The Way Life Works

Mahlon Hoagland

Tuesdays, 2:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
March 23 - April 27, 2004
D.O.C. House

How did you get to be you? Whatever accomplished it had to have started out with a detailed plan: information in the form of DNA — provided by your parents. As you grew from fertilized egg to your present state, a lot of ingenious construction machinery inside your cells, assiduously following the plan, produced many thousands of protein molecules which worked in close coordination to assemble you. (Those proteins also regularly copied the plan so you could later pass it along to your kids.) In the process, a lot of energy — from the sun — was consumed. And essential to the whole process was feedback control: keeping everything working smoothly. Finally, this astonishing sequence of events had to have evolved, over vast stretches of time, from something much simpler. How? We'll examine all these matters in our six sessions. Our text will be The Way Life Works, each session roughly based on a chapter of the book. Questions and discussion will be heartily encouraged.

Class is limited to 20 participants

Mahlon Hoagland, MD is a molecular biologist and Visiting Professor of Biochemistry at Dartmouth Medical School. He was on the faculty of Harvard and Dartmouth Medical Schools (18 years and 3 years, respectively) and was Director of the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research for 15 years. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has authored five books on biology for the public.