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Gunther Stent is Professor Emeritus of Molecular Biology at the Uni–
versity of California at Berkeley. He has been one of the leading scientists
in the field since the 1940s. He received his Ph.D. from the University of
Illinois in 1948 and was a member of the famous Phage Group put
together by Max Delbriick at the California Institute of Technology. In
1952, he became a professor at the University of California and was
chairman of the Department of Molecular Biology from 1980 until
1992. His current research interest is the embryological development of
the nervous system. Despite someone's comment this morning that few
scientists have gone on to become deep thinkers about social issues, he
has written extensively on the history and philosophy of science, and has
published an autobiographical memoir,
Nazis, Women, and Molecular
Biology.
He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and
many other professional and scientific groups, and he has received
numerous awards. First, Gunther Stent will address some of the issues we
heard about this morning. He will focus in particular on the study of
consciousness and how technology relates to that. Professor Stent.
Gunther Stent:
Four deep problems that had been central to biology ever
since Aristotle founded that discipline in the fourth century B.C.E. were
solved during the twentieth century.
Metabolism.
How living creatures derive the energy they need for dri–
ving their transactions and synthesizing the chemical substances of which
they are built was solved by application of the biochemical methods that
began to be developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Heredity.
The understanding of how like begets like among living
creatures began with Gregor Mendel's discovery of the discrete entities
later called "genes," and culminated in the mid-twentieth century with
the discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick of the structure and
mode of self-replication of the DNA double helix.
Embryonic development.
In the 1930S, many embryologists were
inspired by the success of the research on metabolism and tried, by use
of the methods and insights of biochemistry, to account for the process
by which a fertilized egg develops into the mature adult form of its
species. They failed because they still lacked in understanding the regu–
lation of gene expression, which molecular biology would provide only
in the 1960s and 1970s. But by the end of the twentieth century, embry–
ology was well in hand, and many of its fundamental questions had been
answered; yet the overall mechanism that steers the developing embryo
towards its telos-the ultimate adult state- still remains somewhat
mysterious.
