Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Introduction
The cell doctrine stating that all living systems are built out of one or more cells was
formulated by M. J. Schleiden and T. Schwann in 1838-1839 (Swanson 1964;
Bechtel 2010). Since then an enormous amount of experimental data has been
accumulating in the literature and on the World Wide Web, pre- and post-Google,
on the structure and function of the cell, based on which many authoritative topics
have been written, one of the most recent publications being
The Molecular Biology
of the Cell
, Fifth Edition, by Alberts and his colleagues (2008). Other publications
include “Computational Cell Biology” (Fall et al. 2002) and
Mechanics of the Cell
(Boal 2002), which are highly mathematical and computer model based and deal
with rather specialized subfields within molecular cell biology. To the best of my
knowledge (as of January, 2012) there has been no general topic published that
deals with the
molecular theory
of the living cell as a whole, except, as mentioned
in the
Preface
, the topics by Schrodinger (1998), Crick (1966), and Rizzotti (1996).
The present topic may be viewed as the twenty-first-century version of
What Is
Life?
that has been updated by taking into account the biological knowledge that
has accumulated since 1944 when
What Is Life?
was published. The molecular
theory of life formulated by Schrodinger and that described in this topic are
To emphasize the importance of
theory
in relation to
experiment
in biology,
I elected to entitle the present book after the title of the topic by Alberts et al.
(2008) by (1) replacing
Biology
with
Theory
and (2) adding the adjective
Living
in
front of the word
Cell
, resulting in
The Molecular Theory of the Living Cell.
The
first modification highlights the difference between the
theory
of life emphasized
in this topic and the
experiment
on life comprehensively summarized in Alberts
et al. (2008). The second modification emphasizes the difference between the
static picture
of the cell normally found in textbooks (analogous to
sheet music
)
and the
dynamic
picture of the cell (analogous to
audio music
) emphasized in the
present topic. Also, unlike the topic by Alberts et al. and by others that focus on
experimental data obtained from broken (and hence “dead”) cells, the present topic
attempts to understand the essential characteristics of cells that are unbroken and