What Is Life? - Molecular Theory of the Living Cell - page 564

1989). By applying the reductionist, physicochemical approach to biology as far as
possible (in the process he was so successful as an experimental reductionist as to
garner a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1969) until he reached a
situation revealing the failure of the reductionist approach, he apparently hoped
to uncover a clear example of biological phenomenon where complementarity
applied as predicted by Bohr (McKaughan 2005). To the best of my knowledge,
Delbruck was not able to discover any new complementary pair in molecular
biology beyond the mechanism-function complementarity that Bohr had already
suggested in 1932.
One possible member of what may be called the Bohr-Delbr uck complementar-

ity class (i.e., the set of the complementarity-like principles that Bohr and Delbr

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looked for in biology) may be suggested as follows:

The orthogonality of genetic information and free energy, or the idea that genetic informa-
tion cannot be reduced to free energy or to the laws of physics and chemistry. (16.8)
Statement 16.8 can be diagrammatically represented as shown in Fig. 4.2 .
There are many alternative ways of expressing the content of Statement 16.8,
just as there are many ways to express the Second Law of thermodynamics,
including (1) the genetic information-free energy orthognonality, (2) the genetic
information-free energy complementarity, and (3) information-energy complemen-
tarity (Sect. 2.3.2 ) .

16.4 Life According to Prigogine

As indicated in Sect. 3.1 , Prigogine (1977, 1980) divides structures in the Universe
into two fundamental classes - equilibrium and dissipative structures. The former
includes tables, chairs, rocks, molecules, etc. that can exist without any dissipation
of free energy, and the latter is exemplified by the flame of a candle, the
Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction (Fig. 3.1 ), the living cell (Fig. 3.2 ) , and social
structures of organisms, etc., all of which require continuous dissipation of free
energy to maintain their structures.
Prigogine once remarked to me when I was visiting him in Austin in the early
1980s that

Cells are dissipative structures. (16.9)
As a corollary to Statement 16.9, we may logically attribute the following
generalization to Prigogine:
Organisms are dissipative structures. (16.10)

odinger's theory of life with Statement 16.6, so can
we express Prigogine's theory of life in terms of Statement 16.10. Whereas the
validity of Statement 16.6 is debatable as already indicated (see Sect. 2.1.5 ) , that of
Statement 16.10 is beyond doubt. However, it should be pointed out that theoretical

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