Conference: Harold Morowitz Symposium

Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe NM

Investigators

Abstract

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) will host the Harold Morowitz Symposium in August 2017. This Symposium will honor the long career of a major figure in the origin of the fields of biophysics and genetics, who also played a significant role in science policy. The two-day Symposium will be divided into two separate sections: first an opportunity for personal recollections of Morowitz's contributions and influences on the participants and second, a focus on a selection of major areas where Morowitz started new fields or made major contributions: genetics, biophysics; and science policy. Morowitz was a leading figure in shaping not only the scientific but also the popular understanding of the geochemical origins of life on Earth. He was a good communicator of science at the popular level and his work resulted in many nontechnical articles and a permanent exhibit on the origin of life at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. The proposed Symposium will include participants from diverse community of fields, genders and career stages. The results of the event will be published in one of SFI's Intelligence Reports disseminated to a wide variety of readers including those in academia, business and the general public Morowitz's early academic research and writing often dealt with thermodynamic themes and the pervasive roles of physical principles in biology. Increasingly throughout his career, he turned from searches for minimal life forms to more and more comprehensive attempts to frame the nature and origin of life. Starting in the late 1960s and continuing through the end of his life, Morowitz was a leading figure in shaping the scientific understanding of the geochemical origins of life on Earth. In particular, his writings played a significant role in elaborating one of two frameworks that has become important for understanding life's origins: known as "metabolism first", this view tries to anchor specific, universal features of biochemistry in geochemical constraints, as a precursor and foundation for the later information-dominated view termed the "RNA world". This project is jointly cofounded by the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences and the Physics of Living System in the Division of Physics.