Dinner Speech - Gerhard Stock, Internal Senior Fellow, Physik: A physicist's guide to molecular biology

A physicist's guide to molecular biology

Physicists love to study the strange quantum world of elementary particles or fundamental cosmological problems like the big bang. More recently, though, they are also engaged in the description of complex systems such as biological molecules. The basic idea is to understand elementary processes such as folding (the making), binding (the recognition) and transport (the function) of biomolecules such as proteins, DNA and RNA in terms of fundamental laws of physics like Newton's law. Computer simulations turn out to be the ideal tool to achieve this goal, as was just acknowledged by last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In my talk, I will illustrate this endeavor by some basic examples and discuss what physical theory and simulations can do for biological understanding and, in turn, how physics may get inspired by biology.