The Future of Biology — Cliona O’Farrelly

#whatislife75
Sep 4, 2018 · 4 min read

Have you ever wondered how a tiny creature like a swallow could power its own flight to Africa? Schrödinger’s What is Life? lecture series is most famous for its exploration of the concept of biological information. But Schrodinger was also intrigued by the physics and chemistry underpinning the energy of life. Bioenergetics is Nick Lane’s field of research; he has written papers and prizewinning books that go some way towards explaining how cross membrane proton gradients power all living cells. Molecule for molecule, this mechanism generates more power than the fission that powers the sun — and yet it derives from sun’s energy. It is conserved across every form of life, telling us something about how life began and how it was constrained to evolve. I want to hear more — I’m hoping I might get closer to understanding the swallow. Why is it important that we know exactly what life is and how it works? I think it’s so we can exploit the knowledge for better lives for everyone and everything on the planet.

The evolution of multicellular organisms has given us plants and animals, two totally different ways of organising cells into functioning, sentient life forms. Evolution has provided at least two particularly successful independent solutions to the problems of multicellularity — animals and higher plants. An obvious requirement for successful multicellularity is communication between different parts of the organism, both locally, for example between neighbouring cells, and over very long distances. Recent advances in understanding hormone signalling networks in plants are beginning to reveal how co-ordination of activity across the whole plant body can be achieved despite the lack of a control centre, typical of animal systems. Ottoline Leyser will talk about The Future of Plants. One of her many discoveries — the auxin receptor — has helped to explain how hormone signals shape the response of a plant to its environment. She began studying the growth of shoots in the 1980s in Arabidopsis, which at the time was an emerging model for plant biology. I’m hoping Leyser’s talk will inspire young plant biologists to enjoy lifetimes of discovery around plant cell survival and growth so we can survive the catastrophic upheaval to crops and eco-systems caused by climate change.

Kathryn Holt’s research is inspired by another global crisis, antimicrobial resistance. She and her team use genomic epidemiology tools to tease apart the evolutionary history and global dissemination of multidrug resistant pathogens. I’m hoping Holt might tell us more about the complexity, diversity and interdependence of microbiome bacterial populations. Her views on how we might nurture and direct their growth could help make real the possibility of preventing and inhibiting pathogen survival without antibiotics. Israeli crystallographer Ada Yonath (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2009) is known for her discoveries of how ribosomes, the protein factories of the cell, work. Microbial ribosomes function differently to eukaryotic ribosomes so her research has been key to the discovery of drugs that target microbial ribosomes and have given us whole families of antibiotics. Will her talk at last point us in the direction of new antibiotics? One way or the other, Yonath has celebrated curiosity and young people all her life as well as ribosomal biology, so no matter what she talks about it will be inspirational.

Feng Zhang has been a central pioneer in the burgeoning field of CRISPR gene editing. This technology will soon make human genetic engineering a reality. Amongst many other feats, his group recently developed a sensitive diagnostic nucleic acid detection method based on CRISPR which he called SHERLOCK (Specific High sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter UnLOCKing). SHERLOCK is remarkable for being able to detect and distinguish strains of viruses and bacteria present at attomolar (10−18 M) concentrations. Zhang is world famous for how he has harnessed this technology around the gene-editing capability of bacteria to making very specific changes to eukaryotic genomes. This field of research is exposing challenging ethical dilemmas as well as exciting therapeutic options. Centrally, Zhang will talk about using synthetic biology to develop technologies for genome and epigenome engineering to study neurobiology. One question I’m really excited about is how do we turn CRISPR into a real therapeutic tool? — so that we can treat disease and develop new tools for prospective surveillance and tracking of emerging problems in the public health and clinical infectious disease space. Zhang was born in China and given the name 锋 which seemingly means ‘point of a spear; edge of a tool’, so I’m hoping that, he will help stimulate moral, as well as scientific, public discussion.

Lydia Lynch is one of Ireland’s most promising scientists, and will give us fresh insights into the future of how we understand the immune system. Lynch holds dual faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and Trinity College Dublin and is known for her trailblazing work in helping to create the new field of immunometabolism. Her talk will hopefully tell us how we might manipulate the interacting fields of immunity and metabolism to deal with obesity and cancer. In 2017, Lynch, together with a Michelin star chef and a social entrepreneur, was named one of three women Trailblazers by the Irish Independent. She was also named a L’Oréal-UNESCO Woman in Science, and was recently awarded the President or Ireland Future Leader Award from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). Her research is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF).

Cliona O’Farrelly (Trinity College Dublin) is an organiser of Schrödinger at 75 — The Future of Biology. The conference takes place on Sept 5th and 6th in the National Concert Hall, Dublin, and you can watch it live here.

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Marking 75 years since Schrödinger's iconic 'What is Life?' lectures at Trinity College Dublin.