The Way Life Works

Mahlon Hoagland

Fridays, 10:00 a.m. - Noon
March 28 - May 2, 2003
D.O.C. House

In our first session, we'll take a broad overview of the amazing properties of life and some of the ways we've used to discover them. Then, in more detail, we'll look at the plan for life (genetic information — DNA) and how it gets copied and changed (session 2); we'll see how life, using the plan and the energy of sunlight, converts air and water into food (session 3); and thence into living substance (session 4); how living processes, including embryonic development, are regulated — with a look at cloning and stem cells (session 5); and how, over vast stretches of time, from simple beginnings, life has tinkered its way to its present complexity (session 6).

Our text The Way Life Works (Hoagland and Dodson 1998). We'll use the book's lively art as well as hands-on models to help you understand principles and to appreciate the unity of biology: how, down under life's splendid diversity, all living creatures achieve their ends in remarkably similar ways.

Class is limited to 20 participants.

Mahlon Hoagland, M.D. had a research and teaching career at Harvard and Dartmouth Medical Schools (18 and 3 years respectively) and was President for the Worcester (MA) Foundation of Biomedical Research (15 years). He is a molecular biologist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has authored several books for the public on molecular mechanisms in living systems.