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
compared in Sects. 16.2 and 16.6 and Chap. 21 .
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
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