Genesis of What Is Life?: A Paradigm Shift in Genetics History

Most geneticists can easily name a dozen papers that transformed their field. Many of these papers continue to be reprinted and commented upon by historians, philosophers, literary critics, science technology and society scholars, and biologists. Such papers include Mendel’s 1866 plant hybridization paper; Sutton’s 1902 synthesis of Mendel with meiosis, which thereby coupled chromosomal mechanics with independent assortment; Morgan’s 1910 paper on sex linkage; Wright’s 1930 “Evolution in Mendelian Populations”; Luria and Delbrück’s 1942 paper on the fluctuation test; and, of course, Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper on the structure of DNA. A seminal piece that is often absent from these lists is What Is Life?: The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, in which Erwin Schrödinger (1944) offers his interpretation of the “Three-Man Paper” (3MP). The three men who authored the 3MP in its original German, “Über die Natur der Genmutation und der Genstruktur,” were Nikolai TimofeéffRessovsky, Karl Zimmer, and Max Delbrück. While Delbrück, a theoretical physicist, went on to win a Nobel Prize for his later work with Salvador Luria, the other two authors were of equal stature in their fields of experimental genetics and experimental radiology. Schrödinger’s book, rather than the original 3MP, has caught the attention of many geneticists, who argue that it prompted physicists to move into biology after World War II and instigated the hunt for an “aperiodic crystal” and a “code script” that many felt led to the discovery that DNA was the hereditary molecule and the deciphering of the genetic code.