Biology and Informatics - Essays in Bioinformatics - page 8

Acute Respiratory Syndrome) that Lucretius ended his topic with a description of the social
chaos which occurred with the plague in Athens. I commend it to you as the foundation of
bioinformatics.
13. The Present Crisis
This workshop takes place at a critical time in human history 38 . Science and technology
have changed the world 39 . We cannot avoid the political significance of bioinformatics and
indeed the militarisation of science must be one of our major concerns 40 .
The human race faces the possibility of various catastrophes, from oligarchies to
chaos, as well as natural disasters, most of its own making. In particular, the growth of the
world population cannot continue indefinitely at its present rate. The only way in which
these can be avoided is by knowledge and the intelligent application of knowledge 41 . Thus
it is vital to build a world-wide network of people who understand each other, who have
each other's confidence, who can operate in their own societies, and who will be able to
inject their special knowledge into the decision-making centres 42 and thus to influence the
course of history. The social parts of our meetings, begun in Dubrovnik, are at least as
important as the technical parts.
Notes
1 [London] … “the quick forge and working-house of thought” W. Shakespeare, King Henry V, 5:23.
2 Cicero was supposed to have been the editor of Lucretius' m/s "De rerum natura".
3 L. L. Whyte (ed.) "Roger Joseph Boscovich", Allen and Unwin, London, 1961.
4 G. Malescio, “Intermolecular potentials - past, present and future”, Nature materials, 2 , 501-503, (2003).
5 “De resolutione et compositione mathematica”, Rome (1630). Getaldic also made a concave parabolic
mirror, 70 cm in diameter, which is now in the London Maritime Museum (inventory NAV 0928), and
probably also a reflecting telescope.
6 Lucretius, [Titus Lucretius Carus], "On the Nature of the Universe", (trans. R. E. Latham), Penguin, revised
edition 1994. In this topic, the concept of “swerve”, [clinamen] which has so worried the classical
commentators, can perhaps be understood retrospectively in terms of chaos theory where the progress of an
idealised game of billiards cannot be forecast more than a few impacts ahead.
7 A. L. Mackay, "Generalised crystallography", Structural Chemistry, 13, (3/4), 217-222, (August 2002).
http://sinapse.arc2.ucla.edu/Mackay02.pdf
8 The editor of the work on Boscovich and a writer on atomism.
9 "The facts of genetics demand, as J.B.S. Haldane has pointed out, that, at some stage in mitosis, the
individual molecules in a chromosome must be exactly duplicated. A complete molecule can be duplicated in
three ways. If it is solid and three dimensional only a supernatural agency, a divine copyist, can, entering its
inner complexity, reproduce it in detail. If we prefer a natural solution, we must imagine the molecule
stretched out either in a plane or along a line. In either case the simpler constituent molecules have only to
arrange themselves one by one on their identical partners in the original molecule, and then become linked to
each other by the absorption of suitable quanta from radiation or from second order collisions. That such
autocatalysis is possible is indicated by recent work in Russia and America, where the regular atomic arrays
of metallic catalysts are shown to operate like laceworker's frames on which simple organic molecules settle
to be joined into larger aggregates. A two-dimensional reproduction of this kind is impossible, owing to the
fact that the constituent amino acids in nature are not symmetrical, but exist in right or left hand forms. Two-
dimensional reproduction would lead to mirror image molecules, which are not found in nature. There
remains then only one dimensional reproduction. At the moment of reproduction, but not necessarily at any
other time, the molecule of the protein must be imagined as a pseudo-linear, associating itself, element by
element, with identical groups, related by an axis instead of a plane of symmetry, and thus preserving only
right - or only left handed symmetry. This hypothesis is clearly indicated by Astbury's explanation of
Svedburg's numbers. Svedburg has established that most natural proteins consist of M Wt 34,000 or multiples
2, 3, or 6 times that number. This gives us the confidence to treat all protein molecules, regardless of their