef" Racker, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1966 as the Albert Einstein Professor of Biochemistry. Racker was a prominent scientist who worked on many important problems in biochemistry as well as being an accomplished artist.

Sarah Davidson is a science writer intern with the Cornell News Service.